Roverarts.com reviews The Fourth Canvas

One Story, Four CanvasesBOOKS - The Fourth Canvas, Rana Bose, TSAR Publications
By Ken Monteith
12.07.2009


If you ever wondered how painting and writing might be connected, this book could offer you an answer, as much in the story it tells as in the way it is told. Rana Bose’s The Fourth Canvas reads like a painting observed in stop-time animation. Both the process and the result are fascinating and entertaining.
Diana McLaren meets Pervez Chiragi in an outpatient clinic at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montréal. She is there for an abortion, he accompanying his wife who will soon die in childbirth. The child, Claude, a Pakistani-Quebecker, will become the centre of this story, but first we need to find out where Diana came from, how she came to be reading a Bengali newspaper in that waiting room that day, and how she will remain a part of Pervez and Claude’s lives.

An artist starts with the background, so we wash back to scenes that might evoke images of a classic Merchant Ivory film, with period costumes in the far-flung reaches of the British Empire. We see Diana’s family and their role in colonial India and her own return to the scene decades later to rediscover her roots. We meet the man she will leave in London, a man who will later seek to cross paths with philosopher and painter Guillermo Sanchez.

Bose whisks the reader to different parts of his canvas, through time and place, to observe in great detail small parts of this story of personal and political intrigue. A flat in London, an aging woman in Cuba, a Mother of the Plaza del Mayo in Argentina refusing to let the disappeared be forgotten. You will at first wonder what these diverse images have to do with one another, and then be surprised as they intertwine in unexpected ways.

The central theme revolves around Sanchez’s theory of empire and Claude, the Montreal academic whose life’s work lies in unravelling the philosopher’s past and the meaning of his oeuvre. His writings stolen or destroyed, the philosopher turns to explaining his theory in the form of a series of paintings. Years later some of these come into Claude’s possession. Add elements of personal intrigue, family histories, and the real-world application of this theory of empire.

In four episodes focused on different characters, Bose plants the clues to his mystery and then reveals their meaning at a pace that doesn’t plod, but doesn’t race either. He gives voice to the characters in a consistently convincing manner. The reader seems to be observing one story from varying perspectives and in lighting conditions that highlight different details.

It is probably a good thing that our enjoyment of the story does not depend on the validity of the central political theory, as it is questionable. To paraphrase that theory, this novel has four episodes of rise, but no episodes of decline. It is the canvas that completes our understanding of the world from Sanchez’s perspective. The reader leaves satisfied that the story will continue, perhaps on another canvas.

Ken Monteith is a recovering (former) lawyer working in the community-based AIDS movement in Montreal. He shares his own stories at http://talktothehump.blogspot.com.