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Blind Man's Drum
by Tom Bentley
Thistledown Press, 2002
Reviewed by Robert LeBlanc
Blind Man's Drum is the best satirical look at what
Canada once was that I have read since Mr. Kelly
forced Stephen Leacock's Sunshine Sketches of a Little
Town upon my grade twelve English class. At the time I
would have much rather read Frederick Forsyth, Len
Deighton or Daniel Easterman during my family's much
maligned trip to Florida, instead my underdeveloped
mind struggled to find the humour everyone was raving
about. Still lost somewhere between here and
adolescence, my mind now at least garners a snigger at
the sardonic twists of life on the outer fringe of
normalcy.
Too many years have passed since Mr. Kelly's grade
twelve English class, and the fine tuning of Leacock's
masterpiece has become a bit hazy. Still, Bentley's
collection of short stories reads more like a
novel and continually pulled me back into that other
world. Set half a century (recollection puts Leacock's
work at the turn of the century, while Bentley's
characters live in the early 1950s) and nearly half a
continent apart (it is commonly believed that Leacock
used nearby Orillia, Ontario for his stories, while
Bentley chose the real locale of Biggar,
Saskatchewan), Blind Man's Drum warms the cockles of
the reader with the assurance that there remains a
place in the population of Canadian small towns for
the backward and the quirky.
Locale is important to Bentley in Blind Man's Drum;
without the Prairie and without the smallness of
Biggar, the stories just wouldn't seem right. To his credit, however,
Bentley refuses to clobber the rest of the nation with
Prairie essence. Another high school English teacher
taught us that Canadian writers were good at following
up thirty pages of wind rippling through grain with
twenty pages of snow. Not so in Blind Man's Drum.
Bentley presents his characters as the landscape, the
reader exploring their surroundings through the senses
of their narrative guides.
Told through the eyes of Robert, a witty and
perceptive six-year-old who we follow to the ripe old
age of eight, Blind Man's Drum, is as much a saga of a
place as it is of the people who populate it. Robert
follows his blind grandfather, Will Coutts, around
Biggar with the loving devotion only a puppy or a
grandson could have. Attempting to live by his
grandfather's mantra of "marching to the beat of his
own drummer", Robert tries valiantly to fit it, both
in his grandfather's world, and that of a normal
six-year-old boy in Biggar, Saskatchewan. Fitting in
isn't so easy with a frumpy grandmother who reads tea
leaves, an aunt who's married to a tattooed goon, a
mother who visits only once a year and a blind
grandfather who makes you read the stock report and
the Book of Revelations before going off to the
neighbour's farm to strip naked and exercise. It's no
wonder that Robert becomes as wittingly perceptive as
he does by age eight.
Told with a soft, kindhearted voice, Bentley creates
characters that not only leap off the page, but sit
down next to you to read over your shoulder, chortling
at their own exploits.
By June of grade twelve, I was happy that Mr. Kelly
had hoisted Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town upon
our unsuspecting reading list, and now that I have
control over what is on my bedside table, I'm happy to
have found Blind Man's Drum. As the time worn adage
states: "Biggar is better."
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