What It Takes to Be Human

by Marilyn Bowering

What It Takes to Be Human , the haunting new novel by Orange Prize-shortlisted author Marilyn Bowering, considers the life of Sandy Grey, an idealistic young air cadet who wants nothing more than to... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0143053876
• ISBN13: 9780143053873
• Release Date: August 2006
• Publisher: Penguin Books Canada
• Length: 292 Pages
• Weight: 0.78 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.4" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Renovation or reconstruction?

Within a week of Canada's joining the rest of the British Empire in resisting Nazi expansion, Alexander - "Sandy" - Grey clouts his father with a tire iron. Wishing to become a pilot, but denied permission by his fundamentalist preacher parent, the encounter results in Sandy being dispatched to an institution for the criminally insane. This is far more serious than a criminal trial and penitentiary - an institution has no fixed term and the inmate few, if any forms of legal recourse. The director of such an institution has powers no judge dreams of possessing. Sandy, desperate at what he considers a grave injustice, leaps from a ferry taking him away. Struggling in the strait's chilly waters, he's saved by Georgina, who will come to play a major role in Sandy's life. The asylum has undergone many identities of its own. Run by "Dr Frank" at the time of Sandy's arrival, it had once been a jail. In that interim, Scot immigrant Alan Macauley had been hanged for the murder of an Irishman while working in the bush. While Dr Frank is dealing with Sandy's past, trying to reconstruct it to understand what led to the attack on his father, Sandy himself engages in an attempt to rehabilitate Alan's name. Injustice derived from circumstances haunts them both. The asylum is home to a variety of men. There's Winchell, a communist from Bowering's home town of Winnipeg. He was a participant in Winnipeg's Great Strike of 1919. Later, he was a Loyalist soldier in the Spanish Civil War. "Did you kill anyone in Spain?", Sandy asks him. "What kind of soldier would I be if I didn't?" Yet, the other occupant of the room, Karl, is in the asylum for a different reason - the day war was declared, this German emigre released all the caged birds in Stanley Park in protest. He's a dedicated pacifist. Sandy, still a young man, must learn to cope with this diversity of outlooks and use them to rebuild his own life. One track he refuses to take is reconciliation with his family - "they're not my real parents". It is this issue on which the story pivots - Dr Frank wants to know why Sandy makes this declaration. Although Sandy had been dispatched to a religious seminary by his father, he escapes to enter a college. He learns about poetry and philosophy there, finding opportunity to apply the lessons while in the asylum. Pete Cooper, one of the "Attendants", is the "bad cop" of the story, while Ron Signet is the more lenient one. Between the Attendants and Dr Frank, Sandy must cope with shifting levels of trust. His survival depends upon it. Dr Frank's restorative technique, using sodium pentathol - "truth serum" - to prompt Sandy into revealing "the truth" about his past life becomes both a battle of wills and an exercise in self-revelation. Is Sandy learning about himself or restoring himself? His aim, never lost sight of, is to be free. As Bowering parades her characters across the page, she's careful not to obtrude on the story. We know littl