Craig Stewart Walker. The Buried Astrolabe: Canadian Dramatic Imagination and Western Tradition.(Book Review)

Publication: Comparative Drama

Publication Date: 22-JUN-03

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Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2001. Pp. xi + 467. $27.95 paperbound.

This deeply conservative book provides a close reading of the thematic preoccupations and dramaturgic conventions of six of our better-known dramatists: James Reaney, Michael Cook, Sharon Pollock, Michel Tremblay, George F. Walker, and Judith Thompson. Walker is not theoretically inclined. His approach does not emerge from any particular "isms" nor is he willing to engage in very much debate about the various "isms" that have hitherto been applied to these playwrights and the cultural contexts in which they have worked. As an eclectic liberal humanist, he prefers to go his own independent way, writing in compellingly lucid and muscular prose a long book but one which doesn't seem long, for it is so intelligent that it is a pleasure to read from beginning to end in a couple of sittings.

Walker has choosen these particular playwrights because they have produced "a substantial body of work" and because they are "among the very best and important Canada has produced" (viii). This position neatly avoids debates about the canon. Such a debate would be welcome, however, particularly in the introductory chapter, "Desperate Wilderness." This chapter almost stands on its own. To a certain extent, the book could have been written without it, for the ideas that it raises are not systematically treated in the rest of the book, nor in the conclusion--for there isn't one; instead, the book ends, rather abruptly, with the chapter on Judith Thompson.

The introductory chapter seeks to identify why, how, and to what ends Canadian playwrights "needed to transform their external experience of Canada into a personal imaginative cosmos that could then be explored dramatically" (15). The astrolabe becomes the literal device and the metaphorical means by which playwrights, like early explorers, have sought to find out where they are, each achieving a different way of answering Northrop Frye's famous question, "Where is here?" It is the European cultural tradition, still embedded within Canadian...

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