In autumn 1999,  when we journalists went on strike at the Calgary Herald, fighting to install a union, two visiting Toronto-based writers joined us on the picket line: Graeme Gibson and Margaret Atwood. That meant a lot to us and spoke volumes about the two of them.  Six years before that, as the newspaper's Books Editor, I interviewed Gibson about GENTLEMAN DEATH, his recently published fourth novel. This seems a good time to hear his voice. 

"At heart fundamentalism is not a religious notion," says a character in Gentleman Death. "It`s political, right-wing political of the most perfidious kind." She then describes the leaders of "America`s fundamentalist Right as demagogues and crank ayatollahs every one."

Novelist Graeme Gibson says he wasn`t thinking of the Reform Party when he wrote those words. But in his view religious fundamentalism, be it Christian or Islamic, translates as social engineering, social control.

"We`re not talking religion," Gibson said in Calgary, "we`re talking politics. How to stabilize a certain political view. If I were a Jew or a Muslim, I`d be very worried."

The Toronto novelist, whose books include Five Legs, Communion and Perpetual Motion, has been a driving force in cultural politics since the early 1970s. He helped form both The Writers` Union of Canada and the Writers` Development Trust and has served as president of the Canadian Centre of International Pen. In 1992 he received the Order of Canada, and earlier this month (October 1993), the Harbourfront Festival Prize, worth $11,000.

Politics is subtly present throughout Gibson`s latest novel, as when his narrator, Robert Fraser, rants about prime ministers who sell Canada to pay for their own incompetence and lack of vision.

By including this political subtext, Gibson risks dating the novel and making it less accessible to other cultures (previous works have been translated into French, German, Polish and Spanish). "I thought about that," he said. "But I was trying to make Fraser real. That`s the kind of man he is. If I`d backed off because the politics wouldn`t sell in France, I`d betray my man. As a writer, my major responsibility is to my book and the people in it. Not to the future, and not to other cultures."

The politics is intelligent. But Gentleman Death is primarily a literary treat. It`s sophisticated fiction that finds Gibson using sparkling language to explore profoundly adult themes. And to come to terms with death.

Structurally, the book reminds me of that contemporary classic Flaubert`s Parrot by Julian Barnes. There, the hero hid from painful experience by obsessing about a dead writer. Here, Robert Fraser begins novel after novel to avoid dealing with the deaths of his father and brother.

Gibson wanted to avoid writing about a writer, he said, and considered making Fraser a lawyer. "But this is a book about Fraser`s passage from denial to acceptance," he said. "And only with a writer can you demonstrate the evasions. The reader can see the nature of Fraser`s evasions for himself."

I`ve mentioned language. Here`s Fraser: "Preparing to shave one morning several weeks after Father`s funeral I discovered Death himself had entered my body. Not the cruel fellow of scarlet corners, not Death who comes as a stranger, but that lean inevitable harbinger of mortality, of succession, the Gentleman whose guise is time."

That`s chosen almost at random. "I`m fairly language-driven as a writer," Gibson said. "On some levels that`s the chief glory of the novel. I find flat prose an enormous turn-off."

Because of the way Gibson uses language, Gentleman Death is a richly entertaining novel. Then there`s the engaging wit. At one point, Fraser makes fun of his own nationalism as "fashionable nostalgia, the result of not watching enough American television."

Or consider the flirtatious exchange that arises when he tells a lady-friend that a female ghost visited, and she vows to find out who it was: "Which wanton did you imagine creeping into your bed?"

"Beth, Beth," I protested. "You know it`s always you. It`s only you."

"You`re either a liar, Robbie, or a disappointment."

"Isn`t it possible to belong to both groups?"

"That would be unpardonable."

For the rest, Gibson still raves about Margaret Atwood, his partner of more than two decades: "What astonishes me most is how little fame has changed her. She`s extraordinarily resolute about being herself. Peggy has remained the writer I knew from the beginning."

He`s working on another novel, which he declines to discuss for the record. But don`t be surprised if it includes a political subtext: "As a nationalist," Gibson said, "I have to be optimistic, and as a humanist I have to have faith. But it`s not always easy."

(In 2009, Graeme Gibson and I participated in a Robbie Burns Polar Dip organized by Adventure Canada. Kindred spirits, we did so by serving whisky to those who actually took the plunge.) 

Last June, scientists confirmed the identification of the human remains found on the beach at Cap des Rosiers, Quebec. They had come from the 1847 shipwreck of the Carricks of Whitehaven, a famine ship that had sailed from Sligo on the west coast of Ireland. Bound for Quebec City, the two-masted vessel had been approaching the mouth of the St. Lawrence when on April 28 a fierce storm came up, drove the wooden ship onto a shoal, and smashed her to pieces.

Now, more than 200 years later, Parks Canada anthropologists confirmed that the remains – bones and skeletons uncovered by storms mostly in 2011 and 2016 – were indeed those of Irish men, women and children who had sailed on the Carricks during the Great Famine in its worst year.

As I tracked the story from my home in Toronto, I could imagine the terrible demise of those last survivors all too vividly. Less than one month before the story surfaced, I had gone aboard two replica famine ships in Ireland – the Jeanie Johnston in Dublin and the Dunbrody in New Ross, County Wexford. And in 2018, in Pictou, Nova Scotia, I had explored the replica of the Hector, which famously sailed from Scotland in 1773, decades before the term “coffin ship” was coined. In size and weight, the 200-ton Hector was closest to the 242-ton Carricks.

At 301 tons or more, the three-masted Jeanie Johnston was significantly larger. On deck, the JJ was 123 feet long and 26 wide and it had a draught or pass-over depth of 15 feet. The original ship, built in Quebec in 1847, had two diesel engines in addition to sails. But according to tour guide Sean Gilmore, the vessel was dead slow: “Once, in a race with 65 other ships, it placed 60^th.”

Between 1848 and 1855, the Jeanie Johnston made 16 voyages to North America, carrying an average of 198 passengers and as many as 254 passengers. Was it crowded? Put it this way: the replica ship is licensed to carry 40 people, including crew. The vessel’s great distinction, Gilmore said, was that, “On the Jeanie Johnston, nobody ever died.” This he attributed to the skill of the doctor on board. The two main killers on these voyages, he explained, were cholera and typhus. Cholera was transmitted by fecal matter in the water: “If you got it, you were dead within 48 hours.” Typhus brought a slower death, more miserable, and was carried by lice-infected rats.

The Jeanie Johnston went down in October 1858 when, crossing the Atlantic with a cargo of timber, she became waterlogged. The crew climbed into the rigging and hung on as the ship slowly sank. On the ninth day, as things grew desperate – “no fresh water “-- a Dutch ship happened by and rescued all hands. “Why were they saved?” Gilmore asked rhetorically. “Because no one ever died on the Jeanie Johnston.”

The same cannot be said of the Dunbrody, the largest of the three replica ships I visited. Built in Quebec as a cargo vessel in 1845, it was 176 feet long, 28 wide, and weighed 500 tons – more than twice the Carricks. Sailing out of New Ross during the famine years, the Dunbrody carried an average of 200 passengers, though in March 1847, it sailed to Manhattan with 313. . . .

Steamers operating out of Liverpool could reach North America in two weeks. But these sailing vessels usually required six to eight weeks, during which passengers survived on oatmeal, rice and ship biscuit or hard tack. Two small cabins on the Dunbrody gave first-class voyagers some privacy but most passengers were crammed into 40 bunk beds that were six feet square and made to accommodate four to eight people each. . . .

The vessel nearest in size to the Carricks of Whitehaven was the older ship Hector, best known for its 1773 voyage from Scotland to Pictou, Nova Scotia, where today a replica is tied up at Heritage Quay. The original was already in rough shape when she collected passengers at Loch Broom, and those who went aboard found they could scrape slivers from her rotting hull with their fingernails. The Hector had three masts but was just 85 feet long and 22 wide. She weighed 200 tons.  She sailed with 189 passengers -- 23 families and 25 single men. To say that the ship was overflowing is a gross understatement.

Spring, 2020. Mark your calendar. That’s when Prometheus Books will bring out Chasing Lemurs: My Journey into the Heart of Madagascar. You know: Keriann McGoogan’s first book?

The one I heard about ten months ago, while striding into the night with my super-fit, thirty-something daughter? “Oh, I meant to tell you,” Keriann said.

“Yes?” I responded. Often, after a movie night, and if Travis is out of town, Sheena and I will walk her home from our house, half a dozen city blocks. But tonight, I forget why, it was just the two of us.

“I’m writing a book,” she said.

Over the years, I’d badgered her sporadically to do just that. Still, I was surprised. “You’re writing a book? What kind of book?”

“A memoir,” she said. “The Madagascar story?”

“Of course! But that’s fantastic!”

My next question, one that I am hard-wired to ask, just popped out: “How many words have you got in the can?” I figured she would say 5,000, maybe 10,000. And when I heard her say, “Just over 7,000,” I started cheer. “Over 7,000! That’s a solid beginning.”

“No, dad,” she said. “Not seven. Seventy. Just over 70,000.”

“70,000? 70,000 words?" I clasped my head and reeled around. "But that’s . . . that’s an entire book!  You must be nearly finished.”

“First draft, yes. Maybe 10,000 words to go.”

So that’s how I found out what Keriann was up to. Ten or so months ago, while striding into the night. Next thing I knew, she had a book deal. With Prometheus Books of New York. Prometheus will publish Chasing Lemurs under its own imprint as part of the Rowman and Littlefield Publishing Group.

Keriann describes the book as “a memoir of scientific exploration and emerging womanhood, a celebration of biodiversity, and a love letter to the people of Madagascar.” When she was twenty-five, which to me seems like yesterday, she traveled to Madagascar to study lemurs in their natural habitat and to set up a permanent field site where, in the remote northwest, she could do research for her PhD in Biological Anthropology. “Despite careful planning, the trip spiraled out of control." she writes. "A simple reconnaissance turned into an epic adventure marked by food poisoning, hairy back-country roads, grueling hikes, challenging local politics, malaria, and an emergency evacuation.”

The book will include a fair bit of science and photos of lemurs (like the one above) by Travis Steffens, founder of Planet Madagascar and (not incidentally) Keriann's husband. Come to think of it, you needn't mark your calendar just yet. As the occasion draws nigh, probably I will have occasion to remind you of it.