PA,lTISAN
REVIEW
,279
Canadians and, perhaps above all, the sour dough of the FLQ ,mani–
festo not
I~lerely
read on television, but ,per:manently
prin~ed
between
hard covers and given a context of empathic fictions which hUIllanize
the abstractions. Maybe , the price , paid is grotesquely high, :qut that
might be the way it is for some people and some communities: the
coming of television might mean that the only effective way to express
,our
intere~ts ~s
,to act out our drama
i~
the light of high publicity. But
before television maybe there was no way. The world the FLQ rejects
is a shabby forgotten world their forebears accepted. Moore makes thi:s
clear for us, but he is .able to do so because their violence has: insured
that it may not be forgotten.
I've re<:ently heard another
Iris~
writer make the same point about
Ulster - that the media, precipitate the dramatization of roles. Belfast
and Montreal have much in common, not ,least that Brian' M?ore is the
poet of both their repressed respectabilities: it is his Belfast Catholic
background that gives him his
sensiti~ity
to the French Canadian, and
it is a sensitivity which seems 'to me. to .work against the overt polemic
which I've just discussed. His whole
predilection d'artiste
joins imagin–
atively in the violent assertion against the oppressive world: when he
writes of downtown 'Montreal that "this mean .little life down here in
the shadow of the mountain, below the big
E~glish
mansions accepted
this white-nigger slum, this
nous autres
existence," 'we see more than
the liberal's concessive sympathy. It is the novelist Brian Moore writing
with all the felt frustration of his lonely, excluded heroes and heroines
whose' only release is in the destruction of their routine worlds and
their habits of mind. History confers drama on the dull dead town
of Gavin Burke
in
The Emperor ,o{ Ice Cream
when the 'air raids come
to Belfast, shattering his home and his indoctrinated moral conscience.
Significantly, in
The
Revolution Script,
-the only real empathy with
the other side is when Pierre Laporte, himself imprisoned, hurls himself
against the window in a violent bid to escape - at that moment, his
psychology is at one with the psychology of the FLQ. The media
offer them their one chance to violate , their oppressiv,e world, and the
;book turns. toward their deff!at once Trudeau moves to , take control
of the media. This may be ,the theater of fright, but the creator of
J~dith He~rne"of D~armuid , Devine,
of Gavin Burke ,knows that libera–
tion is
a
pightmare from which
,we
all ' too often, try to escape: ,pre–
electronic heroes, these are doomed by 'their isolation
~nd ~heir
ideol–
ogical incompetence. History" we
are'
bo~d
to'
feel, was kinder to ''the
FLQ:
i
don't want '
to
Seem patronizing and suggest ' that the bOok
,has an unconscious meanmg which runs counter to the overt attitude;
".
.
'.
.
