My Review …

Posted 12 April, 2008 in Book Reviews | No comments

… of Steven Galloway’s new novel, The Cellist of Sarajevo, from today’s Vancouver Sun, is online, here.

For Those Who Want to Get Their Dander Up …

Posted 7 April, 2008 in Literary Criticism, Book Reviews | 2 comments

… my review of Stephen Henighan’s new collection of essays, A Report on the Afterlife of Culture, is online, here.

Henighan is, to put it mildly, a polarizing figure. Writing in the Quill & Quire about Henighan’s 2002 essay collection, When Words Deny the World, James Grainger said that the book contained “[s]ome of the most blistering and erudite pieces of Canadian literary criticism ever published.” Responding to the same volume in The Danforth Review, Shane Neilson complained that “Henighan makes a mediocre Chicken Little but a poor explicator of how to repair the sky.”

The reasons for Henighan’s spotty reception among the denizens of CanLit have much to do with his gleeful willingness to take on the Canadian literary establishment — a willingness that is on full display in A Report on the Afterlife of Culture.

He does lay himself open to accusations of churlishness: the charge that Canadian literature has been overtaken by a parochial and greedy cabal of Toronto-area writers and publishers, first floated in the essay “Vulgarity on Bloor” from When Words Deny the World, is reiterated in the new volume, which reprints Henighan’s notorious Geist essay about Margaret Atwood’s influence on Vincent Lam’s 2006 Scotiabank Giller Prize win. The essay includes Henighan’s contention that “[f]rom 1994 to 2004, all the Giller winners, with the exception of Mordecai Richler, lived within a two-hour drive of the corner of Yonge and Bloor.” The radius that allows for a “two-hour drive” to Yonge and Bloor is not only a clever way of shoehorning Alice Munro — who lives in Clinton, Ontario — into Henighan’s establishment cabal, but also disingenuously elides the fact that, by virtue of his residency in Guelph, Ontario, this rubric also encompasses … Stephen Henighan.

He is also prone to sweeping generalizations, many of which are problematic if only for being untestable:

The books discussed in book clubs … are read for a shared deadline, discussion may be channelled by the “Questions for your reading group” section at the end of the paperback edition, the level of literary debate descends to whether members of the group “liked” characters or regarded them as laudable models for behaviour, or saw them as raising salient public debates in a congenial way; appreciation of literary form or original uses of language sinks below the horizon.

This may be true of some book clubs, perhaps even the majority of them; it’s impossible to prove that it’s true for all book clubs. Similarly, Henighan asserts that “The culture of the book club novel is sentimental, ‘life-affirming,’ deflected from engagement with the world around it and often obsessed with the therapeutic reconstruction of the individual psyche.” This may indeed be true for Oprah’s book club — the most famous and visible book club in the world — but it’s impossible to show that it’s true across the board. (I’m a part of a book club: the last book we read was A Dead Man in Deptford by Anthony Burgess; the next one is Dead Babies by Martin Amis. I wonder how these two novels would line up with Henighan’s umbrella view of a typical “book club” selection?)

Still, notwithstanding their evident flaws, Henighan’s essays are valuable for their ability to cut through the complacency and platitudinous drivel that so often passes for literary engagement in this country. The new book is more expansive than the previous volume — to a fault: a number of the essays are extraneous — and offers fresh perspectives on significant figures from our own literature and from world literatures. He’s not always easy to like, but Henighan is fearless and bracing, and is therefore a necessary figure on the Canadian critical landscape.

Canada on the World Stage: Two Views

Posted 2 April, 2008 in Book Reviews | 2 comments

The Unexpected War: Canada in Kandahar, by Janice Gross Stein and Eugene Lang. Viking Canada, $35.00 cloth, 368 pp., ISBN: 978-0-670-06722-0.

Holding the Bully’s Coat: Canada and the U.S. Empire, by Linda McQuaig. Doubleday Canada, $34.95 cloth, 304 pp., ISBN: 978-0-385-66012-9.

In a recent week-long series of articles for the Globe and Mail, Graeme Smith, the young investigative reporter who blew the lid off the Afghan detainee controversy in 2007, provided a portrait of the Taliban insurgents that Canadian soldiers are battling and at whose hands many are dying in the southern Kandahar region of Afghanistan. In a two-page overview article, published on Saturday, March 22, 2008, Smith offers a snapshot of a typical Taliban soldier that flies in the face of the oft-repeated image of a Western-hating global jihadist:

He looks like an ordinary Afghan in ragged clothes. He says he’s young, 24 or 25 years old … Somebody he knows, or loves, was killed by a bomb dropped from the sky, he says. The government has tried to destroy his farm. His tribe has feuded with the government in recent years, and he feels pushed to the edge of a society that ranks among the poorest in the world.

So he lives by the gun. He cradles the weapon in his arms, saying he will follow the tradition of his ancestors who battled foreign armies. He is not only a Taliban foot soldier, he says. He belongs to the mujahedeen, the holy warriors, who fight any infidel who tries to invade Afghanistan.

What is significant about this portrait is the motivations Smith attributes to the Taliban soldiers. They are not, Smith suggests, fighting a global battle against Western decadence and cultural values, which is the line many of the hawks in governments and the media north and south of the 49th parallel like to parrot as a justification for the continued occupation of Afghanistan. Rather, they are battling a government that burns their farms and their crops — often in the name of poppy eradication — and struggling to drive foreign invaders from their soil. Smith goes on to point out that the average Taliban insurgent might recognize the foreign soldiers in his country as Canadians, but would be hard pressed to find Canada on a map.

As an explanation for the ferociousness and resilience of the continued insurgency, this line of reasoning has more traction than does the competing one that insists we as a nation are acting in self-defence and must force democratization on the Middle East before we fall victim to a global plot to destroy us.

It is a point that Linda McQuaig echoes in her provocative and angry cri de coeur, Holding the Bully’s Coat:

Isn’t this a more likely explanation for the rage that is surging through the Middle East?

If you attack your neighbour, destroy his house, trash his car, kill several members of his family and kidnap his six-year-old son, would it be logical to conclude that your neighbour is in a rage against you because he doesn’t like how you dress and what movies you watch?

More measured and less polemical than McQuaig, Janice Gross Stein and Eugene Lang nevertheless make much the same point in their essential book The Unexpected War. They point out that although it could be argued that al-Qaeda’s motives have a global reach (an argument that has been challenged by writers such as Gwynne Dyer and Lawrence Wright), the Afghan insurgency is localized in both its composition and its ambition. Gross Stein and Lang point out that the conflation of al-Qaeda and the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan is conceptually flawed, and that the Afghan problem needs to be considered independently:

A close look at many of the insurgencies in Muslim societies tells us that they are almost all local, inflamed by local grievances, with a local political agenda. … Very likely, connections exist between the Taliban and a resurgent al-Qaeda that appears to be organizing again on the frontier of Pakistan, where the Taliban is centred. The two certainly are in close proximity to each other, but they are not one and the same. The Taliban are local, Pashtun, rooted in southern and eastern Afghanistan and in the frontier and tribal areas of Pakistan. Their ambitions are local, while al-Qaeda’s are global.

This is an important distinction. Understanding the putative enemy in Afghanistan and the nature of his country is essential to the success of Canada’s continued involvement there, and it is coming, if at all, not a moment too soon.

In their exhaustive examination of the origins of Canada’s military mission to the violent Kandahar region in the south of Afghanistan, Gross Stein and Lang point out the stunning lack of knowledge about the country on the part of the very government officials who sent our soldiers into battle there:

Much was ignored: Afghanistan’s history, its traditions and accomplishments, its social structure, its strengths and fault lines, its tribal and ethnic divisions, the devastation of its social and physical infrastructure after thirty years of fighting, its deeply rooted patterns of warfare, and its long history of expelling foreign armies that thought they had come to stay.

This ignorance of the region was deeply ingrained and pervasive. In December of 2003, then Defence Minister John McCallum and Ken Calder, assistant deputy minister of policy in the Department of Defence, attended a meeting with Arthur Kent, a London-based journalist who had been reporting on Afghanistan since the early ’80s. Gross Stein and Lang write:

The guests sat silently for about an hour and listened to Kent present a picture of a highly complex, textured, layered society that seemed congenitally prone to conflict and war. And at the end of the lunch, as the guests were walking out of the restaurant, Calder turned to McCallum’s chief of staff and said anxiously, “We don’t know anything about this country.”

This is a staggering admission from one of the men who was instrumental in the decision to send our country’s troops into their largest and most dangerous combat mission since the Korean War, and it is an extension of the shortsightedness that plagued the thinking about the mission in its earliest stages.

In the autumn of 2001, when sympathy for the United States was still high following the appalling attacks on New York and Washington D.C. of September 11, 2001, Canadian officials were casting around for a way to help out our friend and neighbour to the south. One proposal, floated by then Minister of Defence Art Eggleton, was participation in an International Security Assistance Force, “a UN-mandated operation that fell somewhere between combat and peacekeeping.” Gross Stein and Lang quote Eggleton as saying that this was “not an offensive mission, not a front-line mission. This is a stabilization mission to assist in opening corridors for humanitarian assistance.” Should full-scale combat break out, Eggleton suggested, “they’d probably be taken out.” In Eggleton’s conception, Canada’s involvement in Afghanistan would amount to an “early in, early out” commitment.

By carefully documenting how this “early in, early out” mission transformed into the current open-ended combat mission, Gross Stein and Lang have provided a necessary document for anyone in this country who wants to understand why we are in Afghanistan and how we got there. (That is — or should be — every Canadian citizen.)

The nexus of pressure points and influences that drew our military ever deeper into a combat operation in Afghanistan is complex and varied, but in Gross Stein and Lang’s conception it’s hard to overestimate the importance of Rick Hillier’s appointment as chief of defence staff in February 2005. It was Hillier who convinced the government of the necessity for Canada to fight what he called the “Three-Block War” combining humanitarian aid, stabilization, and combat. In so doing, Hillier spearheaded a revisioning of the Canadian Forces’ purpose away from the peacekeeping they had undertaken in the decades since the end of the Korean War and towards a more combat-oriented fighting unit.

Hillier’s political influence has resulted in influxes of federal cash to the military under the aegis of Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, but Gross Stein and Lang question the effectiveness of this military enhancement if it comes at the expense of development assistance to Afghanistan. “The international community has spent only eight percent of the total funds it committed to Afghanistan between 2002 and 2006 on development and poverty relief. The conventional wisdom is diametrically opposed: Eighty percent of the spending should go to economic, political, and social development.” They quote a 2007 report by Seema Patel and Steven Ross that reads in part, “Poverty is fuelling anger towards the central government and motivating young men to rearm and fight in the insurgency or with local illegal armed groups to earn cash.”

In a country with a twenty-three percent literacy rate, an average life expectancy of forty-three years, and a per capita income of $230, it is unsurprising that young, unemployed men with no prospects are attracted to a militia that offers cash and food for them and their families. This should be one of the clearest indications that the insurgency will not be defeated by military means alone; indeed, the military contribution may not even be the decisive factor in the long run. Rampant poverty and the lack of infrastructure such as schools and hospitals are among the motivating factors driving young Afghans to join the Taliban; removing these factors would alleviate a good deal of the motivation for these young men to take up arms in the first place. The disparity between Canada’s military spending in Afghanistan and its commitment to development aid is one key area that Gross Stein and Lang highlight in the course of their analysis.

They also point to the relationship between Canada and the United States as a serious stumbling block in our thinking about Afghanistan. Gross Stein and Lang reconstruct decisions that military leaders made “out of the corner of their eyes as they looked squarely at Washington” and carefully outline the series of policy errors that resulted from this misplaced focus. “What explains this obsession with the United States?” they ask.

It is this signal question that Linda McQuaig sets out to address in her book, Holding the Bully’s Coat. Unlike Gross Stein and Lang, McQuaig is not interested in measured responses. Her new volume is an impassioned investigation into how in recent years we have abandoned the traditional “Canadian” values of peacekeeping, multilateralism, and diplomacy in favour of a military engagement in Afghanistan and a consistent bowing and scraping to a bullying administration to the south:

As the U.S. has rejected the rule of international law and become a law unto itself, Ottawa has followed in close step, ever eager to please our powerful neighbour. To this end, we have abandoned our traditional role as a leading peacekeeping nation and adopted a more militaristic, warlike stance as a junior partner in the U.S. “war on terror.” We’ve also abandoned our traditional attempt to be a fair-minded mediator and conciliator, most notably in the Middle East conflict, where, like the U.S., we’ve adopted a hardline anti-Palestinian position that will make a peaceful, just solution all the more evasive.

This is a line of argument that is certain to infuriate those pundits and commentators who insist that we need to foster ever closer ties to the United States in the name of continental security and economic prosperity (and Canadian sovereignty be damned). However, although one might cavil with McQuaig’s provocative and deliberately argumentative tone, it’s difficult to find fault with the substance of her argument. One need look no further than Stephen Harper’s assertion that Israel’s devastating 2006 bombing campaign on Lebanon was a “measured” response to the kidnapping (or capture, depending upon which side of the fence you sit on) of two Israeli soldiers to recognize that there has been a tectonic shift in Canadian foreign policy, and that that shift has brought this country much more in line with our American neighbours.

McQuaig even anticipates the knee-jerk charge of anti-Americanism by turning it on its head. Why, she rhetorically asks, are Canadians who defend our nation’s traditional values — peacekeeping, diplomacy, multilateralism — always smeared with the tag “anti-American”? Why are the people who accuse us of this not branded “anti-Canadian”? It’s a salient question for those of us who begin from the premise that peacekeeping, diplomacy, and multilateralism are virtues that are worth preserving in the Canadian psyche. No doubt there are citizens of this country who would disagree. McQuaig singles out as examples of dissenting voices the usual suspects on the right, including Tom D’Aquino, Margaret Wente, and Andrew Coyne.

Still, if McQuaig is willing to admit that there are a multiplicity of views in Canada — from those of Prime Minister Harper on the one side to those of Linda McQuaig and, presumably, much of her target audience on the other — she seems less willing to make these distinctions about Americans, whom she tends to lump together under one blanket. Of course it’s those who control the reins of power who come in for direct attack in her book: George W. Bush and Dick Cheney; Paul Wolfowitz and his Project for a New American Century; CNN’s Lou Dobbs. But one never gets the sense that the unidentified mass of the American electorate contains a broad spectrum of opinions and imperatives, not all of which line up with that of the current administration in Washington.

George W. Bush won the 2004 election by the slimmest of margins; it’s still possible to argue that he didn’t win in 2000 at all. What this means is that a significant minority of the American public — almost fifty percent, in fact — disagree with the direction in which the current American administration is moving the country. The Democratic victory in the 2006 midterms and the recent admissions even on the part of some Republican members of Congress that the war in Iraq is a disaster and the American economy is a mess should testify to the deep divisions and prevalent fault lines that exist in that country.

By viewing the United States, and its entire citizenry, as a monolithic entity that is determined to project its imperial ambitions well into the new millennium, and to drag Canada along with it, McQuaig evinces a lack of nuance or subtlety every bit as dangerous as that of the people she castigates. It’s true that the focus of her book is the way in which Canada has made itself subservient to a bullying and belligerent American administration in recent years, but some acknowledgement of the tensions within the American union would seem appropriate, if only to prevent her very legitimate arguments from being dismissed as mere ravings from the dogmatic left.

Ultimately, it is this willingness to engage with all sides of the issue that renders The Unexpected War the stronger of these two books. Both provide much food for thought, much of which is unsettling, provocative, and infuriating. But by cutting through partisan rhetoric and providing a clear-eyed, dispassionate analysis of how we got here and where we might conceivably be going, Gross Stein and Lang have given us an absolutely essential text for understanding Canada’s current engagement in one of the world’s undisputed hot spots.

Something to Tide You Over

Posted 31 March, 2008 in Book Reviews | No comments

My review of Reinhold Kramer’s biography, Mordecai Richler: Leaving St Urbain, is online, here.

Rereading this review, I get the sense that I was a bit too easy on the book, particularly regarding Kramer’s critical readings of the novels. His overzealous attempts to slot the fiction into incidents from Richler’s life — something Richler himself warned against, and which Nathan Zuckerman referred to in Exit Ghost as “the deadly literal-mindedness and vulgarity that attributes everything to its source in a wholly stupid way” — is a real stumbling block in the book. Kramer is too frequently reduced to temporizing words such as “likely” and “probably” in his attempt to forge parallels between Richler’s fiction and his life; had he stuck to a straight textual analysis, he would have freed himself to be more rigorously analytical and probing in his readings.

His book is also virtually humourless, which is ironic given that his subject is one of the most mordantly funny writers in the CanLit canon.

Thanks for All the Fish

Posted 21 March, 2008 in Book Reviews | 2 comments

Nikolski, by Nicolas Dickner (trans. by Lazer Lederhendler). Alfred A. Knopf, $29.95 cloth, 298 pp., ISBN: 978-0-676-97879-7.

Canada is a nation of regions. That’s axiomatic to the point of cliché, but literary critics often elide the extent to which Canada’s regionalism influences its literature. Despite living in Toronto, Wayne Johnston’s fiction is inextricably linked to his native Newfoundland, the same way that W.O. Mitchell will always be associated with the prairies and Rudy Wiebe with the west.

It would be reductive to presume that regionalism is the driving factor in Canadian writing, and a writer’s geographical point of origin, while in many cases laying the groundwork for the kind of writer that person will become, is not necessarily a determinant of the calibre or kind of work he or she will ultimately produce. There is one region in Canada, however, that has consistently boasted a steady stream of quality literary fiction for the last decade or so, even though much of that fiction goes unnoticed or unappreciated by the majority of English readers in the rest of the country. That one fertile region is Quebec. Since the turn of the millennium, la belle province has given us strong novels by Élise Turcotte, Christianne Frenette, Jacques Poulin, Gaétan Soucy, and last year’s Giller-nominated Daniel Poliquin, to name just a few of the Franco-Canadian novelists who have been translated into English (a distressingly small number of those actually writing in the province).

Among Anglos writing in Quebec, Rawi Hage is perhaps the best-known recent addition to a list that already includes Mordecai Richler and Leonard Cohen, to name just two of the authentic greats of CanLit.

So it should perhaps come as no surprise that thirty-two-year-old Montreal resident Nicolas Dickner’s first novel is a startling, structurally ambitious work that leaves most of its English-Canadian contemporaries in the dust. Maybe it’s something in the water.

The aqueous metaphor is only partly glib, since Nikolski is, if nothing else, a waterlogged novel. Images of the sea and of seafaring suffuse the book, including repeated allusions to the greatest seafaring novel of all time, Melville’s Moby-Dick. The 1851 novel is referenced directly in Dickner’s book, but long before it makes a literal appearance, the attentive reader will have noticed how Nikolski’s opening line — “My name is unimportant.” — sounds suspiciously like an ironic inversion of the iconic imprecation to “Call me Ishmael.” The attentive reader will also recognize that the town from which Joyce, one of the novel’s three main figures, hails is called Tête-à-la-Baleine, literally, “head of the whale.”

Joyce holds down a job filleting fish at the Poisonnerie Shanahan in Montreal, while she dreams of following in the footsteps of her aunt, who was a pirate. Meanwhile, Noah, an archaeology student, foregoes studying in the American History or Georgraphy and Anthropology sections of the university library, preferring “the tranquility of Section V (Naval Sciences, Travel Narratives and Sea Serpents).” It is here that he meets Arzina, a transplanted Venezuelan who disappears at night into what Noah describes as “the Bermuda Triangle.”

As the novel opens, the final member of the narrative trio, the unnamed first-person narrator, is cleaning up his mother’s house after her death. His mother once lived on Water Street in Vancouver, and when the garbage truck hauling off her worldly possessions disappears at the end of the first chapter, a moving van pulls up “[i]n its wake.”

The repeated water motifs are only one of the many strands uniting our three protagonists. Each shares a familial connection — Noah and the unnamed narrator are half-brothers, their father is Joyce’s uncle. Early in the novel, Joyce, the would-be pirate, wonders if she would “have to escape to Vladivostok in order to elude the clutches of her family tree”; prior to this Noah’s mother speculates that his father “had shipped out in the direction of Vladivostok or had flown off to Fairbanks.” Noah is interested in the archaeology of trash, and Joyce becomes a bin diver, looking for discarded computer parts that have been disposed of throughout Montreal. While evading security guards and policemen, she discovers “piles of broken-down computers, display screens smudged with fingerprints, keyboards with missing teeth, modems, printers, hard disks, floppies, fragments of printed circuits,” all of it “so obsolete, so covered in grime, that Joyce often feels she has stepped into the shoes of an archaeologist.”

The internecine connections between and among the book’s three central characters provide Dickner with the mechanism for a structurally coherent story in which the structure never feels imposed from without. Everything in this novel appears organic; the disparate parts, far from being random or scattered, all tend toward a central purpose. This is a rare example of a novel in which the whole really is greater than the sum of its parts in isolation.

Dickner doesn’t really need to include the repeated leitmotif of a coverless book that passes from one character’s hands to another, or the narrator’s “Nikolski compass,” which points at the Mickey Spillane section of the bookstore in which he works, beyond which lies the tiny Aleutian island of Nikolski, where his and Noah’s father may — or may not — have decamped. Still, these elements provide additional layers of connectivity in a story that otherwise might be in danger of appearing overly diffuse or obscure.

Nikolski is a mass of contradictions: it is virtually plotless, yet never seems wayward or boring; it is an urban novel set in the recent past (in the decade between 1989 and 1999), yet it is redolent of history and anthropology; it is a novel in translation that nevertheless depends on the buoyancy of linguistic play for its effects (and, to this end, much credit should go to Lazer Lederhendler for a seamless translation). Above all, Nicolas Dickner is an author who is robustly unafraid to take risks, and for the most part the risks pay off.

His is a story of life in all its manifest contradictions, absurdities, and coincidences. Its ease of readability belies its weighty thematic heft, and its humour is grafted onto a deeply philosophical meditation about the nature of existence, the meaning of place, and the definition of home. The result is an intriguing, beguiling novel that may just be the CanLit find of the year.

Don’t Bother Reading Me

Posted 17 March, 2008 in Book Reviews | No comments

Go read Mark Anthony Jarman, one of the unsung heroes of Canadian literature. My review of Jarman’s new collection, My White Planet, is online, here.

A Case of Literary Déjà Vu

Posted 11 February, 2008 in Book Reviews | 2 comments

Duma Key, by Stephen King. Scribner, $32.00 cloth, 614 pp., ISBN: 978-1-4165-8555-8.

What happened to Stephen King? There was a time — this would have been the late ’70s and early to mid ’80s — when America’s self-styled “literary bogeyman” could reliably be counted upon to turn out solid works of popular fiction, albeit with a pronounced dark streak. ‘Salem’s Lot; The Shining; Cujo; Pet Sematary — each of these novels operates as a kind of machine designed to deliver what Poe referred to as “a certain single effect” — the effect, in King’s case, being to scare the bejesus out of his readers. His early fiction is marked by an effortless storytelling verve combined with a talent for creating believable characters and a willingness to pull out all the stops in his attempts to manipulate his readers’ emotions. It is also possessed of an almost preternaturally observant eye, able to sketch settings and locales in such minute detail that readers feel transported, as though they have become part of the scene they are reading. (Even The Stand, an otherwise bloated and overly schematic exercise in good vs. evil Manichean mythology, has the trip through the Lincoln Tunnel, which is one of the most vividly creepy sequences I’ve ever read.)

By contrast, King’s recent fiction seems like a pallid imitation of the earlier books: warmed-over themes are trotted out again and again, plot elements from previous books are recombined and incorporated in more recent novels but with a steady diminution of their effects; the later novels have the consistency of a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy.

True, King has always borrowed liberally from his literary predecessors. ‘Salem’s Lot is an admitted reworking of Dracula. Pet Sematary incorporates elements of W.W. Jacobs’ classic short story “The Monkey’s Paw.” King’s 2006 novel, Cell, is dedicated to Richard Matheson and George Romero, which is entirely appropriate, since the novel is little more than a recapitulation of Masterson’s I Am Legend by way of Romero’s zombie films. But more to the point, the postapocalyptic vision that serves as the book’s faintly beating heart hearkens back to the more potent vision of a plague-ridden wasteland in The Stand. In short, King has started cannibalizing himself.

This is apparent in Duma Key, which features a number of King staples: its protagonist is a tortured artist (The Dark Half, Bag of Bones, “Secret Window, Secret Garden”) who has suffered a traumatic accident (Misery, The Dead Zone); he is gifted with a kind of second sight (The Shining); and he is plagued by revenants from beyond the grave (see S. King, passim).

At the heart of the story is Edgar Freemantle, the survivor of a construction-site accident that left him with serious brain trauma and minus his right arm. Following a nasty divorce, Edgar’s therapist tells him that he needs a change of scenery and Edgar relocates to Duma Key, an island off the Florida coast. There he meets Elizabeth Eastlake, the aged scion of the family that owns most of the land on Duma Key, and Wireman, an ex-lawyer who acts as her guardian and keeper. Edgar also begins painting. He starts with rough sketches in coloured pencils, but quickly graduates to more ambitious paintings of a girl who resembles his beloved daughter Ilse and a vaguely menacing ship. It gradually becomes apparent that his paintings have the ability to foretell the future and, in some cases, to change it.

All of this is developed throughout the languid first half of this 600+ page book. King takes his time setting the scene and laying out the various relationships among Edgar, his family, and his new neighbours on Duma Key, but it doesn’t take long for a kind of torpor to set in. Much of the novel’s first half deals with Edgar’s attempts to heal himself following his accident, a subject that King is intimately familiar with as a result of being run down and almost killed by a careless driver in a blue van during the summer of 1999. But despite drawing from this clearly harrowing life experience, the early stages of the novel come across as strangely lifeless, and are certainly nowhere near as potent as King’s description of his own near-death experience, which appeared first in The New Yorker, and later, in a reworked version, in his memoir, On Writing.

There are indications that King is aware of the book’s flagging pace, since around the halfway point things kick into overdrive with the arrival of those pesky revenants. It is at this stage in the proceedings that the book takes on the mantle of a fairly straight-ahead horror novel, as Edgar and Wireman band together to defeat the evil that plagues Duma Key. There is no denying the relentless forward momentum of the novel’s final third — once King finally manages to get his pot boiling, he ensures that we keep turning the pages — but, again, it all feels like territory we’ve covered before. Indeed, the climactic sequence involving the disposal of a malevolent china figurine (don’t ask) is strikingly reminiscent of the rainswept climax in Bag of Bones, arguably King’s last really solid work of fiction.

That Duma Key is grossly overlong is readily apparent, although its author would probably accuse me of being churlish by saying so. In his introduction to the story collection Nightmares and Dreamscapes, King asserts that “[i]n reviews of every long novel I have written, from The Stand to Needful Things, I have been accused of overwriting. In some cases the criticisms have merit; in others they are just the ill-tempered yappings of men and women who have accepted the literary anorexia of the last thirty years with a puzzling (to me, at least) lack of discussion and dissent.” But the fact remains that a goodly number of Duma Key’s 611 pages are expendable, and even diehard fans of the man’s writing will likely find themselves becoming impatient at points during the course of the book.

But it is not the book’s excessive length, or its case of split personality, that ultimately dooms it. What is most distressing is the reader’s sense of déjà vu, the feeling that we’ve been here before. This sense of the novel as a pale imitation of its literary predecessors is exacerbated by King’s refusal to push his story to its nightmarish limits. King has mellowed in his later work, which could be seen by some as a sign of maturity, but it also blunts his edge. A case could be made that the worst thing that ever happened to King’s literary sensibility was his discovery of the happy ending.

What we are left with is a novel that feels like a paint-by-numbers copy of a master’s work. King’s words keep coming, but Duma Key provides readers with the terrible question: does he have anything more to say?

Apocalypse Now?

Posted 11 January, 2008 in Book Reviews | No comments

Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, by John Gray. Doubleday Canada, $29.95 cloth, 246 pp., ISBN:978-0-385-66265-9.

“The modern world began with wars of religion.” So states John Gray, Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics, and author of the alternately frightening and enraging new volume, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia. Frightening, because of Gray’s considered analysis of how secular utopian projects are giving way in the post-9/11 era to a kind of apocalyptic thinking fuelled on both sides — East and West — by openly fundamentalist religion. Enraging, because his detailed and carefully constructed arguments underline how little humanity has learned from history, despite having its lessons hammered home again and again on bloody battlefields around the globe.

Exactly how little have we learned as a result of our unforgivable short-sightedness and ignorance of history? Gray provides a potent example by opening his discussion of the Iraq war, which he calls “the first utopian experiment of the new century,” with a quote reading in part: “It is in the nature of things that the progress of reason is slow and no one loves armed missionaries; the first lesson of nature and prudence is to repulse them as enemies. One can encourage freedom, never create it by an invading force.” The man who uttered those words was not an American general nor any of the policy advisers giving counsel to the American administration in the run-up to the disastrous invasion of March 2003. It was Maximilien Robespierre, in a 1792 speech to the Jacobin Club.

It is entirely appropriate that Gray invokes one of the key figures from the French Terror to give context to his discussion of Iraq, since he is able to draw a direct line from the Jacobin revolution in France through the secular revolutionary movements of the 20th century — Bolshevism in Russia and Nazism in Germany — to the current American imbroglio in the Middle East. What each movement has in common, Gray argues, is a secular utopian vision, a belief that humanity is perfectible and that a revolutionary conflict can lead to what Francis Fukuyama called “the end of history”: the point after which ideological, civilizational battles would cease and the world would exist in harmony.

The problem with this utopian ideal is that it is fantasy. In addition to eliding certain important aspects of human nature — the tendency towards opportunism, for example — in the specific case of Iraq, it assumes that the popular sentiment will run to the same kind of liberal democracy that exists in the West. If, however, the popular sentiment tends more towards a fundamentalist reading of the Koran, then certain groups that might have found some protection under a secular despotic regime — women, for example — will actually find themselves less well off when that regime is displaced. “No constitution,” Gray writes, “can impose freedom where it is not wanted or preserve it where it is no longer valued.”

Gray is by no means the first person to point out that the American supposition that it could export democracy to a region mired in thousands of years of tribal conflict is a delusion: Gwynne Dyer has made the same point in his books Future: Tense and The Mess They Made. What separates Gray’s analysis is his positioning the neo-conservative American ideology firmly within the context of repressed religion. Many people today forget that America had two founding groups. The first were the (relatively) secular individualists who authored The Federalist Papers and drafted the American Constitution. The second were the Puritans, and they’ve never gone away. As Gray saliently points out, “Where America differs from other nations is in the persistent vitality of messianic belief and the extent to which it continues to shape the public culture.”

In its utopian fervour, its notion of human perfectibility through violence, the current American administration is not sui generis, although its close links to Christian fundamentalist groups that believe the Rapture is imminent does tend to tie it more closely than other governments to the early Christians, who Gray refers to as an “eschatalogical cult.” However, as Gray rightly asserts, “The political ideologies of the last two hundred years were vehicles for a myth of salvation that is Christianity’s most dubious gift to humanity.” That myth found its secular outlet in the revolutionary movements of the Jacobins in France, the Bolsheviks in Russia, and the Nazis in Germany. Clearly, the wanton violence that can be unleashed by an adherence to notions of earthly utopia is frightening to contemplate.

But if the era of faith in utopia is, as Gray suggests, coming to an end, only to be replaced by an adherence to eschatalogical religious thought based on notions of the end times, how are we to survive the coming sea change?

Gray’s answer is by returning to “the lost tradition of realism” championed by Machiavelli. In this endeavour, Gray argues, the “cardinal need is to change the prevailing view of human beings, which sees them as inherently good creatures unaccountably burdened with a history of violence and oppression. Here we reach the nub of realism and its chief stumbling-point for prevailing opinion: its assertion of the innate defects of human beings.”

I would quarrel with Gray on this point: the notion of humans as fallen creatures is not necessarily the great stumbling block to a Machiavellian realist way of thinking. Indeed, the great religions all take human fallibility and weakness as their starting points, so this mode of thinking is not confined to the realist camp. The chief stumbling block to a rigorous realist philosophy is the human need for myths, for stories and narratives that provide structure and hope for the future.

Gray is clear on the dangers of viewing history as an extended narrative: “this benefit is purchased at a high price: a price measured in the lives of others who are forced to act out a role in a script they have not read, still less written.” History, for Gray, is not a coherent narrative with a plot that can be followed in the way one would follow the plot of a novel. This idea is comforting to human beings who crave structure and meaning, who are most afraid of history that “is a meandering flux without purpose or direction.”

The “meandering flux” of history may indeed be the correct reading, but it is also clear that it will be inimical to humanity’s need to impose a coherent structure on historical events. If the idea of an earthly utopia is a secular political fantasy, so too is the notion that human beings can abandon their need to turn the events of their lives, and the world around them, into stories. That abandoning the comforts of historical narrative for the rockier shores of a history devoid of meaning or coherence may be humanity’s best hope for survival is a tough pill to swallow, and to his credit Gray doesn’t try to candy-coat it. Where he stumbles is in his assumption that such an intellectual sea-change may be possible given humanity’s need for hope and structure.

Gray’s analysis throughout is rigorously dispassionate and intellectual. No dogmatic academic liberal, he is equally critical of folly on the right and the left of the political spectrum. Liberals, with their knee-jerk adherence to “rights” as a political and social trump card, come in for just as much criticism as do their conservative (and neo-conservative) counterparts. This dispassion will prove difficult for readers used to Oprah and The View, but it is a welcome alternative to the liberal platitudes of the CBC on the left and the histrionic conservative screech of Fox News on the right.

The fact that Gray’s final prescription for humanity may be unachievable adds to the discomfort level inherent in his book. Black Mass is a difficult, discomfiting read, but nonetheless a necessary one.

Down in the Depths

Posted 2 January, 2008 in Book Reviews | No comments

Crooked Little Vein, by Warren Ellis. William Morrow, $27.95 cloth, 280 pp., ISBN: 978-0-06-072393-4.

“I opened my eyes to see the rat taking a piss in my coffee mug.”

That is the opening line of Crooked Little Vein, the debut novel by acclaimed graphic novelist Warren Ellis. If that line in any way offends, repulses, or otherwise unnerves you, you’d be well advised to give this novel a very wide berth, because in the pantheon of outrageous perversity that unfolds over the following 280 pages, that’s about as effete and as tasteful as things get. If, however, you have a taste for the macabre, if you laughed out loud at the little dogs getting murdered in A Fish Called Wanda, and if you set aside American Psycho because it wasn’t edgy enough, this short novel — which reads like what would have resulted if Hieronymous Bosch had written The Da Vinci Code — might be for you.

The story — such as it is — involves one Michael McGill, a luckless private investigator whose last case involved a group of men engaged in amorous relations with a flock of ostriches, “a human shit-tick, swimming through the toilet bowl of America,” “renowned for plucking diamonds from that skyscraper of blood-flecked turds that is the American cultural underworld.” McGill is hired by the chief of staff to the President of the United States to track down a book, an alternate Constitution complete with twenty-three “Invisible Amendments,” which “is reputedly bound in the skin of the extraterrestrial entity that plagued Benjamin Franklin’s ass over six nights in Paris during his European travels,” and “is weighted with meteor fragments. The design is such that the sound of the book being opened onto a table has infrasonic content, too low for human hearing. The book briefly vibrates at eighteen hertz, which is the resonant frequency of the human eyeball.”

Still with me?

Not that this admittedly outlandish premise matters that much, really. Crooked Little Vein is nominally a hard-boiled detective story modelled on Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, but the mystery story is just an excuse for Ellis to provide us with an increasingly deranged series of set-pieces featuring the denizens of the “American cultural underworld” that McGill encounters on his trek to find the missing volume. What evolves is a kind of picaresque on acid involving saline-infused testicles, philosophical serial killers, and a cocaine-addled millionaire who takes advice from a talking teddy bear. Ellis is clearly operating in the Jerry Stahl mode of literary provocation, and his takes evident glee in dreaming up his outrageous and polymorphously perverse scenarios.

What is surprising is not the book’s compulsivity: this is a novel that dares you to look away, to stop reading, and it comes out of the gate at full speed. If you make it past the first chapter, you’re likely not going to stop, and the spiralling depravity of the events in the novel ensures that a willing reader is propelled forward on an ever-increasing current of narrative energy.

No, what is surprising is that there is a moral centre to the story, and that the author actually manages to score a number of rhetorical points while constantly upping the gross-out ante. Ellis is interested in what defines the cultural mainstream of our society as against what exists at the margins. In a world where serial killers are more popular than rock stars in the mass psyche and large-scale Internet sex sites catering to every kind of fetish or paraphilia are patronized by soccer moms and librarians, is it even possible to speak of margins any more? If so, where are they, and to what extremes does a person have to go (or to sink) to find them?

These are pressing questions, and Ellis deals with them head on. He throws an unforgiving, incandescent light on a society that has passed — almost without our realizing it — through the looking glass. Even in a cultural landscape that resembles a funhouse mirror, there are moral lines to be drawn, and Ellis is adept at locating them, while always remaining non-judgemental of those outsiders who enjoy more alternative or esoteric — yet essentially harmless — pursuits.

There is fun to be had here, for sure, but beyond and beneath the fun there is also a serious artist asking some probing questions about the way our culture is constructed in the early years of the 21st century. Crooked Little Vein could never be mistaken for great literature, but as a quick, dirty, entertaining diversion it is to be recommended. That it also asks some provocative questions is just the icing on Ellis’s perverse little cake.      

The Old Devil

Posted 27 December, 2007 in Book Reviews | 1 comment

Jake’s Thing, by Kingsley Amis. Vintage Books, $19.95 paper, 270 pp., ISBN: 978-0-099-51217-2.

Jake’s thing is his penis. At fifty-nine years of age Jake’s thing — unlike the seventy-one-year-old Nathan Zuckerman’s thing in Philip Roth’s Exit Ghost — still functions effectively. The problem is not one of mechanics, but one of desire. Once a ribald Lothario, Jake has recently lost all interest in sex. Or, as Dr. Rosenberg, the youthful sex therapist to whom Jake is sent for consultation, puts it in a typical Amis exchange:

“Now your trouble is that your libido [lib-eedo] has declined.”

“My what?” asked Jake, though he had understood all right.

“Your libido, your sexual drive.”

“I’m sorry. I’d be inclined to pronounce it lib-ighdo, on the basis that we’re talking English, not Italian or Spanish, but I suppose it’ll make for simplicity if I go along with you. So yes, my lib-eedo has declined.”

Jake is an Oxford don, “Reader in Early Mediterranean History there and a Fellow of Comyns College,” and as such is one in a line of Amis academics stretching back to his first novel, Lucky Jim. Published in 1954, that novel established Amis’s reputation as a notable prose stylist and is still considered one of the finest examples of postwar British comic writing.

By the time Amis came to publish Jake’s Thing in 1978, much had changed in the world, notably the rise of feminism. The author, who along with his good friend Philip Larkin was a key figure in the group of British postwar writers known as the Movement, had begun to take on the mantle of misogynistic, racist misanthrope that would hound him in throughout his later career. The titular figure in Jake’s Thing, albeit a patently comic character, nevertheless espouses attitudes toward women that were outdated at the time, and that seem positively Neanderthal from the perspective of 2007:

Jake did a quick run-through of women in his mind, not of the ones he had known or dealt with in the past few months or years so much as all of them: their concern with the surface of things, with objects and appearances, with their surroundings and how they looked and sounded in them, with seeming to be better and to be right while getting everything wrong, their automatic assumption of the role of injured party in any clash of wills, their certainty that a view is the more credible and useful for the fact that they hold it, their use of misunderstanding and misrepresentation as weapons of debate, their selective sensitivity to tones of voice, their unawareness of the difference in themselves between sincerity and insincerity, their interest in importance (together with noticeable inability to discriminate in that sphere), their fondness for general conversation and directionless discussion, their pre-emption of the major share of feeling, their exaggerated estimate of their own plausibility, their never listening and lots of other things like that, all according to him.

The passage’s final clause is perhaps meant to indicate ironic distance, to forestall what Philip Roth in Exit Ghost referred to as “the deadly literal-mindedness and vulgarity that attributes everything to its source in a wholly stupid way.” Thirty years after the publication of Jake’s Thing, however, it is unlikely that any enlightened reader coming across the passage above would not be brought up short by its scabrous dismissal of the female gender as shallow, deceitful, and gormless.

A similar reaction is prompted by Jake’s diatribe during a faculty debate about the merits of admitting women to Comyns College:

No doubt they do think, the youngsters, it’d be more fun to be under the same roof, but who cares what they think? All very well for the women, no doubt, it’s the men who are going to be the losers — oh, it’ll happen all right, no holding it up now. When the first glow has faded and it’s quite normal to have girls in the same building and on the same staircase and across the landing, they’ll start realising that that’s exactly what they’ve got, girls everywhere and not a common-room, not a club, not a pub where they can get away from them. And the same thing’s going to happen to us which is much more important, Roger’s absolutely right, all this will go and there will be women everywhere, chattering, gossiping, telling you what they did today and what their daughter did yesterday and what their friend did last week and what somebody they heard about did last month and horrified if a chap brings up a topic or an argument. They don’t mean what they say, they don’t use language for discourse but for extending their personality, they take all disagreement as opposition, yes they do, even the brightest of them, and that’s the end of the search for truth which is what the whole thing’s supposed to be about. So let’s pass a motion suggesting they bugger off back to Somerville, LMH, St Hugh’s and St Hilda’s where they began and stay there. It won’t make any bloody difference but at least we’ll have told ‘em what we think of ‘em.

That Jake is a misogynist should by now be abundantly clear; that his declining libido is inextricably tied to his hatred of women seems likewise inescapable. His genuine tenderness toward his wife, Brenda — whose low self-image locates Jake’s lack of desire in what she perceives to be his distaste for the fact that she is overweight — coupled with his willingness to undergo a series of increasingly embarrassing and degrading sexual “therapy” sessions in an attempt to overcome his problem, is the only counterpoint to his growing notion that the benefits derived from sex are not worth the effort of engaging with women in the first place.

It should be noted at this point that Jake’s Thing is a comic novel. But its comedy is of a distinctly nasty stripe: dark, vicious, calculated to offend. Jake is in many ways a relic of a bygone era — or, at least, of an era that was rapidly waning in the Britain of 1978. Jake is contemptuous of anyone or anything he decides is beneath him, and his derision knows no bounds. He is brutal toward his neighbours Alcestis, whom he refers to privately as “Smudger,” and her husband, Geoffrey, “Christendom’s premier fucking fool”; toward his long-suffering cleaning lady, Mrs. Sharp, who is “born of that mysterious power … of unconsciously sensing how and when and where to be most obstructive and acting on it”; and toward Dr. Rosenberg, “a student of the mind who didn’t know where Freud had come from.” He is likewise suspicious of the “therapeutic” techniques that Dr. Rosenberg and his colleagues employ with him, including “sensate focusing” sessions, the viewing of pornography to overcome his guilt and shame in the realm of sex, and a bizarre workshop that involves his ritual humiliation by exposing his genitals to a room full of strangers. It is harder to take umbrage at these satirical jabs, since so many of them still ring true in today’s Dr. Phil besotted culture: “If there’s one word that sums up everything that’s gone wrong since the War, it’s Workshop. After Youth, that is.”

But by and large, Jake’s Thing is an historical document, a snapshot of a time and a place that no longer exist. This is perhaps one reason why Amis is not more widely read at the close of 2007. Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, critic Michael Dirda opines, “a lot of people felt that [Amis’s] books were coldhearted, and certainly no one could deny that the male protagonists were often despicable, no matter how artfully portrayed. Not least, because Amis’s books eschewed formal innovation, they have never held much appeal to literary scholars or classroom teachers.”

Amis was notoriously antithetical to formal innovators such as Joyce or Nabokov, and his novels display none of the structural or linguistic pyrotechnics of those authors. He was, instead, a proponent of clear, crisp, efficient prose, and it is perhaps this very clarity and precision that makes the content of the novels seem that much more untenable to 21st-century readers.

As for being coldhearted and despicable, these adjectives could easily be applied to Jake and to the novel that he inhabits, but these seem less like legitimate literary criticisms and more statements of emotional affect on the part of discomfited readers. There is nothing inherently wrong with writing about despicable characters; it is a peculiar brand of literary philistinism that demands that characters in novels be sympathetic or cleave to a politically correct worldview. Particularly when the novel is placed in its proper historical context, the backward views of its lead character — a British-educated male of a certain age — tend to become more understandable.

None of which is to excuse Jake’s more reactionary or offensive attitudes. It would be a shame, however, if a short-sighted political correctness were ultimately to deny a careful literary artist his rightful place in the pantheon of late 20th-century literature.