Prayers of a Young Man

M. Wayne Cunningham is a past executive director of the Saskatchewan
Arts Board and the former director of Academic and Career Programs at
East Kootenay Community College.

Like his Prayers of a Very Wise Child, the 1991 winner of the Stephen
Leacock Award for Humour, Roch Carrier’s Prayers of a Young Man is a
whimsical piece. Carrier uses first-person narration so that the reader
can listen in on the 15 revelatory prayers of a young Québécois as he
matures from a naive, village-born 11-year-old believer in God, to a
mid-teen sceptic, to an 18-year-old unbeliever arriving in big city
Montreal “to write poetry” while secretly aspiring to become Prime
Minister of Canada.

At the core of each prayer is a biographical incident, beginning with
the young man apprehensively leaving home to enter the Petit Seminaire,
as depicted in his “Prayer of a Child Whose Big Trunk Is on the Roof
of the Car”; then proceeding to the worldly temptations of the
“Swearword Prayer,” the near-sacriligeous challenges to priestly
authority in the “Prayer of the Woman in the Television,” the sexual
awakenings of the “Prayer of the Little Soldier Who Stands at
Attention,” the political aspirations of the “Prayer After the Great
Election Speech”; and ending with his arrival in Montreal as described
in his “Prayer of the Young Man of the Future Who Is On His Way to the
City.”

Always witty and humorous, the easily read prayers are sprinkled with
colorful images and concrete language, such as “a butterfly ...
struggling to carry a stone,” “new sunbeams ... shattering in the
dew and on the daisies,” and “the ray of dawn when it pierces the
dusky wall of night.” Even when he expresses his doubts and disbelief
about abstract notions, he does so in the common vernacular: “Where
did the candle come from that you lit, God? If you pressed the switch,
who screwed in the bulb?”

The book is a tribute to Carrier’s creativity and to Sheila
Fischman’s skills as a translator. Between them, they have crafted and
polished another fine jewel in the well-stocked Carrier collection of
Canadian fiction.