Paul Bryant's Reviews > The Tenderness of Wolves

Sometimes insightful remarks are made which are so reductive they have the power to diminish life even as they explain it. In 1939 Alfred Hitchcock explained in a lecture at Columbia University: "We have a name in the studio, and we call it the 'MacGuffin.' It is the mechanical element that usually crops up in any story. In crook stories it is almost always the necklace and in spy stories it is most always the papers." Wikipedia elaborates:

A MacGuffin is a plot device that motivates the characters or advances the story, but the details of which are of little or no importance otherwise. The element that distinguishes a MacGuffin from other types of plot devices is that it is not important what the object specifically is. Anything that serves as a motivation will do.

This is one of the principal reasons why spy and "mystery" novels bore the living bejesus out of me, and alas, when I realised "The Tenderness of Wolves" was not, in fact, a cookery book as I had been led to believe, I found it was a "mystery" novel, a stone whodunnit in fact. The victim is murdered because of the big fat MacGuffin which in this book takes the form of a bone tablet which some guys think is valuable because it may indicate there once was a literate Indian society. So in this book people do a lot of following trails, which as this book takes place in the Frozen North are actual footprints in the snow. I won't give the ending away, but they do so much tracking they almost find the Woozle.

I liked the chaotic flailing about which takes up most of the plot, it reminded me of two great Coen Brothers movies, Blood Simple and Fargo. But enjoying the bafflement of others only takes you so far.
The other thing which bugged me about this book was The Historical Present. It's weird enough when authors write in the first person past tense but you can suspend enough disbelief and imagine (if the self-consciousness of reading imaginary narratives ever surfaces) that you are hearing a perfect recollection by the narrator. The Historical Present smashes this conceit. "I am not gentle but he makes no sound as I clean the wounds with rubbing alcohol. He has his eyes shut. From the corner of my eye Parker seems to be watching us..." That kind of thing. It's a strange idea - instead of the perfect recollection the perfect real-time self-description like you are on an advanced driving test - "Describe your observations Mr Bryant" "In my rear view mirror I see a black Fiat Punto with a blond male driver and a woman with a leopardskin coat, can't see if it's fake fur but I am assuming so; now I am making a left turn into Cold Potato Street, avoiding the cyclist who has large earrings and is weaving slightly as his panniers are overfilled".

And finally - this book was famously written by a woman who suffered so much from agrophobia that she did not leave a wooden box measuring three feet by six feet by ten feet for over two years. So the book was written entirely out of research and imagination (she would poke her arm out of the box and friends would place interesting articles about Ancient Canada into her open hand). I like this idea a lot because after all, fiction is made up, and I have little time for autobiographical coming of age novels (except for Edmund White). However - if I look at the author blurb and I see "John Weebblebeeble has been a lecturer at the Creative Writing School of the University of Do As You like, Minnesota for 37 years" or I see "John Weeblebeeble has been employed variously as a prizefighter, royal embroiderer, catamite, chef on board a nuclear submarine and private detective; John was born Stephanie MacGuffin and transgendered at the age of 31. He now lives in a community for the blind and limbless in Katmandu" - I kind of get the notion that the latter's interesting experiences will make the better writer. Literature proves this prejudice nonsense, but it lingers.