The Double Hook: Penguin Modern Classics Edition

by Sheila Watson

Book Overview

In spare, allusive prose, Sheila Watson charts the destiny of a small, tightly knit community nestled in the BC Interior. Here, among the hills of Cariboo country, men and women are caught upon the double hook of existence, unaware that the flight from danger and the search for glory are both part of the same journey. In Watson's compelling novel, cruelty and kindness, betrayal and faith shape a pattern of enduring significance.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0735253323
• ISBN13: 9780735253322
• Release Date: January 2018
• Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
• Length: 144 Pages
• Weight: 0.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.2" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Students! wanna understand this book?

I was horribly depressed when I chose this book for my English "Book Review". Soon after reading the first page I categorized it to be Stupid, Useless and Crazy altogether! In other words a "Piece of Junk". FORTUNATELY, I had no way to get my mark other than reading it. I read it quickly because I hated it so much. When I reached the end, I had a complete look to the lives of the players (the characters). That "pre-reading" was my key to understand The Double Hook! So, try to follow these steps [IN ORDER] 1. Read it fast till the last end; focus on these nasty characters. 2. Make sure you know whom the characters are. 3. Read the book again with a fairly slow, thorough reading. You'll find how easy it is to get inside the life of these people. My opinion is that "The Double Hook" is one of the best novels EVER! It increased my appreciation toward literature, Canadian Literature, and made me discover a new way to express your feelings. I think that the story is worthy to be turned into a movie. The story is somehow similar to that movie called "The Village" by M. Night Shyamalan

Hardship and Beauty

Sheila Watson's selective and allusive prose reveals the lives of a small isolated community in Western Canada where hardship and kindness shape daily existence and make it extraordinary. When reading this classic, one must let the various images flow to get the whole picture---it is truly a unique and refreshing reading experience. The atmosphere created is heavy with emotion--Greta's resentment, Ara's disappointement, the Widow's loneliness, James' struggle for independence, the mysterious death of the the old lady, and the touching birth of a little boy are fused together to create a rawness that is both scary and beautiful. It is a compelling novel that reveals the true force of Canadian talent, and is very much demonstrative of the endless possibities when one moves beyond traditional form

An daring experimental novel of failure & redemption.

I was dismayed by the negative reviews of Watson's fine experimental novel, The Double Hook (1959). Most of them came from high school students who were required to read a book when they didn't really want to read anything. Clearly some students are being given this book prematurely in Canada. For someone willing to give the book a chance, I have some suggestions. It concerns a frightened group of people living at the edge of civilization, in British Columbian Cariboo country. A former population of Native Canadians has been displaced by settlers like them. Each character is haunted by the spectral presence of Coyote, a trickster figure revered by the former natives. Although Coyote is a symbolic presence, and feared as a curse by the whites, he brings redemption because his continuity means the destruction of native influence isn't complete, or even possible. That relates to the "double hook" of the title--literally a hook that points two ways, so that "you can't catch the glory on a hook and hold on to it. That if you hook twice the glory you hook twice the fear" (61, Kip's thoughts). The book is written largely in dialogue without quotation marks. Modern writers like Joyce and Woolf experimented with varied presentations of fiction in the early 20th century, and Watson is playing with these techniques. Do not be dismayed by them, though. The book is presenting characters deeply fearful of what is happening around them. What they most fear is their ability to control their own existence. When Mrs. Potter dies, she becomes part of that fear (like Mrs. Moore in Forster's A Passage to India, who becomes part of the legends of the caves when she dies). Fire ends the influence of Mrs. Potter, and characters who have been alienated come into a better alignment with each other. Shrewdly, the narrator tells us, "Coyote plotting to catch the glory for himself is fooled and every day fools others" (61). Finally, a new child born is named "Felix" (Latin for "fortunate"). Here Christian redemption in a newborn babe blends with native beliefs, again hooking us doubly. Failure in this book derives from an unwillingness to look at the alien and accept its presence and importance. When characters stop doing that, they create a place for themselves in the most inhospitable locale Watson ever found herself (as a teacher in the early 1930s). The book reflects her mental struggle to reconcile the bleakness of life in the Cariboo with her sense that the remote locales of Canada matter as much as the sophisticated soirees of Montréal and Toronto.Finally, a book by William Faulkner--As I Lay Dying--greatly influenced this book's characters and style. Watson's book makes a good deal more sense if you read Faulkner's book first, or at least get a plot description of it.

Get yourself thinking

Unquestionably the book is difficult and the plot weaves every which way around the characters of a small community. There is a horrific tone within the symbolic play of light/dark, water/earth, and the meaning of the double hook.