The Unsettling of the West

Fay Lando was Projects Officer at the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture and Food in Toronto.

All but one of the stories in this first collection take place in Western Canada. In the exception, characters from Alberta are holidaying in Barbados. In the title story, set in the last century, a Northwest Mounted Police officer must transport some prisoners from Calgary to Fort Edmonton. “The Accounting” has its basis in the detention of the Japanese on the West Coast during World War II.

Geddes adeptly strips the mystique from research in “Common Ground,” describing it as “make-work for academic misfits and those bespectacled pervs who prefer stroking the spines of books to the messy world of human contact.” There are other descriptions, equally sharp. Geddes’s poetic background is clear throughout these stories.

The stories all begin by presenting some issue or situation in an interesting way and promising, at the very least, a good read. But most of the endings are vague and unsatisfactory. Unsatisfactory as well is the absence of a contents page.