The Words of My Roaring

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

Kroetsch’s 1966 novel, reprinted here in the University of Alberta
Press’s Currents series, takes for its source the 1935 Alberta
election in which “Bible Bill” Aberhart swept the province for his
fledgling Social Credit party, largely on the basis of his biblical
rhetoric, which, the Depression still fresh, struck a resonant chord.
Johnnie Backstrom, undertaker and womanizer, is running for office
against the incumbent, Doc Murdoch. While Murdoch stumps the district
preaching the need for maturity and experience, Backstrom, whose
platform seems to be made up as he goes, spends his evenings romancing
his opponent’s daughter.

Born in Heisler, Alberta, Kroetsch has always been at home writing
about the excesses of Western Canada. When Backstrom, in a hyperbolic
campaign speech, promises rain by election day, Kroetsch knows what such
a statement means to the farmers and ranchers. As Thomas Wharton makes
clear in his introduction, Kroetsch makes his hero “a kind of monster
of self-creation, a figment of his own gift for words.”

Kroetsch himself is a sort of self-creation. His experiments with new
narrative forms earned him a Governor General’s Award in 1969 for The
Studhorse Man. The torrent of words uttered by the candidates during the
campaign is, in a sense, the correlative to the larger-than-life drama
that finally drenches both Backstrom and his opponent even as the rain
concludes the story. Decades after it first appeared, Kroetsch’s novel
is as fresh and resonant as ever.