Be Sure to Close Your Eyes

Patricia Morley is professor emeritus of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University and the author of Margaret Laurence: The Long
Journey Home and As Though Life Mattered: Leo Kennedy’s Story.

The ninth novel in Hugh Hood’s epic New Age series will surprise even
regular fans. Trust Hood to twist the novel form into new shapes and
possibilities. Would you expect technical data on animal husbandry? Or
the history of jazz in the 1920s?

Narrative, here, is minimal. Romance supplies the overall framework.
May-Beth Sleaford starts life in King City, Ontario; grows up in a
Swedish Lutheran town in Saskatchewan, and returns to Toronto to study
nursing and marry a hardware merchant from Stoverville, an Ontario town
that is central to the series’ structure. Rarely has romance been
expected to carry the philosophical, historical, and technical
information supplied here. Hood, however, is carefully incorporating his
favorite apocalyptic theme of immanence, God with us here and now.

May-Beth’s father, an agricultural scientist shocked by the suffering
of farm animals caught in winter storms, sets out to design and build a
barn with an automatic feeding system. This strong, prophetic character
unwittingly contributes to the tragedy that strikes two-thirds of the
way through.

Neighbor Peter Arnesson is a self-taught musician whose favorite
instrument is the B-flat cornet and who becomes a cornetist as good as
Louis Armstrong. His passion for jazz, unknown in Saskatchewan before
the first radio sets, allows Hood to explore the nature of music and to
compare it with May-Beth’s visual art.

The problem in this intriguing, troublesome novel lies in the narrative
voice. Where is the voice coming from? Too often it begins with a
character’s point of view and slides into the omniscience of a highly
educated, philosophizing critic-cum-historian.

Hood’s perennial gifts for humor and intelligence are as keen as
ever, and extend to the novel’s central, spiritual theme: “Hardware
is eternal, like life. The trade resembles Being-in-itself in its
endlessness. For why shouldn’t screws come in an infinite variety of
lengths, files be produced flat, bastard or round...?”

The novel, quite legitimately, has no boundaries. Jazz fans will love
Be Sure to Close Your Eyes.