The Culprits

The Culprits by Robert Hough (Random House Canada 2007)

I want to say that this book was entertaining, because I could hardly set it down – but I fear that this description might only belittle Hough’s accomplishment. A book can be measured in many ways: its craft (how the story is told), and its purpose (what is being told), are chief among them. But sometimes there is also an unidentifiable quality derived from the perfect combination of these other elements. This is the case with The Culprits.

Hank Wallins, a former merchant sailor cum lonely computer operator, lives through a near-death experience. Does his life flash before his eyes? Does he realize the futility of his existence? Does this realization send him packing to the Himalayas to tackle Everest? To the Amazon? No. But he does begin searching www.FromRussiaWithLove.com hoping against all odds to find that certain special someone to fill the perceived hole in his life gaping.

When he discovers Anna Verkoskova née Mikhailovna, a near-pretty student from St. Petersburg with a wandering eye, Hank is hooked. The resulting story draws both he and "Anya" into a baffling and complicated tale of love, loss, and ... international terrorism.

Woven by one of the most ingenious and fascinating narrators in recent history, this novel juggles the madcap with the sober, the tragic with the comic. It flirts with the melodramatic as often as it plays with the improbable, without ever actually crossing either line. Its humour and wit give weight to its eventual calamity, and its voice – full of the sing-song qualities of Slavic constructions – is as endearing as a Dr. Seuss fable. In short, it is a fine balance.

"Life is a deception," we are told in the novel’s opening paragraph. "If we could scrub away the lichen and peer at life with clear vision ...its entirety would overwhelm us." Indeed, we are almost overwhelmed by the lives and events in The Culprits. However, with Hough, we are in good hands. After leading us through the fray by the nose, he delivers us safely on the other side where "there are watermelons, everywhere....juicy and sweet and through black soil sprouting."

The End of the Alphabet

The End of the Alphabet by CS Richardson (Doubleday Canada 2007)

This first novel by book designer CS Richardson is really little more than a novella. But it is a gem. Simple and direct in the telling, The End of the Alphabet is an adult fable with a bittersweet ending.

Ambrose Zephyr, the creative mind behind a London advertising agency, learns that he has an illness of "inexplicable origin," and, as a result, little more than a month to live – "give or take a day." He is married to Zappora Ashkenazi, though childless, and still very much in love. In short, he is not ready to leave this world. His wife is not ready to have him leave her.

His plan is straightforward, if a little eccentric. As a boy Ambrose wrote away to embassies and consulates for travel brochures. He collected news about the world. He was also enamoured with alphabets and typefaces. He combined these two loves in a series of illuminated lists. "D is for a beach in the Dutch Antilles, E is for the windy coast of Elba..." Now, in his desperation, he digs out these long-forgotten lists as a guidebook for his final days on earth – a journey both geographical and spiritual.

If this sounds gimmicky, it is. But the novel’s opening sentence tells us "this story is unlikely."

The characters are revealed rather than developed to any great extent, and the author uses broad strokes to reflect on mortality, art, history, and the idea of home. Still, the resulting text is poignant in its restraint. The prose is spare. The humour wry.

It is short enough to be digested of an evening, and potent enough to remain with you afterward.

The Outlander

The Outlander by Gil Adamson (House of Anansi 2007)

Gil Adamson’s first novel is a yarn well-spun, full of improbable, implausible, and near-mythical events. It is the stuff of legend, with one foot planted firmly in accurate history, and one foot treading the ether-sphere of picaresque adventure.

Mary Boulton is a murderess, plain and simple. One may argue that she is the victim of postpartum depression, or overwhelming grief at the death of her child; she may even be insane with jealousy over her husband’s indiscretions. But no matter which way you slice it, Mary pulled the trigger that blew a hole in her husband’s thigh "so the bone came out the back...[and] a pink mist suffused the air." Then she "sat down to wait" as he bled out on the floor of their isolated cabin. "Eventually, she took up her sewing."

On the lam, Mary scrambles half-crazed into the Crowsnest Pass and through the rocky mountains, pursued at first by dogs, and later by something more sinister – her late-husband’s brothers. Mary is taken in, befriended, apprenticed, and loved by a host of eccentric characters throughout her flight. She bears witness and survives the Frank Landslide at Turtle Mountain where "for a full minute, the mountain seemed to billow, then slowly collapse, floating downward." But always and relentlessly, she is hunted by "red-headed brothers with rifles across their backs...and fine black boots."

Adamson recreates turn-of-the-century Canada and its vast tracks of wilderness in assiduous detail. Her language is poetic and elevating, so that even the harsh savagery of the land and its inhabitants take on an otherworldliness, a sweeping cinematic beauty.

Conversely, however, the novel’s history can hijack the story. Each character Mary encounters or rubs up against during her adventures opens a new world to be explored and plumbed by the author. This can take wind from the novel’s sails. Fortunately, we have the brothers to get us back on track.

All in all, it is an engrossing tale. One may well have to suspend disbelief while reading The Outlander, but Adamson does well to remind us that books still have the power to transport us beyond the mundane.

Bottle Rocket Hearts

Bottle Rocket Hearts by Zoe Whittall (Cormorant Books 2007)

Zoe Whittall’s first novel is a simple story. Girl meets girl. Girl loses girl. Girl wins girl back again. Girl realizes aforementioned girl was no good for her in the first place. Girl leaves girl, once and for all.

Essentially, Bottle Rocket Hearts is a coming of age story set in Montreal in the mid-nineties, complicated by the sexuality of its protagonist. Eve’s in love for the first time with the wrong girl and she gets her heart broken. After a brief, precarious rapprochement, she patches it up again and moves on, "soft and furious."

There’s a lot of clubbing, drinking, some drugs, some more drugs, a little more clubbing. The plot itself is not overly compelling. Told from the first person, in a more than convincing late adolescent voice, the story of Eve’s heartbreak can sometimes be a little claustrophobic, like watching someone pick at a scab.

The narrative does, however, scratch the surface of several deeper issues, such as senseless violence against women/homosexuals, or the ravage of AIDS amongst the queer community. There’s a brief comparison of Quebec’s search for identity with Eve’s own personal quest. But these threads run close to the surface. Ultimately, they are the backdrop to failed love.

Whittall is a talented writer. And that talent is most evident in the minutiae – thumbnail sketches of iridescent detail, like photographs taken in harsh light. Her writing has teeth. It bites. Hard. Upon finding her girlfriend in bed with someone else, Eve feels "a quick incision between her seventh and eighth ribs ... then several quick kisses with a staple gun to [her] gum-line...a sock in the teeth for good measure."

On another occasion Eve stops by a strip-club for the first time to meet a friend. Once inside, she feels "like a raggedy kindergarten teacher with finger paint on her face. Totally asexual. Like a houseplant."

There is also a brief funeral scene which, more than any other episode in the novel, captures what it means to be young and gay and struggling for identity. "There is a rift between family and friends in the church, a weirdness that comes when your closest family has no idea who your closest friends are. Two camps that loved the same person separately, like there were two funerals happening at once."

The author’s insight and acuity in these situations bode well for the future. Bottle Rocket Hearts is an intriguing debut.

The Reckoning of Boston Jim

The Reckoning of Boston Jim by Claire Mulligan (Brindle and Glass 2007)

A reckoning is a settling of accounts – the tallying of a balance sheet. It is also, in the biblical sense, an accounting of one’s life. Claire Mulligan’s first novel is the story of many such reckonings, a story of bonds, and of the quest for balance.

Boston Jim Milroy (if that is his real name) is a protagonist of Byronic proportions. He is haunted by memories which are all too vivid, and by those he cannot quite recall. His body is indelibly and mysteriously scarred, and, he believes, cursed as well. He is a former Hudson’s Bay man, and now a lone trapper subsisting at the edges of a burgeoning colony in a sort of self-imposed exile.

It is midway through the nineteenth century, and life is hard on the wild British Columbian coast. So when Boston Jim unwittingly suffers the simple kindness of Dora Hume, he becomes obsessed with the notion of recompensing her for the deed, proving "once an exchange is made it creates a bond, however tenuous."

His quest manages to land him in jail, endure a beating, and eventually drive him north along the unfinished Cariboo Wagon Road to safeguard and retrieve the bumbling, pompous, and pitiful Eugene Augustus Hume – the only suitable compensation for the woman Dora, according to Boston Jim’s reckoning.

The writing is lush and vivid in its detail. It carefully evokes a world precariously poised between old and new, civilization and savagery. It is a world in flux, and oftentimes out of balance. In fact, Boston Jim’s struggle for reckoning is but a microcosm for the larger problems of humanity, and, as such, his tragic attempt to restore that balance.

Unfortunately, a perfect reckoning is not always with our grasp. And herein lies the strength of this novel. Replete with many truisms, The Reckoning of Boston Jim doles out its justice blindly. Good guys do not always win, and bad guys do not always receive their just desserts. Instead, in Mulligan’s own words, "our world cracks into great unequal pieces."

Coureurs De Bois

Coureurs De Bois by Bruce MacDonald (Cormorant Books 2007)

Coureurs de Bois does not feel like a first novel. MacDonald’s voice is confident and self-assured. The writing grabs you by the throat in a no-holds-barred, drag down, knock out bout from the opening sentence.

Randall "Cobb" Seymour has a mission from Crow the Creator. Newly released from prison, this "monster" of a man – half Mohawk, half Ojibway – enters the world of the white man like the proverbial bull in the china shop. He quickly builds an empire out of illegal cigarette sales, running weed, prescription drugs and other scams for kicks. He has a chip on his shoulder that dates back generations.

William Tobe, a visionary economics student from the University of Ottawa, drops off the radar following graduation and resurfaces in Toronto as Cobb’s unlikely partner in crime. They are prophets, both of them, in their own way. People who can "guide and see." Together they subvert the system like 17th century coureurs de bois – the earliest venture capitalists to visit North America – turning their newly created fortune into vast tracks of Costa Rican rainforest, with the ultimate goal of selling carbon bonds in some distant dream economy.

The testosterone is thick here, so is the symbolism. Cobb realizes early in the novel that the white man has "liberated himself from the pigmentation of his skin, from his sex, his hair, his age, and his place. The white man was an idea, like money, a commodity." Cobb is his anti-thesis, "a man with the powerful and purposeful stride of a mountain cat." A man of action who is given over almost entirely to eating, drinking, and fornicating. A man in touch with his animal self. And Will, for his part, is quick to ascertain that in the modern world "there is nothing left to believe in." So the two of them set about creating their own system of beliefs based on barter and exchange, for, as they discover, "need has a power of its own."

Set in a seedy stretch of Toronto’s Parkdale neighbourhood, Coureurs de Bois is a novel where the insane speak oracular truths and a female Christ figure – complete with virgin birth – attempts to kill herself, shocked by the "absolute horror of the human condition." The characters here are full-blown and fascinating. The pacing is immaculate. The humour black, intelligent, and just as likely to reinforce a stereotype as deflect one.

It’s a shame that it doesn’t have a truckload of promotional money to propel it into the Canadian consciousness. Exceptional.

As Good As Dead

As Good As Dead: a cautionary tale by Stan Rogal (Pedlar Press 2007)

Stan Rogal’s As Good As Dead is nothing if not entertaining. It is an absurdist romp through the world of publishing and entertainment. In the late 1990s, I had the chance to read and review two of Rogal’s earlier works of fiction, and like them, As Good As Dead has the same voyeuristic quality. That is to say that reading this novel is like passing an accident on the 401; although startling and twisted – and maybe even a bit horrific at turns – you cannot help but slow down and take a look.

Victor (Vic) Stone is a forty-five-year-old writer, of poetry mostly, who has settled into a grove that suits him. He is not wildly happy, but neither is he particularly dejected with his lot. He has a small press publisher, Vigilante Editions, that is more than willing to turn out a slim volume of poetry for him every few years, a New Age ex-wife who continues to care for him long after their split, and a bit on the side with a married mother of two. Add the occasional bottle of Jack, and things are good.

It isn’t until a Hollywood schlock-meister offers him a million dollars for the movie rights to his first, and only, novel that life gets complicated.

Vic opens his stream-of-consciousness tale with a question: how did Jack Kerouac feel the morning he woke up famous? And while we suspect Vic’s story to elucidate this point, the waters get a little muddied along the way. We do learn that people treat him differently once Hollywood comes knocking: "...I’ve made it, I’m getting out, I’ve achieved what others can only dream of, and no matter that we’re buddies and they want to be happy for me, there’s no shaking the fact that they’re stuck." Old friends turn him down for drinks.

But what he also discovers while guesting on an episode of Oprah is that "people are listening to me, actually hanging on my every word. Moreover, they are affected by the things I say." And this blind adherence to the cult of personality is what irks him most.

For Vic is a cynic (who oddly is also a "firm believer in love at first sight"), and deep down, he cannot reconcile his commercial success with his artistic integrity. People who have never read his work, and probably wouldn’t like it if they did, are now courting him for his opinions.

It is the age-old dilemma of the "indie" artist. He longs for success and approbation, but openly believes that the unwashed masses cannot possibly appreciate the intelligence of his work. So if he is suddenly embraced by the mainstream, he must have sold out and written something "unadventurous...stamped indelibly with either a Hallmark card happy face or a drippy-dippy glycerine tear, totally accessible, easily consumed and digestible, utterly forgettable and nothing to stick to the ribs or agitate the brain."

However, this is not the only rant up Vic’s sleeve. As Good As Dead is a slim, satirical narrative punctuated by "Howls" – of the Ginsbergian persuasion. Vic sounds off on cell phones, telemarketing, the media, New Age religions, and even the word "actually." These come hot and heavy, especially in the first third of the book, and although they are humourous, their frequency can be distracting at times.

There is also the matter of the novel’s turn toward the surreal in the latter stages. Without giving away too much, following Vic’s screamingly uncomfortable appearance on Oprah, the plot moves beyond a satirical tongue-in-cheek look publishing success and becomes a rather surprising story of cat-and-mouse chases and conspiracy theories.

The final chapter does much to save the novel from this radical departure by employing a kitschy deus ex machina that works well with something the protagonist ruminated over earlier; however, you have to stay with it in order to find out where the author is going.

In the end, it’s the character of Vic that carries the day here. He’s the sort of crazy drunk you want to meet in the early stages of a party when he’s still sober enough to be witty and drunk enough to say what he shouldn’t be saying.

Woman In Bronze

Woman in Bronze by Antanas Sileika (Random House of Canada 2004)

Antanas Sileika’s third novel, Woman in Bronze, is an archetypical bildungsroman, and bears comparison with many other classics in the genre, such as Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, Dreiser’s The Genius, or more recently, The Cloud Sketcher by American author Richard Rayner. And like all of these classics, Woman in Bronze is epic in its scope with enough staying power as to endure and itself become a classic in the Canadian canon.

Tomas Stumbras, a young artist, flees the ravages of his worn-torn Lithuania in search of fame and fortune in the streets of mercurial Paris in the 1920s. He brushes elbows with the famous and the infamous from the Polish war hero Marshal Josef Pilsudski to the American sensation Josephine Baker, and fellow Lithuanian sculptor Lipchitz. He struggles with his art, falls in love with a chorus girl from Les Folies Bergère, and in the end suffers betrayal at the hands of his best friends, which threatens to destroy everything he has worked for.

If this sounds familiar, it is. But the secret is all in the telling.

Sileika opens the novel with an almost mythical prologue that describes a nation "the local people called ...the rainy land, as if they still remembered some sunnier country their ancestors had come from." The mythical quality is a conceit that remains with the reader, resurfacing throughout the story, elevating the individual’s struggle to something more universal in scale.

Sileika has also created a strong protagonist who even in his tenderness and naivety can wreak terrible havoc on those around him through the selfishness and egocentrism inherent (and perhaps necessary) in any great artist. It is this single-mindedness that both attracts and repels the reader to Tomas, and eventually heightens the dramatic tension in the novel’s final scene.

In fact, if there is any fault in this novel, it comes in the epilogue. While this device does wrap up the story plausibly, the bow is just a little too pretty – deflating the power of the previous scene. The literary reader while find this addendum unessential and perhaps even dissatisfying after the much stronger conclusion in the novel’s final installment.

This, however, is a small complaint. Woman in Bronze is an otherwise gripping narrative, magical at turns, and highly evocative in its recreation of a time and a place.

Woman In Bronze

Woman in Bronze by Antanas Sileika (Random House of Canada 2004)

Antanas Sileika’s third novel, Woman in Bronze, is an archetypical bildungsroman, and bears comparison with many other classics in the genre, such as Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, Dreiser’s The Genius, or more recently, The Cloud Sketcher by American author Richard Rayner. And like all of these classics, Woman in Bronze is epic in its scope with enough staying power as to endure and itself become a classic in the Canadian canon.

Tomas Stumbras, a young artist, flees the ravages of his worn-torn Lithuania in search of fame and fortune in the streets of mercurial Paris in the 1920s. He brushes elbows with the famous and the infamous from the Polish war hero Marshal Josef Pilsudski to the American sensation Josephine Baker, and fellow Lithuanian sculptor Lipchitz. He struggles with his art, falls in love with a chorus girl from Les Folies Bergère, and in the end suffers betrayal at the hands of his best friends, which threatens to destroy everything he has worked for.

If this sounds familiar, it is. But the secret is all in the telling.

Sileika opens the novel with an almost mythical prologue that describes a nation "the local people called ...the rainy land, as if they still remembered some sunnier country their ancestors had come from." The mythical quality is a conceit that remains with the reader, resurfacing throughout the story, elevating the individual’s struggle to something more universal in scale.
Sileika has also created a strong protagonist who even in his tenderness and naivety can wreak terrible havoc on those around him through the selfishness and egocentrism inherent (and perhaps necessary) in any great artist. It is this single-mindedness that both attracts and repels the reader to Tomas, and eventually heightens the dramatic tension in the novel’s final scene.

In fact, if there is any fault in this novel, it comes in the epilogue. While this device does wrap up the story plausibly, the bow is just a little too pretty – deflating the power of the previous scene. The literary reader while find this addendum unessential and perhaps even dissatisfying after the much stronger conclusion in the novel’s final installment.

This, however, is a small complaint. Woman in Bronze is an otherwise gripping narrative, magical at turns, and highly evocative in its recreation of a time and a place.

The Great Canadian Book Challenge

The Great Canadian Book Challenge is taking the nation by storm. Today I officially toss my hat into the ring. Watch this site for frequent updates and reviews of Canadian