Discovering a new author is a primary joy of the reading life, but finding one who already has a shelf of books available for your delectation is even better. The First Cut Is the Deepest examines debut novels by authors who endeared themselves to us much later.

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Before adulthood, there was the adult fiction section of the bookstore and the freeing yet bewildering moment of being set loose upon it. When this happened to me, I wanted to fit in more than I wanted to ask for guidance, so I fell to grazing where I could — bowing to the cliché about picking books by their covers for an embarrassing length of time.

Happily, one of those haphazard selections was Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye, a novel with extensive teenage flashbacks that neatly bridged the gap between my YA forays and what I felt was appropriate to move onto. The book’s plumbing of what Mean Girls would later call “girl world” — the province of adolescent women whose savagery and byzantine codes no one on the outside would believe — grounded the story in a reality I recognized, and was one that Atwood would return to again and again.

While not a teenager, Marian McAlpin, the heroine of Atwood’s 1969 debut novel The Edible Woman, feels herself similarly unformed, and the belief that getting married will give order to her life nearly kills her. In a marriage plot gone awry, Marian expects, and gets, a proposal from her boyfriend Peter, a patronizing cipher whose feelings on the subject were previously limited to feeling depressed after each of his single friends got hitched. Marian feels satisfied at first, making plans to leave her job and move back home to prepare for the wedding, but also ill, imagining that her food is still alive on her plate — a condition her college friend Clara breezily attributes to pre-wedding nerves.

If Clara, beleaguered and pregnant for the third time, represents one possible pole for Marian’s future, the other belongs to her roommate Ainsley, who earns Marian’s silent disapproval by flitting from job to job, reviewing and openly criticizing the men she meets at parties, and showing no definite inclination toward settling down. When Ainsley announces she’s going to have a baby on her own despite not having a husband, Marian is politely horrified, but a little envious of her determination, which includes seducing one of Marian’s male friends for the required genetic material.
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The Governor General’s Award for English-language fiction is one of Canada’s oldest and most prestigious literary prizes. Yet many of the books that won the award are now out of print, forgotten, or both. In Hello, Governor, Michael Hingston cannonballs into the archives and reads the GG winners in chronological order. If there is a CanLit identity that we’ve accidentally left behind, he will find it.

This month: Franklin Davey McDowell’s novel The Champlain Road, which took home the prize in 1939.

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This column is supposed to be an ongoing act of reclamation, methodically exhuming and re-assessing some Canadian novels that, while famous in their own day, have since fallen by the wayside. After all, the Governor General’s Award is no mere trinket. To have won it, surely, must be an indication of something.

And while I may not have been able to fully endorse any of the books I’ve read so far, each of them has had some kind of redeeming feature — or at least a base curiosity factor — that makes them worth keeping around.

Franklin Davey McDowell’s The Champlain Road, then, has the dubious distinction of being the first book that I wouldn’t even half-heartedly fight to reclaim from obscurity. In fact, this one’s on me, obscurity. Have at it.

On the one hand, The Champlain Road tells us absolutely nothing about Canada circa 1939. It’s untethered, quasi-historical fiction set in the mid-17th century at the tail end of the bloody massacre of the Huron First Nation by their rival Iroquois in pre-Confederation Ontario. But on the other hand, it doesn’t illuminate much about the past, either, filled as it is with stilted writing, one-dimensional characters, zero in the way of stakes or pace — several seemingly important characters are murdered and forgotten within a paragraph or two — and an attitude towards Aboriginal people that could charitably be called “troubling.” In other words, it’s a dull, racist, 300-page Heritage Minute.

Fortunately, there doesn’t appear to be a huge movement to reclaim this book. Information on McDowell himself is even in short supply, but he was a journalist for the Toronto World and the Winnipeg Free Press, and later worked for the Canadian Pacific Railway. It looks like The Champlain Road was his first novel, and that he later wrote another that is now equally out of print.
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