Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures by Vincent Lam

I finished Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures at 2am, after my Book Club. I have to admit, I did NOT enjoy it at first. At my insistence, we had dropped Yasmina Khadra's The Attack, because I felt the writing was weak and dry. It was like reading a first-year's attempt at drama. Anyway, we dropped it and opted for Lam's 2006 Giller winner instead. Unfortunately, the first two chapters were just as stilted and hesitant as Khadra's work, so I had a mini panic attack, thinking I had jumped from the pan to the fire.

Thankfully, it picked right up. I think it has everything to do with the introduction of Sri and Chen; Fitz and Ming were like, as Mags would say, a bad episode of Grey's Anatomy. It was so interesting to watch these very different personalities deal with death: Sri is compassionate, Fitz is cavalier, Ming is detached and Chen is super-professional. At one point, Fitz and Chen ask each other when it was they lost their ability to deal with death in a human (not just humane) way. I think it must be difficult to deal with something so harsh (final) everyday and not become detached or cavalier about it, otherwise you become overwrought and bound to have a breakdown. Sri's compassion seems ideal, but perhaps would have burned him out, had he been given the opportunity to continue his work. Perhaps not.

Written as a collection of interlocking short stories, it was easy to pick out my favourite chapters: "Winston", with its dark erratic turns, that yet actually gives you a believable view inside the mind of a psychotic - my favourite part has to be the ghost costume made with a flowery bed sheet; "Contact Tracing", dealing with the SARS epidemic that left Toronto stunned and had the world thinking we were a plague ridden city - my favourite part had to be the lottery, which was news to me and which had shades of Shirley Jackson. Getting through Ming and Fitz was so so SO worth it.

I always expect a lot of my Giller winners - I expect them to be epic and heartbreaking and distinctly Canadian. Lam achieves all of these in such a surprisingly lighthearted way. The "short story" is a great tool for completely changing moods, tones, styles and narrative textures - I have no idea if he did it on purpose or if it just came together that way, but boy, did it work. The collection is full of beautiful vignettes (a fedora being pushed into a mailbox; a pregnant mother opting for a Cesarean without anaesthesia; eggs Benedict) coalescing into a moving frieze that paints a harsh but honest, epic but personal view of life. How ironic that this is achieved is a work where the the main theme is death. I recommend this one highly.