The Art of Forgiveness: Short Fiction by Chris Benjamin

In The Art of Forgiveness, Chris Benjamin presents readers with short fictions in grim tones about three friends — Gerry, Long, and Drew — in a collection that could have been called Men Without Women if Hemingway first, then Murakami, hadn’t used that title. The point of the book, it seems to me, is to show an evolution of sorts, of these unlikely school-age friends in their homes — usually pretty rough ones — to young adults struggling to make it in a world that, as the years go on, grows colder and dimmer than even what they experienced as children. It’s a world that, in some respects, cocoons them from fostering meaningful relationships with women but not protecting them from severe random or calculated blows from those they know and from life itself. Even their parents, few as they are, are edging away from this plane, for reasons of their own.

The time of these stories appears to be pre-2000, with one set sometime after 9/11, and the geographical location is everywhere and nowhere on a Canadian map: the misty land of the downtrodden, kitty-corner to the domain of the destitute. Each character is one misstep away from prison or homelessness and being forsaken by everyone he knows. Benjamin is quite good at quickly sketching the lives of man-children, and his shorthand deftly communicates their dreams — which are sometimes grandiose and, in their circumstances, at times ridiculous, but which the narrative doesn’t treat as ridiculous. These three characters, as boys and young men, are always shown respect by the narrator.

Since this is a work by a Canadian writer known for his reliance on realism, it’s not surprising that the stories use gang violence, trailer parks, lust, and drug use to establish in the reader’s mind the characters’ natures and the problems they face. Their choices appear limited due to their circumstances. After the final page readers who identify with or recognize the roughness Drew, Long, and Gerry experience throughout their lives probably will ask if this character becomes the boss he wants to be or if another manages to shine on talent night. Those concerns, perfectly natural while also sentimental, go beyond what is in these short fictions that appear loose but are, for their objects, tight and constraining. (Objects, not subjects, for authors choose what wringers to put their creations through.) What sunlight is present in these lives could be either the faint hint of dawn or the end of their days. In these stories life is lived in the margins, a liminal zone that few people choose to stay in. That crabbed existence is attractive to certain kinds of writers who blend social realism with a documentary impulse, an earnest impulse, to ensure those who are unnoticed are finally heard.

What came across as I read this book was a twofold realization about Benjamin as a writer. All of us can appear as one thing in a certain setting and, in another, act in opposite ways. He’s well-known as the author of several non-fiction titles. One of them, Eco-Innovators: Sustainability in Atlantic Canada (2011), focuses on figures who address environmental concerns. Benjamin admires their contributions to improve the way humans relate to the natural world. The stories in that book “contain fear and hope” (Eco-Innovators, 1) and it’s not unlikely his subjects’ philosophies have inspired others to go down the same path and do better for the environment and for humankind. Their efforts and successes, the fact that “they have also lived the solutions” (Eco-Innovators, 2), come from thinking about long-term problems in new ways and implementing new approaches. The appreciation for innovation in that field contrasts with how, in The Art of Forgiveness, the tales of fear rather than hope are told, stylistically, in minimalist fiction too reminiscent of much fiction in the 1980s. That 40-year-old method, suspect even then for some people, is a step back from the expansive internationalism of Benjamin’s novel Drive-By Saviours (2010). It’s a matter of taste, but I feel keenly the loss of this opportunity for him to write in an innovative way. Sometimes writers need to publish a work so that the mind is clear to tackle the next book, a more substantial one. Chris Benjamin’s fine eye for detail about men and what they feel and do could take more chances in its manner of presentation and respond to current concerns and, consequently, be in the vanguard of Canadian literature.

Chris Benjamin is a freelance journalist, book editor and an author of fiction and non-fiction. He is the past managing editor of Atlantic Books Today magazine.

Publisher: Galleon Books (July 15, 2024)
Paperback 7″ x 4″ | 128 pages
ISBN: 9781998122103