The Many Deaths of George Robertson

Boyd Holmes is an editor with Dundurn Press.

The Many Deaths of George Robertson is a collection of 11 short stories
by a teacher and former leader of New Brunswick’s New Democratic
Party. However, Little’s background in education and politics is
reflected in only a few of these fictions; more often his concerns are
death, insanity, human tenacity, and familial relationships. The book
also contains a concise and clearly written foreword by Ed Broadbent.

Norman Levine once remarked, “I can usually tell a bad writer by the
words he leaves in.” Little fulfills that definition; he edits his
prose poorly, and as a result, it is cluttered. There is, for example,
no point within the context of “Marooned” in telling readers that
the heroine’s adventure is being recorded “with a gold-nibbed, green
fountain pen in a notebook bound in red leather.” What is more, this
book bounces from pretentiousness (“No one is left alive now to plumb
the full depths of her mystery”) to preachiness (“Bucky’s and
Tom’s deaths were real, his pain was real. No process . . . could ever
change that”) to insufferable sentimentality (“ ‘Weren’t they
the best mushrooms you’ve ever tasted?’ . . . ‘Oh, yes, they were
just scrumshie’”). Those wanting a better understanding of
Little’s bankruptcy of language may compare his depiction of the
elderly in “Sophie’s Song” to the thematically similar portrayal
that forms Philip Larkin’s poem “The Old Fools”; Little, unlike
Larkin, does not command the mastery of syntax and diction needed to
make experience compelling and real.