Reviews for Merry England: Its Sports and Pastimes

The average rating for Merry England: Its Sports and Pastimes based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-07-03 00:00:00 Matthew Carroll This combined review of Traplines and Blood Sports was first posted on BookLikes. If there is such a category as BC Noir, then Eden Robinson's books Traplines (4*) and Blood Sports (3*) epitomize this category for me. I'm combining the review of both books here because Blood Sports is the continuation of Contact Sports, one of the short stories contained in Traplines. Having discovered Robinson's work through her novel Monkey Beach, I was not quite sure whether her other work would follow paths and include similar themes or whether it would be wholly different. As in Monkey Beach, both Traplines and Blood Sports are written from the point of view of teenagers or people who have had to learn to become adults rather early. However, where the rites of passage in Monkey Beach are accompanied by a sense of community based on legends and a presence of the supernatural, all the stories in Traplines and Blood Sports are focused on people growing up trapped in the gritty and dysfunctional fringes of society, dealing with violence, addiction, despair, and seemingly unable to grasp at any opportunity that could lead a way out of it, even if it seems to be offered. Violent and gritty but at the same time moving. And none more so than Contact Sports / Blood Sports which is set in Vancouver's East Side at a time when it was classed as the most dangerous place in Canada. The story follows Tom, who wants to escape the world of crime and addiction and settle down with his young family. Tom is haunted and - literally - hunted by his drug-dealing, video-blogging psychopath cousin Jeremy, who will stop at nothing to wage revenge on people who he thinks have betrayed him. If you need trigger warnings - this book pretty much has all of the ones I can think of, and more. It's still a pretty good read. "Nothing existed. Nothing had ever existed but the pain. He squealed, he heard the sounds ripping through his throat, and he fought the ropes. He screamed and he screamed and he threw himself forward so the ropes would tighten and it would end."

Review # 2 was written on 2014-06-10 00:00:00 Nicky Horne This book is about as gritty as they come. It tells a rather convoluted story - largely owing to Robinson's decision to dispense with chronology for the sake of building suspense - of a couple trying to cut out the rot of their pasts after getting off drugs and cleaning up their acts. When you surrounded yourself with psychopathic drug-dealers and their thuggish 'friends', well, it is not so easy to start anew. Especially when the psychopathic drug-dealer is your cousin and, at times, showed you more care and concern than anyone else ever has. Or something. Honestly, this book jumps around so much that you really need to have your inferencing cap on to sort out everything that is between the lines. I didn't always feel up to the task (uh, so what exactly did Jeremy do to Tom in the first go-round? And how did those bikers get involved anyway?), which was compounded by having long-ish gaps between my reading sessions. Robinson has a gift for portraying people who haven't had a lot of opportunities and/or means in their lives in a way that shows their intelligence, resourcefulness, resilience and heart. She did this really well in Monkey Beach as well. I liked that book more than this one, but both show her compassion for the downtrodden equally well. And, of course, I have to mention Robinson's choice of setting - Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. practically every Canadian knows about Vancouver's Eastside. It has been known as 'Canada's Poorest Postal Code' (although that honour now goes to Cape Breton's Eskasoni First Nation, with Winnipeg's inner city a close second. DTES is now 7th poorest). Its needle exchange, opened in 1989, was the first in North America. There are extremely high rates of HIV infection, homelessness and mental illness among its denizens. Not to mention violence and the sex trade. Anyway, it is a place that likely conjures up a lot of stereotypical images of places and people that one would give a wide berth to. But Robinson shows how community is built here, the little ways in which people living in a community get to know each other and recognize each other's humanity, no matter what the circumstances. Overall, this is a book that doesn't sugar-coat how hard the everyday can be for people who never got a break in their life, and how making those seemingly minor decisions to try to ease the miseries can add up to a whole lot of crap on your head. Kind of brutal, non?