Burning Water

It took George Bowering a few attempts to express adequately his fascination with the explorer George Vancouver. After a book-length poem and an ensuing radio play on the same subject, Bowering decided to write a novel about Vancouver. Burning Water , which won the Governor General's Award for fiction in 1980, recounts Vancouver's last voyage to the Pacific Northwest, an attempt to do a meticulous survey of the coast and find a western entrance to the Northwest Passage. Vancouver's character becomes as important as the story itself, and two of his relationships dominate the his homosexual love affair with the Spanish captain Don Juan Francisco la Bodega y Quadra and his bitter rivalry with his own *'s naturalist, Archibald Menzies. Burning Water tells a straightforward, linear narrative, but it does so from within the trappings of postmodernist fiction. The novel often breaks into authorial asides, abandoning a scene in progress in favour of a sort of third-person author's journal. Many of Bowering's characters are deliberately unrealistic and function as historical puppets. They speak a dialect that is half-antiquated and half-modern. Only Vancouver and Menzies gain any real individuality, and their belligerent personalities chafe against the confines of their duties to history as the Great Explorer and the Great Naturalist, leading, eventually, to a murder. It's not a murder that matches the historical record, however, and readers who are uncomfortable with this type of storytelling would do well to avoid Burning Water . However, those who are comfortable with the self-doubting tactics of postmodern historical writing will find much to enjoy here. --Jack Illingworth