The Novelist at Play

Posted 2 October, 2007 in Book Reviews |

The Girls Who Saw Everything, by Sean Dixon. Coach House Press, 304 pp., $21.95 tpb, ISBN: 978-1-55245-184-7.

Of all the words one could marshal to describe the pantheon of Canadian literature, playful would never top the list. Dour, yes. Inward, certainly. Sombre, for sure. But not many Canadian novels, or Canadian novelists, have tried to be playful. There are exceptions — Ray Smith comes to mind, as do Robertson Davies and Mordecai Richler — but by and large the common perception seems to be that playfulness in novels should be equated with frivolity, which is not befitting an important work of literature. Literature, it is assumed by Canadian critics and prize juries alike, if it is to have any value, is meant to be about weighty subjects: war, famine, familial strife. If an author is playful in his or her approach, by implication, that person can’t be engaged in any serious literary endeavour.

Which makes Sean Dixon’s debut novel, The Girls Who Saw Everything, something of an anomaly. Here is a novel whose opening scene features a young couple seeking asylum in a Montreal warehouse in March 2003 to negotiate the transfer of sex for money, only to be interrupted by a young woman falling through the ceiling. The victim of the unfortunate tumble, Runner Coghill, is a member of the Lacuna Cabal Montreal Young Women’s Book Club, a cadre of females — and one transvestite — who gather to enact the books they read together.

For The Autobiography of Red, for example, the cabalists painted themselves from head to toe before giving a public reading of the text at the Montreal airport. When they read In the Skin of a Lion, officially their favourite book, they “headed down to Place des Arts on a Sunday and tried to depict the scene of the nun swinging from the bridge builder’s broken arm … One of our members nearly hanged herself.”

On the day that Runner crashes through the warehouse ceiling, she is planning to bring to the group her suggestion for their next reading experience. She and her younger brother, Neil, have come into possession of the ten original stone tablets that make up The Epic of Gilgamesh, long believed to be the most ancient book in the world.

As the young women begin to act out the episodes contained in the stone tablets, they unleash a chaotic whirlwind that involves, among other things, the leader of the group canvassing the local dives in search of promiscuous sex in order that she might conceive a child; the expulsion of the book’s own narrators; a cameo appearance by the Baghdad Blogger; and the fitzbot, an artificial intelligence device “programmed initially to seek cover and comfort in the shadows and avoid other ambulatory creatures (including humans).”

All of this surface chaos is handled deftly and lightly, and although the novel is briskly paced it never feels rushed. This has much to do with the underlying structure, which follows the source material fairly closely (it is helpful, although not essential, to have at least a passing familiarity with The Epic of Gilgamesh before reading Dixon’s novel, in order to fully appreciate the extent to which he has incorporated it). Dixon also references a number of different, sometimes competing, translations and interpretations of the original text to underscore his persistent critique of the nature of storytelling and the shifting reliability of narration and interpretation.

The novel is infused with sex and literary in-jokes and the postmodern device of self-reflexive footnotes to spice up the story. But its surface playfulness masks a deeper seriousness: there is death in the novel, and war (the story’s setting, March 2003, uses the backdrop of the U.S. invasion of Iraq to add an archly political aspect), and a recognition of human fragility and loneliness. These themes, which are deeply and inextricably embedded, put the lie to the notion that a Canadian novel must affect a stentorian pose in order to be worthy of consideration. Flannery O’Connor wrote that “all comic novels that are any good must be about matters of life and death”; Sean Dixon would surely agree.

The Girls Who Saw Everything can be read variously as a raucous comedy, a work of literary archaeology, and a wry commentary on our uncertain, postmodern era. But above all, it serves as a welcome corrective to all those who believe that in order to deal with serious subjects, Canadian literature must itself remain unblinkingly serious and remote.

3 comments to “The Novelist at Play”

panic, October 3rd, 2007 at 11:35 pm:

• What?! You don’t find Coupland playful?

  *ducks*

Steven W. Beattie, October 4th, 2007 at 10:12 am:

• That “whooshing” sound you hear is me hurling my copy of JPod …

August, October 5th, 2007 at 3:50 am:

• I think I’m going to buy this book now.

  But if you’re tired of the relentless sombre attitude (Davies used to say that Canadian writers seem to think ’serious’ and ’sombre’ are synonyms) there’s always Russel Smith. ;)

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