taxi driving years ago

'Taxi' by Helen Potrobenko. New Star Press. l989 162pp.


   Anakana Schofield is a young talented novelist who has recently shot to literary superstardom with her new novel 'Malarkey'.  Anakana and I were neighbours for a few years in the Cambie Village area of Vancouver and then she moved on. We met again in a park not far from where I live in July of this year.
      "Have you read any good books about Vancouver/" I asked Anakana who like myself was born in England.
     "I liked the book 'Taxi'," Anakana said. "I thought it was quite good."
      So on Anakana's say so I started to read "Taxi" and Anakana was right; It is a good book.
      But 'Taxi' isn't an ordinary novel with characters and conflict. It's more of a journal about a woman named Shannon living in Vancouver in the 1970's and driving a taxi. She lives in a house with a basement suite. And she knows the couple who have a baby and who live upstairs.  Shannon is a feminist  and feminism back in those days was just taking off.
     Shannon gets tired of fares who ask her, "How did you become a txi driver/" She also I think is a Marxist  who may or may not believe in a working class revolution. Believe it or not, back in the early 1970's, you could meet  quite a few Marxists in Vancouver.
    After a while taxi driving is a tough trade, tougher even than bus driving where you do get paid by the hour. Still, I recall one bus driver saying, " After a while one bus stop just looks like another."
    Shannon drives many of her passengers from downtown hotels to poor places on Vancouver's East Side, Some of her fares are drunk. Other  are sober members of the middle class. She finds a beautiful spot in the Kitsilano area of Vancouver, around Blenheim and 14th Avenue. That's still a lovely spot though much has changed there in the past 40 years.
     In the meantime much has also changed in Vancouver. Hotels mentioned by Potrobenko have vanished to be replaced by upscale dining places or expensive condos. Potrobenko doesn't drive a taxi anymore. I think she now lives in suburban Burnaby. Most taxi drivers in Metro Vancouver are of  south asian descent. And socialism and Marxism for that matter have had their day.
    Still Helen Potrobenk did write this interesting book about taxi driving  and it's still worth reading. "The novel is the book of life," novelist D.H. Lawrence once wrote. "Taxi' is a book about life in the fast and slow lanes of life.