{"product_id":"the-double-hook-isbn-9780735253322","title":"The Double Hook","description":"\u003cb\u003eWidely considered one of Canada's first postmodern novels, marking the start of contemporary writing in the country, \u003ci\u003eThe Double Hook\u003c\/i\u003e is now available as a Penguin Modern Classic.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e     In spare, allusive prose, Sheila Watson charts the destiny of a small, tightly knit community nestled in the BC Interior. Here, among the hills of Cariboo country, men and women are caught upon the double hook of existence, unaware that the flight from danger and the search for glory are both part of the same journey. In Watson's compelling novel, cruelty and kindness, betrayal and faith shape a pattern of enduring significance.SHEILA WATSON was born in New Westminster, B.C., in 1909. She took her B.A. and M.A. from the University of British Columbia, and then taught in elementary and high schools on the B.C. mainland and on Vancouver Island. In 1961, at the University of Alberta, she was a founder and editor of \u003ci\u003eWhite Pelican\u003c\/i\u003e, an avant-garde journal of literature and the visual arts. \u003ci\u003eThe Double Hook \u003c\/i\u003ewas her first novel\u003ci\u003e.\u003c\/i\u003e1\u003cbr\u003eIn the folds of the hills\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eunder Coyote’s eye\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003elived\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ethe old lady, mother of William\u003cbr\u003eof James and of Greta\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003elived James and Greta\u003cbr\u003elived William and Ara his wife\u003cbr\u003elived the Widow Wagner\u003cbr\u003ethe Widow’s girl Lenchen\u003cbr\u003ethe Widow’s boy\u003cbr\u003elived Felix Prosper and Angel\u003cbr\u003elived Theophil\u003cbr\u003eand Kip\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003euntil one morning in July\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eGreta was at the stove. Turning hotcakes. Reaching for the coffee beans. Grinding away James’s voice.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJames was at the top of the stairs. His hand half-raised. His voice in the rafters.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJames walking away. The old lady falling. There under the jaw of the roof. In the vault of the bed loft. Into the shadow of death. Pushed by James’s will. By James’s hand. By James’s words: This is my day. You’ll not fish today.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e2\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eStill the old lady fished. If the reeds had dried up and the banks folded and crumbled down she would have fished still. If God had come into the valley, come holding out the long finger of salvation, moaning in the darkness, thundering down the gap at the lake head, skimming across the water, drying up the blue signature like blotting-paper, asking where, asking why, defying an answer, she would have thrown her line against the rebuke; she would have caught a piece of mud and looked it over; she would have drawn a line with the barb when the fire of righteousness baked the bottom.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e3\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAra saw her fishing along the creek. Fishing shamelessly with bait. Fishing without a glance towards her daughter-in-law, who was hanging washing on the bushes near the rail fence.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI might as well be dead for all of her, Ara said. Passing her own son’s house and never offering a fry even today when he’s off and gone with the post.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe old lady fished on with a concentrated ferocity as if she were fishing for something she’d never found.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAra hung William’s drawers on a rail. She had covered the bushes with towels.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThen she looked out from under her shag of bangs at the old lady’s back.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt’s not for fish she fishes, Ara thought. There’s only three of them. They can’t eat all the fish she’d catch.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWilliam would try to explain, but he couldn’t. He only felt, but he always felt he knew. He could give half a dozen reasons for anything. When a woman on his route flagged him down with a coat and asked him to bring back a spool of thread from the town below, he’d explain that thread has a hundred uses. When it comes down to it, he’d say, there’s no telling what thread is for. I knew a woman once, he’d say, who used it to sew up her man after he was throwed on a barbed-wire fence.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAra could hear the cow mumbling dry grass by the bushes. There was no other sound.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe old lady was rounding the bend of the creek. She was throwing her line into a rock pool. She was fishing upstream to the source. That way she’d come to the bones of the hills and the flats between where the herd cows ranged. They’d turn their tails to her and stretch their hides tight. They’d turn their living flesh from her as she’d turned hers from others.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe water was running low in the creek. Except in the pools, it would be hardly up to the ankle. Yet as she watched the old lady, Ara felt death leaking through from the centre of the earth. Death rising to the knee. Death rising to the loin.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe raised her chin to unseat the thought. No such thing could happen. The water was drying away. It lay only in the deep pools.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAra wasn’t sure where water started.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWilliam wouldn’t hesitate: It comes gurgling up from inside the hill over beyond the lake. There’s water over and it falls down. There’s water under and it rushes up. The trouble with water is it never rushes at the right time. The creeks dry up and the grass with them. There are men, he’d say, have seen their whole place fade like a cheap shirt. And there’s no way a man can fold it up and bring it in out of the sun. You can save a cabbage plant or a tomato plant with tents of paper if you’ve got the paper, but there’s no human being living can tent a field and pasture.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI’ve seen cows, he’d say, with lard running off them into the ground. The most unaccountable thing, he’d say, is the way the sun falls. I’ve seen a great cow, he’d say, throw no more shadow for its calf than a lean rabbit.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAra looked over the fence. There was no one on the road. It lay white across the burnt grass.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCoyote made the land his pastime. He stretched out his paw. He breathed on the grass. His spittle eyed it with prickly pear.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAra went into the house. She filled the basin at the pump in the kitchen and cooled her feet in the water.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe’ve never had a pump in our house all the years we’ve lived here, she’d heard Greta say. Someday, she’d say, you’ll lift the handle and stand waiting till eternity. James brings water in barrels from the spring. The thing about a barrel is you take it where you take it. There’s something fixed about a pump, fixed and uncertain.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAra went to the door. She threw the water from the basin into the dust. She watched the water roll in balls on the ground. Roll and divide and spin.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe old lady had disappeared.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAra put on a straw hat. She tied it with a bootlace under the chin. She wiped the top of the table with her apron which she threw behind a pile of papers in the corner. She went to the fence and leaned against the rails.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIf a man lost the road in the land round William Potter’s, he couldn’t find his way by keeping to the creek bottom for the creek flowed this way and that at the land’s whim. The earth fell away in hills and clefts as if it had been dropped carelessly wrinkled on the bare floor of the world.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEven God’s eye could not spy out the men lost here already, Ara thought. He had looked mercifully on the people of Nineveh though they did not know their right hand and their left. But there were not enough people here to attract his attention. The cattle were scrub cattle. The men lay like sift in the cracks of the earth.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eStanding against the rails of the fence, she looked out over the yellow grass. The empty road leading from James’s gate went on from William’s past the streaked hills, past the Wagners’, down over the culvert, past Felix Prosper’s.","brand":"McClelland \u0026 Stewart","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303416385765,"sku":"NP9780735253322","price":18.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780735253322.jpg?v=1767739066","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/the-double-hook-isbn-9780735253322","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}