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Hardrock miners are the heroes
in Dyson Carter's new novel

pS the rich and blossoming lit-
erature of Canada portraying
the growing pains and the virile
culture of a young and wigorous.
nation, there often appears one

serious omission or drawback — ,

the inability or unwillingness of
many Canadian authors and writ-
ers to project that allimportant
section of the people, whose la-
bor struggles and ideals epitomise
the true essence of Canadianism,
the working class. ;

Dyson Carter’s latest novel
Fatherless Sons (Progress Books,
obtainable here at the People’s
Cooperative Bookstore, 337 West
Pender Street, price $2.63) is the
sort of book which will do much
to “repair the omission.”

The people in Canter’s bopk are
real down-to-earth people. Hard-
rock miners with their women-
folk and children, living, working
and struggling in their Yankee
monopoly-ridden town of Deep
Rock. Union’ men, conscious and
proud of the union: they have
built and its achievements, carv-
ing out the pattern of their lives,
sometimes deep in the bowels of
the earth, sometimes in their

working class church mission, in,

the union hall, in their homes, or
on the street . . . never forgetting
for a moment that the vast min-
eral wealth they dig for a ruth-
less American monopoly, wealth
often watered with the blood of
a erushed and broken miner, is
a mighty potential for human
. wellbeing — or devastating de-
' struction and death.
‘In Fatherless Sons one also
‘ meets the Pollards and Nolles,
the well-groomed big executives
of monopoly giants... . the “soul”
of monopoly — those types of

RADIO-TV

AgPHE B.C. Lions have the ball, the
# pall carrier plunges through
“the wall of the Calgary Stamped-
ers, he is heading for a touch-

.. down, the mountains echo the
“roar of the crowd and the 1955.

football season opens on the west
dast.

football fans in the Vancouver
area can look forward to telecasts
on CBUT of some of the big
_games in the Western Interprov-
incial Football Union leading up
to the Grey Cup classic on No-

- vember 26.

The Grey Cup game may be

‘shown live at the west coast if
»-an agreement for the telecast
» g¢an be reached.
3 live on the CBC's eastern TV met-
*, work. :

It will be seen

{Included in the games to be
telecast is a Big Four game be-

“tween Toronto and Hamilton to
» be shown over CBUT on October

16. Right on tap of the play with

*<@escriptions of each team’s strat-
‘egy will ‘be Bill Stephenson, well-

“known sports commentator.

As eyes turn to Empire Stad-
ium on Noveniber 26, a battery
of Canadian sports pundits. will
be up in the TV booth giving
their judgments on the play be-
‘Yow while eastern Sportscaster
Steve Douglas and Bill Stevenson
provide the running commentary.

CBUT will show the Vancou-
yer-Edmonton game on August

‘97 this coming Sunday, Septem-

- ber 4, at 2 p.m., and the Vancou-

men who weigh all human values
on the scales of balance-sheet
profits. “Look at this,’ rage
these corporation big shots as
they pore over production costs,
“youre paying these damned
Deep Rock miners almost half
the current American wage...
what do you think they are, Am-
ericans?” :

+ ot Gi +

From the finest and the worst ~

in humanity Dyson Carter has
created his Fatherless Sons and
with it has added a ‘very notable
contribution to the growing store-
house of Canadian literature.

No one can mistake Carter’s
Deep Rock, the heart of an inter-
national nickel empire, nor forget
the many Deep Rocks scattered
across the face of Canada like the
blotches on the once fair face of
a smallpox victim; towns in
which ‘hardrock miners and work-
ers like Dave Nelson nourish
their love of peace from the bit-
ter curse and hatred of war, and
the terrible toll it takes from
their families, their class, and
their country.

Reading Fatherless Sons one
cannot help but draw ‘the impres-
sion from some chapters of the
book that the author has mot
“lived” the story he writes. That,
however, should be regarded as a
tribute rather than a criticism of
this splendid effort to project the
Canadian working class as the
true patriots of the nation. In this
Dyson Cartér, scientist, engineer
and social architect, has lifted his
working men and women out of
the muck and grime of monopo-
ly’s Deep Rock and through the
daily pagentry of their lives and

ver at Winnipeg game of Septem-
ber 3 will be shown Sunday, Sep-
tember 11.
ma ut bos

During his long career as phil-
osopher and mathematician Bert-
rand Russell has undergone many
ups and downs. Rewards for his
studies ‘and writings’ have varied
from medals from the Royal So-
ciety and the London Mathe-
matical Society in 1934 and the
Nobel prize for literature in 1950
to six months’ imprisonment as
a pacifist and anti-conscription-

BERTRAND RUSSELL

struggles given a living content
working class literature.

With some reviewers it is the
practice to quote whole para-
graphs out of context and fit
these into the opinions of the re-
viewer, or worse still to reverse
the process by the reviewer

reading things into. a book
which just aren’t there. With
Fatherless Sons such literary jug-
gling won’t meet with much suc-
cess, since ,his working class nov-
el is not loaded with love-sick
swains, bashful maidens, or medi-
ocre “plots” cluttering up its
pages. Fatherless Sons is a slice
from the raw history of a basic
Canadian industry and of the men
and women whose toil arfd sweat
and struggles have built it.

The power of this book does
not lie in the fictional glamor-
izing of Canada’s hardrock min-
ers, but in bringing the saga of
their lives and struggles under
monopoly exploitation into the
hearts and minds of their fellow-
men in other walks of life.

The ‘success and worth of good
fiction must always be measured
by its ‘closeness to reality, and
there is nothing more real than
working people. It is such peo-
ple who stand forth in the pages
of Fatherless Sons, in the course
of their daily struggles giving
realistic expression to the moods,
the changing conditions, and the
hopes of an era. :

Dyson Carter has done just
this. As a scientist and a student
of Marxism, I have no doubt he
could have written a very com-
mendable thesis on the pentra-
tion and domination of predatory
American monopoly in Canada,
on the Yankee rape of our na-

Arrangements being made to
televise Grey Cup ga

me here

ist during the First World War.

The energetic, 83 - year - old

thinker will be seen on CBUT

Thursday, September 8 at 10.30

p.m. in an interview on Profile.
se Ca < SaaS «|

On Tuesday, Thursday and Fri-
day next week at 7.20 p.m. on
CBC Trans-Canada, Philip Strat-
ford, who is an English teacher
at Assumption College, Windsor,
Ontario, gives a series of three
essays which decribe certain

‘highlights of French provincial

life.

The series is called The Three
Bells and is subtitled Birth, Mar
riage and Death.

* * *

Saturday, September 10 is
French night on Focus (8.35 p.m.
on CBC Trans-Canada) with three
quite different items coming from
three parts of Canada.

First is a concert of French
songs of the 15th to 18th cen-
turies, sung by a French a cap-
pella choir from St. Boniface,

Manitoba, directed by Marius

Benoisi,

From Toronto comes a play,
produced by John Reeves, called
Cursed be the Bread, adapted by
James Bennerman from a short
story (Le pain maudit) by Guy
de Maupassant about manners
and* morals in the 1870's.

The evening ends in Montreal,
with ‘Irene Andrian singing
French cabaret music.

DYSON CARTER

tural resources, our culture, and
our independence as a nation.
Less specifically, perhaps, but
with equal force, this is the
~aatrix that shapes the love and

lives of Dave and Irene Nelson -

in Deep Rock, the fight ‘for
the union, to build it and to pre-
serve it against the Mercer raid-
ers, the curse of war upon the
Nelson family and the effects of
its haunting fear wpon Dave Nel-
son — this search for peace of
mind in the far corners of
Canada, away from Deep Rock,
always searching but never find-
ing. Even the rottenness of social
democracy, typified in Clyde Mer-
eer and his social-climbing wife
Camilla, who utilize the CGF and
the union only for stepping stones
is shaped in the same matrix. All
these elements are well woven to-
gether in a strong and beautiful
pattern in Fatherless Sons;, an ou-
standing work of fiction driving
home an obvious truth — the
growing will and desire of the
Canadian people for peace, inde-
‘pendence and progress, free from
the deadening fetters and frust-
rations which Yankee monopoly
has fastened upon their country.
at 5S 5°3

The engineer in Dyson Carter
comes out quite often in his de-
scriptive detail of the technique
and machines in hard-rock min-
ing and smelting, but it never ob-
secures the leitmotif of his pow-
erful drama of working people;
a drama playing out its last act
in the broken ‘bodies of two miner
buddies fatally crushed in a rock-
burst, tending the intricate ma-

chines which produce big profits

for the monopolists.

But: the ore still comes up “...
from the very same lever where
the fall took place. It’s been
crushed and milled and concent-
rated. Now it’s being smelted
. .. the blood they shed on that
cursed ore will never be destroy-
ed. it’s rising mow, their life-
blood, from the flames of the
smelter. It’s coming up through
the highest chimney in the world.
The ashes of their blood are pour-
ing up above the clouds, and the
winds will carry them to the

; yp =
farthest corners of the earth, |

And yes, to all the DeeP 7,
across Canada which give of thelt
labors and their blood 1 F pit
ing monopoly, in return +0)
tance of the wealth produce’,
Fatherless Sons would ne
regarded in conformist P
ing circles as a bestseller. cane
be some time yet before 4 i
dian author with the coUmS 4s,
choose the wordes class © aye
portrait of struggle ame "nce.
ment will attain to that omit
But in the setting he DAS ~ and
for his novel, and the men if
women of labor who ee pot
parts well, Dyson Cartel "© no
only made an outstandine ir,
tribution to Canadian Bae wil
but has written a novel that ine
not soon grow old, becaus
struggles of the fathers i ons
antee for the victory ° 2
“Never forget,” sayS the 3
miner Dan Grant, as he ‘welsoms
the dead miner Dave § of x02!
two boys, “you're the S005" ineit
men. Your fathers 88? n Bt"
lives for the sake of hum! yve

'

In this century’s struge att
a free, independent 4%
loving Canada, there 3
fatherless sons only wy fot
ing what their fathers ©  qaed
Fatherless. Sons will Biv? 92 it
speed to the process, y las
bases itself upon the @ nation
capable of raising ag
banner of indépendent? jist
foreign exploitation an
tion — the working ¢ ne DO?

I feel confident that ™ syus
Rock miners of British tke
bia, in concert with erat”
everywhere who daily eT ad 9

the ruthless grip 4 own 1

.

foreign and home ads
poly exploitation, wil mere
inspiration and a 1 gle is ye
tion for unity and struse™, pov’

pages of Fatherless sons tod
written for the workers | courte
— and tomorrow — en
eous Canadian a moe

CLOTH $4.75

FATHERLESS SONS —
By DYSON CARTER |

A story of the Canadian people as e*
as Canada itself

Now on sale. at

PEOPLE’S CO-OP BOOKSTORE
337 WEST PENDER — VANCOUVER 4
MArine 5836

citing

‘i

PAPER $2

j Add 5% Sales Tax a
: ace’

PACIFIC TRIBUNE — SEPTEMBER 2, 1959 —

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