Product Description

First published in 1980 to high acclaim, Burning Water won a Governor General's Award for fiction that year. A rollicking chronicle of Captain Vancouver's search for the Northwest Passage, the book has over its career been mentioned in recommended lists of postmodern fiction, BC historical fiction, gay fiction and humour. This gives you some idea of the scope of what has been called Bowering's best novel.

"I have sometimes said, kidding but not really kidding," writes its author, "that I attended to the spirit of the west coast, and told the story about the rivals for our land as an instance in which the commanders decided to make love, not war."

As an accurate account of Vancouver's exploration of our coastline, Burning Water conveys the exact length–99 feet–of the explorer's ship, and contains citations from his journals. As a work of fanciful fiction, things usually thought to be impossible transpire, without compromising the realism of the text. Bowering recalls that his free hand with history particularly incensed the founder of the National Archives, who had written a biography of George Vancouver and complained in print that Burning Water differed too much from other, similar books in its field. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

European Invaders
Burning Water is a book for readers who like their history leavened with imagination. The basic story is of the mapping of the Inside Passage and Puget Sound by George Vancouver, but this book is much more than that. The character ofVancouver himself is interesting and quite believable: Competent and tormented, autocratic and lovelorn, he worms his way into your heart almost despite himself. Residents of the Pacific Northwest will never think of Peter Puget and sundry other characters who have leant their names to various Northwestern geographical features in the same way again. This is the rare book that mixes the story of the European explorers with that of the Indigenous peoples who occupied these lands long before they were "discovered" by Europeans. This book is often funny and irreverent, but it can also be heart-rending and tragic. I think most people interested in the Pacific Northwest and/or Canadian History will find it a good reading experience. On the other hand I suspect that readers of British Naval history might be offended. this is not Master and Commander, but neither is it a Flashman adventure. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Bowering's book overblown and full of errors
Taking on of British Columbia's literary emeriti in a public review is perhaps a bit bold, but as with my other review about Jean Barman's book I think it's necessary.There are too many errors and misjudgements (and whinings) in this sometimes-amusing read that some kind of caveat emptor towards prospective readers should be made.As with my comments about Barman's book, there are too many examples of the failings of this book to recount in a brief review so I'll cite only a few.I have given it only three stars because of the failings in its content; it is much more readable than Barman, but it should be taken with a grain of salt and I'd recommend readers interested in BC history to direct themselves instead to the writings by various journalists - Paul St. Pierre, Terry Glavin, Alan Morley, Stephen Hume, Donald Hauka, Bruce Hutchison and others.

I am writing only from memory here, having returned the copy of the book I read to its owner.Within the first chapters somewhere is a comment about the building of the "North West America", the first ship built in BC back in the 1780s at Nootka Sound, using the labour of 300 Chinese ship carpenters.Bowering pronounces this the first in the pattern of "hiring Asians to do the dirty jobs that white people were too lazy to do themselves" (paraphrase).Actually, the reality was that it was only a few months journey to bring these carpenters in from China, vs. an expensive eighteen months to bring anyone around Cape Horn from Bristol, Newcastle or Liverpool (plus another year bringing them back by the usual one-year return route via China and the Cape of Good Hope).Shipbuilding also wasn't a "dirty job" but a highly-skilled one, and it is debatable whether wages paid to Chinese labourers in this decade were much different from those paid English labourers, and the Chinese could in any case be paid in furs rather than pound sterling.This is not so much an error as a gaffe, but Bowering's readiness to make such casual and mistaken judgments is followed throughout the book; all the usual knee-jerk politically correct dogmas are trotted out and treated over and over, again also often in a completely wrong context or analysis.

Another gaffe - no, an error - that struck me was his statement somewhere that a war between the Okanagan and Lake Indians (the Sinixt of the Arrow Lakes) was the only infra-native war during the post-Contact period.That Bowering is from the Okanagan may explain his narrow scope here, but in the context of what is supposed to be an authoritative history of British Columbia this is a gross error.A three-way war between the Chilcotin, Lillooet and Shuswap raged for the first decades of the 19th Century, and the Lower Lillooet were also afflicted with a brutally invasive war of occupation by the Nlaka'pamux (Thompsons). Sometime in that same period the Athapaskan Stuwix of the Nicola Valley were finally exterminated by one of their neighbours, the surivors assimilating with the Nicola group of mixed Thompson and Okanagans.The Haida and Kwakiutl expeditions against the Coast and River Salishan peoples are well-known fact - especially the Euclataws attacks on the Kwantlens of Fort Langley but also the Southern Kwakiutl invasion and occupation/assimilation of the Island Comox, as is the Squamish migration into Burrard Inlet.Further, the wars between the various Aht (Nootka) peoples recounted by John Jewitt and others are known fact.What was Bowering thinking, or has he just not read enough to have known or realized any of this?

Errors abound on nearly every fifth or tenth page, and the tone of the book throughout caused me to wince on virtually every other, sometimes on every, page.One comment that seems typical had to do with the Anti-Oriental Riots of 1907, where Bowering comments that "not even the native Indians showed any sympathy", as if somehow they should have sided with their fellow non-whites.The reality of the time is the Chinese-native conflict has been part of BC history since the days of the gold rush (actually the first incidents of the Fraser Canyon War of 1858 involved Chinese miners who had raped a native girl and were slaughtered for that crime) and in the decade leading up to the Anti-Oriental Riots there were a series of criminal court cases involving natives and Chinese.Such matters are, of course, politically incorrect and do not get considered in modern historiography and are an awkward thing to include in works whose efforts seem mostly designed to discredit "white imperialism" rather than simply give a straightforward account.Several times in Bowering's book he drops a line at the end of the paragraph about this-or-that with "no one asked the native Indians what they thought about that".Actually, local diarists often include the native view of things, but those diarists have been given short shrift in modern historiography, which prefers to see ALL whites as biased and racist, rather than dealin with the reality that many whites were sympathetic to their Asian and Chinese neighbours.

This is, of course, becoming too much of a rant, and it may seem like I'm singling out ethnic politics but I'm not meaning to.Other content in the book dealing with the curious nature of BC politics is equally poorly treated, especially the Solidarity Uprising of 1983 but also the variously sordid scandals or earlier times.The passages on recent history are particularly bland and noncommittal - surprising in a work which finds it easier to attack politicians of earlier periods than deal with those of more recent times about whom more resources are available.Bowering, of course, depends on government grants in order to fund such writings, so it seems a propos that he not attack BC or federal politicians too untowardly.The various ways in which federal policy limited economic growth or cultural identity in BC and the ongoing rivalry between the two levels of government receives, like so much else, incredibly short shrift.

This is, of course, meant as a popular history rather than an academic one, but it fails as a popular history as much for any academic cachet.From the poet laureate one would have hoped for better.And, being a poet laureate, I would have hoped that he'd have better Latin than to confuse the word "animus" (life, spirit) with "animosity", in a passage where he recounts Grace McCarthy's "animus towards unions".He does however, launch into a few pages of whining here and there about British Columbians' lack of appreciation for the completely-unlistenable academic composers Barbara Pentland and Jean Coulthard, and cites poetry by his friends while at the same time dismissing popular culture.One quotation, from PK Page I think, about old Hastings Street was yet another gaffe, both by her and by him for citing it, in which her not-very-poetic lines state that Hastings Street (the stretch from Main to Woodwards is what she's describing) had been clearcut by the CPR.Bzzzzt.Sorry, wrong answer.That area had been part of the old Hastings Townsite and had been cut long before the railway even considered Gastown as its terminus; even the stretch of Hastings Street west of Cambie, though bordering on the CPR townsite, was not CPR land nor was it cut by them.Similarly turgid passages from Earle Birney and, I think, Al Purdy, are included less to illustrate something useful than to blurb his buddies....

Lastly, the title is entirely misleading - the term "swashbuckling" just doesn't cut the content.There's LOTS in BC history that IS swashbuckling, from the escapades of the fur traders (featured on the cover illustration) to the rum-runners of the 1930s or the present-day drug empires, even the rapacious scandaleering of the politicians on present and past times.None of this is given any kind of detail, and instead we are treated to a condensed and p.c.-ified version of events that, while fairly readable, is entirely misleading in understanding BC.....



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Customer Reviews (1)

Necessary reading
As a USAmerican (Bowering's reference to those of us south of Canada), I have now spent my last two vacations in Canada looking for a history of a place that we USAmericans know nothing about.

This is it.It reads like a Howard Zinn's version of Canada told by someone with a (insert here your favorite political left political comedian -- George Carlin, Lenny Bruce, Margaret Cho, etc.) sensibility.

It is, of course, interesting that you can only get used hardbacks in USAmerica.I bought a new paperback in a good independent bookstore in Victoria, BC.

A couple of lines that I like:

Like long poems and war songs and parental advice, history books are generally about myths.. . .
In places where white people used not to live, the white people always want to know about who was there first. (p. 19)

The US has always favord a real or imaginary attack on its ships as an excuse to unleash its war machine.In later years it would call on people to rmember ships that were attacked in Cuba, Tampico, Hawaii, the Gulf of Tonkin, etc. In 1812 it went to way with Britain and tried to invade Canada [actually we didn't try but were defeated] after a series of incidents concerning US frigates. (p. 117)

If you want to read about the history of our neighbor to the north told from a perspective of the neighbor, this is the book.It should remind us all in a post 9/11 environment we USAmericans have been telling others what to do for a very, very long time. ... Read more

Product Description
It's not where you're going but how you get there: George Bowering, one of Canada's Grand Prix writers, and Ryan Knighton, new to the race, together spin a series of car stories that weave into an auto biography. Now, these aren't your ordinary boys-and-cars stories. George likes to drive pretty slowly, and Ryan, who is now blind, doesn't drive at all. But they take turns in the literary driver's seat, bantering and fender-nudging so their stories tangle like a BC highway. Whether boiling fish in the radiator, jousting with a forklift or cabbing with Doris Lessing: in one hundred panels (that's fifty each), George and Ryan tell their tales of life by the dashboard light. ... Read more

Product Description
Powerful, exquisite, and intricately crafted, His Life: A Poem, George Bowering's stunning new poetic memoir spans and reconfigures 30 years of this award-winning writer's life. A thoroughly unique project, vintage Bowering, His Life began to take shape in the early eighties. Bowering explains that at that time a young Sicilian in Toronto presented him with a fine Italian writing book with lines and rounded quarters. He put the gift away, saving it until it was needed for a poem. The time came a few years later. In the late eighties, Bowering began rifling his diaries for what he had recorded on the equinoxes and solstices between the years 1958 and 1988. Whatever he'd recorded on those days became the building blocks for the poems in this collection. Ten years after beginning the project, more than 40 years after first recording information about the people, places, and events upon which the poems are based, His Life has taken on a life of its own, bent and reshaped by experience, time, and revision. ... Read more