[I don't particularly like either of Birney's two novels] yet I find that each has a facet which is of real interest. Down the Long Table, for example, despite certain structural flaws which Birney has acknowledged, is still an interesting novel if only because of the quality of the insight it provides into the politics of the Thirties. My response to Turvey is divided in a similar way. Turvey himself is an almost moronic character. In The Creative Writer Birney describes him as a "dumb backwoods private … with the intellectual and soldierly capacity of a farmyard duck," and overall Turvey's responses to the absurd and predictable situations in which he is placed are about as compelling and, with a few exceptions, as funny as those of an intellectual duck. The novel fails because the central character is not complex enough to engage the reader's interest for almost three hundred pages. Only in the novel's final and more solemn section do I find myself responding to Birney's depiction of the war years, and at that point Turvey himself is essentially a distraction.
But what orginally kept me reading the novel was the fact that Birney was attempting to deal with the lower class characters, life and, above all, language. Turvey is a loosely organized, overly repetitious, and often tedious whole but some of its dialogue is the best record we have in our fiction of what certain Canadian dialects sound like…. Birney's soldiers come alive in and through their speech and the fact that they do so makes the restoration of the "obscene" words even more important: a novel dealing with polite society can be authentic without them, but one depicting lower class life is inevitably marred if the essentials of the speech of that life—slang etc.—are missing. (p. 56)
This is a free excerpt of 299 words. There are 375 words (approx.
1 page at 300 words per page) in the full critical essay.
Read the rest of this Criticism with our Birney, (Alfred) Earle 1904–: Critical Essay by Sam Solecki Access Pass.
