Murray Brewster/CP
SUNRAY: THE DEATH AND LIFE OF CAPTAIN NICHOLA GODDARD
Valerie Fortney
Canadian soldiers stationed at Kandahar Airfield sleep in huge white structures known as BATs (big-ass tents). Each one boasts dozens of bunk beds—and zero privacy. Which is why, in February 2006, Lt.-Col. Ian Hope issued an order that seemed reasonable enough: hang up some tarps to create a “women’s only” section for the few females inside each tent. Nichola Goddard was livid. An artillery captain serving her first tour of duty, she had spent months undergoing the same gruelling training as the men under her watch—and sleeping in the same trenches. “We’ve taken a benign situation and created a fantasy,” Goddard complained to her fellow troops. She even worked up the nerve to write a memo to Hope, reminding the boss that the days of “objecting to mixing genders in combat is over.” Her words weren’t enough to change the commander’s mind; the tarps were staying. But Hope would never forget the name Nichola Goddard.
“This is an officer with guts,” he thought to himself.
Three months after sending that memo, the 26-year-old captain was killed by Taliban insurgents—the first female Canadian soldier to perish in combat. Not surprisingly, that tragic fact became the focus of every news report. But what most Canadians don’t know is that a few hours before she was killed by a rocket-propelled grenade on May 17, 2006, Goddard was at the centre of another historic first: she was the first army officer—male or female—to direct artillery fire against an enemy force since the Korean War.
As Fortney makes abundantly clear, Goddard would be horrified to know that her gender became the focus of her obituaries. Charismatic, tough and forever loyal, she was such a standout officer that the men under her command had long forgotten that they were answering to a ma’am, not a sir. “First female, first female,” says Sgt. Dave Redford, Goddard’s second-in-command during their Afghanistan tour. “That would have driven her absolutely berserk.”
Thankfully, Fortney uses dozens of detailed interviews—and, most importantly, Goddard’s own dispatches from the front lines—to tell the complete story of a woman who was so much more than that.
- Michael Friscolanti
FREEDOM
Jonathan Franzen
Nine years after The Corrections, Franzen is back with another supersized tome on the rise and fall of an American family, this time the Berglunds of St. Paul, Minn. “Greener than Greenpeace” Walter is renowned for his niceness, while his wife, Patty, is “a sunny carrier of socio-cultural pollen,” who even remembers the neighbours’ birthdays. They seem, in other words, too good to be true, and by the end of the novel’s dazzling and very funny opening chapter, have already received the ultimate comeuppance for liberal helicopter parents: their doted-upon son Joey has moved in with the white-trash girl next door.
There are some false notes: Patty’s “autobiography,” for instance, which comprises nearly 200 pages, is written in precisely the same voice as the rest of the book. But Franzen is a brilliant stylist, blessedly free of postmodern hocus-pocus, and in Freedom, for the first time, he seems to care about the interior lives of his characters as much as he does about his prose. Patty, in particular, seems to step off the page as she careens, for decades, between Walter and his bad-boy best friend like a Chardonnay-swilling version of her favourite literary heroine—Natasha in War and Peace. This love triangle plays out against a panoramic yet minutely detailed backdrop of American life post-9/11, complete with ethically compromised environmentalists and acutely observed asides on everything from cloth diapers to alternative rock.
While some of this social commentary crosses the line between satire and slapstick farce, the Berglunds’ fraught attempts to figure out “how to live” both apart and together ring true. As they struggle and bungle, they are revealed as increasingly complex characters: Patty is brittle and depressive, Walter is less of a lapdog and more of a weasel than he initially seemed. And there’s redemption, of a sort, amidst the dysfunctional ruins, once they recognize that freedom, in Franzen’s world, is just another word for impending disaster. Each intoxicating blast of liberty seems to be followed by a devastating blow—a surprisingly old-fashioned, even romantic, message made new when surrounded by such a richly drawn tapestry of contemporary life.
- Kate Fillon
THE TIGER
John Vaillant
The territory of Primorye, Russia’s wild, wild Far East, is one of the most exotic ecosystems on Earth. Much of the fauna resembles that of the Pacific Northwest, except there aren’t as many wolves—the tigers eat them. That a Russian region’s apex predator should be a tiger, a 300-kg, three-metre-long beast that flourishes in temperatures of -30° C, is hard enough to fit into our mental picture of how the world works; that it should be as malevolent, intelligent and human-like as the angry animal in Vaillant’s chilling page-turner is even harder.
The human history of Primorye, at least in modern times, is almost uniformly depressing. Harsh Communist-era conditions, followed by post-Soviet economic chaos, drove much of the two-million-strong population into sustenance living, including tiger poaching for the insatiable Chinese market. In 1997, a poacher wounded a tiger and stole part of its kill, starting the enraged tiger on a three-day stalk of the poacher. The tiger got his revenge, killing and consuming the man almost entirely; then, too injured for its normal game, it took to human-hunting with terrifying efficiency. In a classic man vs. nature narrative—complete with an astonishing denouement—a team of men and dogs took to the frozen woods to track it down.
The story of that tiger (and Yuri Trush, the tracker on its tail) is riveting enough, but Vaillant, who won a 2005 Governor General’s award for The Golden Spruce, expands on it marvellously. He explores theories of how humans and tigers may have evolved together, with us as scavengers of predators’ kills rather than as hunters. The role played in human evolution by large killers like tigers explains our fascination with them, Vaillant argues, and foretells how bereft we will feel if we let them slide into extinction.
- Brian Bethune
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