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The
The Words of My Roaring, the colourful first novel in Robert Kroetsch's Out West trilogy, is set in the same Alberta farm country as the better-known
The Studhorse Man and
Gone Indian. More conventional and accessible than the others,
The Words of My Roaring moves kinetically through a 1930s provincial election campaign as experienced by the irrepressible Johnnie Backstrom. An undertaker, a drunk, a self-proclaimed "heller with women," and a neophyte political candidate, Johnnie begins his campaign by recklessly promising rain to the drought-stricken prairie. His bemused opponent, the popular Doc Murdoch, delivered Johnnie as a baby 33 years before and still thinks of him as his "first-born." Johnnie's party leader is the Bible-thumping, Ontario-bashing John George Applecart, loosely based on the historical "Bible Bill" Aberhart. As Johnnie struggles to define himself against these father figures, Kroetsch offers a lively portrait of small-town Depression-era politics and the roots of present-day western alienation.
Brimming with personality, Johnnie is a unique mix of contradictory qualities: boasting and self-deprecating irony, awkward silences alongside blustery, flamboyant speech. As a political candidate he develops the gift of the gab, telling his audience of cowboys, farmers, and rodeo fans exactly what they want to hear. And as a narrator he proves immensely flexible: he's by turns comic, philosophical, impassioned, confessional, and raunchy. You can't help but like this guy, even at his most self-indulgent. The formal experiments of Kroetsch's later fiction and poetry, along with his highbrow theorizing, earned him the label "Mr. Canadian Postmodern" and a mostly academic readership. If he'd kept on writing novels as fun as this early one, he could have cultivated a wide popular audience, too. --John C. Ball
Review
"Of all the writers working in Canada today, Robert Kroetsch is perhaps the one who exerts more quiet influence than any other--and on a national scale. A superb mentor, a wonderful editor, and tirelessly generous to the literary community, Robert Kroetsch is a truly outstanding model and mentor as an artist, an intellectual, and an educator. Hundreds of students and writers can attest to his influence." Aritha VanHerk, University of Calgary
