The Order of Good Cheer
by Bill Gaston
Anansi, 2008; 391 pp.; $29.95

The Order of Good Cheer maintains a precarious balance between comedy and tragedy. It is tragic because most of the novel is mired in the ennui of not one but two winters of discontent. It is comic because it describes what is necessary to combat the listlessness, depression and sickness that often accompany such a season – namely, good food and drink, the love of friends and family – and sex.

Based on actual events and historical figures – Samuel de Champlain prominent among them – author Bill Gaston provides a fictitious account of the French experience of winter in what is now the Annapolis Basin of Nova Scotia in the early seventeenth century. This scenario, in alternating chapters, is presented against an invented description of present-day British Columbian port-town Prince Rupert.

Wishing to avoid a repeat of the previous winter where “the scurve” laid to a slow wasting death dozens of men, Samuel de Champlain has it upright in his mind ways “to survive the winter that is almost upon them.” What Champlain is thinking of is nothing short of a party, many parties in fact, intended to ward off sickness. “What he wants is for the men to know that it is not this night only, and not the next night only, but rather a feast that does not stop. A state of good humour, of thanks and of appreciation, ongoing in its effect.”

Similarly, but less urgent than Champlain’s more poetic attempts to ward off immediate death – and also separated by the span of 400 years – are Andy Winslow’s efforts to enliven the oppressive atmosphere of a northwest coast winter. Andy Winslow’s winter – the reader’s winter too – is particularly daunting. Accompanying long lost love Laura Schultz’s return to her hometown, are the vagaries of Andy’s annoying proverb spouting and charmless mother, mid-life crisis afflicted “best friend” Drew, and Andy’s own subtle sense of failure and lack of ambition. Behind all this is Gaston’s astute and timely commentary that focuses on the anxieties plaguing our own peculiar epoch.

Gaston beautifully renders Port Royal using the bare essentials of land, sea, forest and sky – underneath which mingle in an odd codependence men from the old world and their indigenous observers: “… on this path, amid all these glistening and seemingly beckoning leaves, shoots, cones, curls, pods, hoods, mosses, of which at least half he is ignorant, the savages’ knowledge of what here is food seems like wisdom of the most miraculous kind.” And at the same time that the French need the knowledge of the Mi’qmah to survive in the wilderness, the native people, particularly the “sagamore” Membertou, covet membership into the white man’s strange and powerful religion.

Although the horrors of death by the scurve are graphically depicted, the heightened and formal language with which Gaston writes of Port Royal gives the reader both a compelling and almost idealized account of the first Europeans’ experiences of North America.

Cluttered by comparison is Gaston’s portrayal of contemporary Prince Rupert, where the myriad anxieties pressing on its characters seem to drag down the pace of the novel. Throughout the chapters dedicated to Andy’s (our) time, there regularly appears, direct, and not so direct, references to global warming and other environmental worries. When we are first introduced to Andy and his community we are presented with a mysterious die-off of fish – the fresh bodies of which have washed up on the shore of Prince Rupert leaving residents to contemplate whether or not the fish should be consumed for fear of poisoning. In a more subtle poke at consumer culture and the necessary damage it inflicts upon the environment and those that buy into it, Gaston writes, “He gave Dan Clark’s car “the inch” as he passed it … holding thumb and forefinger an inch apart whenever a Hummer went by, showing the driver how large his penis must be for wanting such a car.” The on-going social commentary in these chapters is no doubt specific to the cultural moment and many readers will be appreciative of Gaston’s sharp eye, but the details of modern times seem to read like accessories, which detract from the characters and the mostly enjoyable narrative of which they are a part.

All the swirling anxieties that the novel dredges up lend a sense of despair to The Order of Good Cheer. However, the novel is more geared toward that which its title suggests. Side character, seventeenth-century carpenter Lucien and his experience of sexual intimacy with “savage” Ndene, along with Andy and Laura’s longing for each other, pulls the story out of the sadness and anxiety where it seems content to wallow.

Surrounded by storms of sorrow and doubt, in the end, The Order of Good Cheer clings to hope and believes in love.