For the last couple of weeks I have been confined to bed with Covid-19. I haven't been anywhere, except in and out of sleep, coughing fits, and up and down in temperature. So, getting lost in Will Ferguson's travelogue, and "delving into Canada's history and landscape", offered some escape from my captivity. If only in my mind.
In Beauty Tips From Moosejaw, Ferguson details his criss-crossing journeys through Canada over the years, and describes the nation's landscape, its people, and past. And, in doing so, draws the reader closer to the essence of the country, its beating heart.
Will Ferguson is a Canadian novelist and travel writer and, if you have read this blog before, you might remember that I reviewed another of his books, Hokkaido Highway Blues, here.
As with that other travelogue, the author imbues this work with something of the personal. However, the author's individual reflections and family history inform this book with less cynicism than Highway Blues. This time we find Ferguson a more positive man, with a wife and young children joining him on his travels. The reader here gets the sense that Ferguson found some reconnection with the land of his birth, and has found reasons to be optimistic since the journey detailed in that other book.
Near the beginning of Beauty Tips . . . , the author tells us of some of the ennui he felt for where he grew up – something many young people the world over will recognise. He even describes boredom with the Aurora borealis! But, towards the end, Ferguson is writing appreciatively about the country, waxing poetic, and how what and who went before informs the land today.
Just as Ferguson's book on his hitchhiking trip across Japan also details a journey of self-discovery, so too does this book. In one, the writer discovers that the journey had to be taken as a step towards leaving, in the other it is perhaps a step towards rediscovery and reclamation.
I very much enjoyed the way this book moved seamlessly from past to present. Taking the reader to the earliest days of Canada's history, permeating the locales he describes with the lives that built and defined them, and back to the modern day. Tracing the delicate threads of a web.
The author describes history's reach through decades and centuries, and its ghostly presence in the here and now.
The author's use of these historical events is worked wonderfully into the book, and the reader's experience of the book is richer for its inclusion.
Reading Beauty Tips From Moose Jaw, the author's affection for his subject is clear. Introducing the reader to a country to which he is bound by history and the blood in his veins. Familial ties that stretch into the long past, a small part of the history he describes, and into the future through his children. He may mock it for its foibles or throw a light on its failures, as well as celebrate its beauty, but one feels that that is done with fondness too. A hope that it can be better.
Like any good piece of travel writing, this book inspires curiosity and wonder. If travel broadens the mind, so too does a good travel book. Yes, this is a book that inspires itchy feet in its reader!
You can purchase a copy of Beauty Tips From Moose Jaw here.
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