Category: Reviews — Fiction

THE WALL
By John Lanchester

The wall has slowly been gaining ground as a metaphor for our time. There had been intimations in the late twentieth century, like when gated communities became news items in the U.S., but it wasn’t long before people took the same local social fear and enlarged the wall to more grandiose heights.

You could see it first in works of the imagination, with walls keeping hordes of the undead at bay in movies like World War Z and the popular novel series and cable show Game of Thrones. From there it was a short step to making the wall a political rallying cry (“Build the wall!”), with authoritarian types from Viktor Orbán’s Hungary to Donald Trump’s United States railing against the threat of tides of immigration. Indeed, a wall could be seen as protecting insecure nations from all kinds of threats – not only from immigrants, for example, but from sea levels rising due to global climate change.

I’m reminded of the way William Carlos Williams thought of the way the atomic bomb possessed the imagination of people in the 1960s. In his book Pictures from Breughel (1962) he wrote of how the “mere picture / of the exploding bomb / fascinates us / so that we cannot wait / to prostrate ourselves / before it.” As a picture, an image, and then a metaphor the bomb with “its childlike / insistence” took hold of everyone during the height of the Cold War. It became something people put faith in to keep them safe, even as it also represented apocalyptic levels of global destruction.

I think the wall, or the Wall as it’s rendered in John Lanchester’s dystopic novel, operates in much the same way in our own day. Arriving to stand sentry on it, the book’s narrator Joseph Kavanagh is initially impressed by its sheer size. “What you mainly think,” he says as he confronts it,

is that the Wall is taller than you expected. Of course you’ve seen it before, in real life and in pictures, maybe even in your dreams. (That’s one of the things you learn on the Wall: that lots of people dream about it, long before they’re sent there.)

This is almost always a bad thing in fiction, when cultural totems colonize the unconscious and the life of the imagination. Think of the way commercial jingles infect the brain patterns of sleeping children in Don DeLillo’s White Noise. It used to be the Bomb. Now it’s become the Wall, an old technology for a new Cold War. As conceived by Lanchester, it’s much like Hitler’s Atlantic Wall in Normandy as seen in Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum, with the brutalist poetry of coldconcretewindskywater replacing Barbaric, Mystical, and Bored.

The Wall does double duty for the two threats I mentioned: keeping out unwanted immigrants, or Others, and keeping back rising sea levels brought on by an environmental meltdown dubbed the Change (one effect of the new political structure being the takeover of the language by increased use of capitalization). It is the last line of defence of the homeland, which no longer feels very much like anyone’s home. Or at least it doesn’t to Kavanagh:

Home: it didn’t just seem as if home was a long way away, or a long time ago, it actually felt as if the whole concept of home was strange, a thing you used to believe in, an ideology you’d once been passionate about but had now abandoned. Home: the place where when you have to go there, they have to take you in. Somebody had said that. But once you had spent time on the Wall, you stop believing in the idea that anybody, ever, has no choice but to take you in. Nobody has to take you in. They can choose to, or not.

In his non-fiction, and his novels Mr. Phillips and Capital, Lanchester has written fiction that makes good use of the sort of material that feeds today’s editorial pages if not the headlines. Immigration and climate change are the two obvious ones in play here, but there are also asides on matters like the depopulation of the countryside, social inequality (a class of helots known as the Help do all the “chores and shitwork”), and a profound generational divide. With regard to the latter, Kavanagh (and Lanchester, I think) has no illusions about how we got into this mess:

None of us can talk to our parents. By “us” I mean my generation, people born after the Change. You know that thing where you break up with someone and say, It’s not you, it’s me? This is the opposite. It’s not us, it’s them. Everyone knows what the problem is. The diagnosis isn’t hard – the diagnosis isn’t even controversial. It’s guilt: mass guilt, generational guilt. The olds feel they irretrievably fucked up the world, then allowed us to be born into it. You know what? It’s true. That’s exactly what they did. They know it, we know it. Everybody knows it.

The least Kavanagh’s generation can do is stop breeding, which is a route most of them have taken. It’s just the responsible thing to do.

There is a real insight here. Young people in this world are deeply conservative. What the Wall promises is stasis, and that’s good. “The only things that can happen are bad things. So you want nothing to happen.” All change, like the Change, is disastrous. And so while nothing ever happens on the Wall, this is good and “that’s the way we like it.” Until of course something does happen – this is a novel after all – and it is a disaster.

It’s hard to think of a more depressing zeitgeist. The young people don’t just want to avoid having children, they’ve become reactionary old fogies. But here we are. Kavanagh indulges pastoral dreams of someday living on a commune with his friends. “We’d maybe live on a farm, we’d maybe have, you know, goats. The kind of thing farm people had.” But as he’s already observed, there are no more farm people, only bots tending the crops. Meanwhile, his friend wants to go to college after he’s served his time on the Wall and study literature. He carries a paperback Wordsworth around with him and hopes to become an academic. I had to shake my head at this even being an imaginable career path post-Change, but I think Lanchester’s point is that all these plans for the future are warmed-over retirement fantasies, grounded in a mythic view of England’s past. Only you can’t go home again, especially when there’s no home.

The ending extends the fable-like texture of the rest of the book in a way that is, as they say, ripe with ambiguity and irony. Perhaps the story is just going to keep repeating itself, or perhaps it really is the end of the world. And if it is the end of the world, well, we can’t say it’s been a good run but perhaps we can say that it’s been enough.

Notes:
Review first published online May 13, 2023.

THE PASSENGER
By Cormac McCarthy
STELLA MARIS
By Cormac McCarthy

The publication of Stella Maris only a month after The Passenger, Cormac McCarthy’s first novel since The Road in 2006, is just one of the odd things about this literary double album.

As albums go, what’s on offer is part new material and part greatest hits. In The Passenger we’re introduced to Bobby Western, a salvage diver operating out of New Orleans. It’s the year 1980 and things kick off with Bobby investigating the mysterious wreck of a plane submerged in the Gulf of Mexico. Mysterious because there seems to be a passenger missing from the sealed fuselage.

As any McCarthy hero could tell you, the world is no place for men who aren’t paranoid, which is a point that an amateur JFK assassination expert will later explain to Bobby. This is after some sinister suits (Feds, or maybe gangsters) visit Bobby and he has to go on the run, living off the grid and eating roadkill.

Chapters dealing with this main storyline alternate with the schizophrenic hallucinations of Bobby’s genius sister Alicia (their father worked on the Manhattan Project, which becomes a sort of intellectual original sin). It turns out Alicia committed suicide some years earlier and that the siblings were in love with each other in a quietly creepy way. Bobby then starts to go a bit crazy himself before winding up living in a windmill in Ibiza.

That’s it for plot. The business with the plane is a MacGuffin, an excuse to present a scrapbook of McCarthy’s folksy, faux-Biblical philosophizin’ about love and death and fate. Or, as Stella Maris sells it, God and truth and existence. The characters all sound pretty much the same, saying things like “All you can believe is what is. Unless you’d prefer to believe what aint.” Bobby’s story is that of the “last of all men who stands alone in the universe while it darkens about him. Who sorrows all things with a single sorrow.” This sounds bleak, but there’s always some worse revelation coming, as “Grief is the stuff of life”:

The world’s truth constitutes a vision so terrifying as to beggar the prophecies of the bleakest seer who ever walked it. Once you accept that then the idea that all of this will one day be ground to powder and blown into the void becomes not a prophecy but a promise.

Some readers will find this pretentious to the point of hilarity, but fans of McCarthy will eat it up. And to give the master his due, he’s very good at it. Weaving together rhythmically spare but ornately dictioned descriptions of life in survival mode gives his writing a texture that’s as much a signature as his apocalyptic visions of a universe collapsing into moral and informational entropy.

Stella Maris is the name of the sanitarium Alicia checks herself into, and the novel of the same name — which is marketed as a coda to The Passenger though it’s really a sort of prequel — takes the form of what amounts to transcripts of discussions between Alicia and one of the resident psychiatrists. Transitioning from one book to the other we move from the mechanics of oil rigs and vintage roadsters rendered in prose that reads like a handbook of some blue-collar, masculine user’s code, to the rarefied world of quantum mechanics and the philosophy of mind.

Stella Maris is certainly a more open-ended book, and it’s an openness that casts a shadow back onto The Passenger. Alicia thinks Bobby is brain-dead after being in a car accident, and we’re left to wonder if maybe he really has passed on to some twilight quantum phase of being, and that The Passenger was just the dream of a dead or dying man. Or perhaps the first book was all one of Alicia’s hallucinations, or the creation of a dismal end-times deity she dubs the Archatron.

There are few writers as skillful at carrying long stretches of a novel with nothing but dialogue, but even given McCarthy’s ability in this regard Stella Maris gets to be a bit much. What it sounds like is the 89-year-old McCarthy talking to himself, musing aloud on various big subjects and not coming up with much except that darkness is falling on the West, the human race, and the universe.

That said, McCarthy’s bleak vision is tragic but not depressing, as it’s driven by an ambitious sense of experimentation and engagement with the American literary tradition that few writers today would dare, much less be capable of. And if it’s to be his final chapter it’s fitting he avoids signing off on a climactic note, preferring to watch the sun go down in style.

Notes:
Review first published in the Toronto Star, December 2 2022.

THE APOLLO MURDERS
By Chris Hadfield

It’s tried-and-true advice for authors, especially new ones, to write about what they know. As Chris Hadfield is probably Canada’s best-known astronaut, and a former commander of the International Space Station, it’s a rule he was happy to follow in writing his first novel, The Apollo Murders.

The year is 1973, and in this alternate history the Cold War is still burning hot and is now being projected into space with the Soviets building an orbiting spy station while looking to mine the Moon for precious radioactive minerals. With Apollo 18 (the real Apollo missions ended at 17) the U.S. is out to frustrate these plans. It may be that the Soviets are one step ahead though, as they already have someone inside the Apollo program.

That’s the basic plot, and it’s solid. Where The Apollo Murders really sets itself apart though is in the level of detail Hadfield includes. And this isn’t just the usual hard-SF business of explaining fancy technology and dropping loads of acronyms on the reader (though there is plenty of that). Instead, what Hadfield brings to the table is how such a space adventure might feel.

It’s experiential SF brought home on a practical, tactile level. Things begin with a rush: a prologue written in the first person with a jet pilot having to make an emergency landing after losing his eye in a mid-air collision with a seagull. From there we proceed to the launch of Apollo 18 and the “Wham!” “Slam!” of staging, a physical gut-check which is likened to “crashing into a wall.” Then there are such mundane matters as the flatulence caused by the drop in air pressure in the cabin and the effect of throwing up inside one’s spacesuit (“the stink, the smeared visor, the stomach acid getting into their eyes, and trying not to inhale any of the floating chunks and bile”).

This isn’t window-dressing. The question of what to do with a corpse in space comes up at one point, and how it is dealt with plays a part in the plot. In such a confined space the smell and bloating are matters that have to be addressed.

None of this detail slows the book down. Time and again Hadfield shows how little things, like a missing lock wire on a nut or a sneeze while soldering one of the spaceship’s communications devices, have a huge impact. And some of the technical details can be fascinating in themselves. The description of the damage caused by bullets fired in space really freshens up one action scene.

The Apollo Murders is a hefty first novel but Hadfield’s clear enthusiasm for the subject is its rocket fuel. At one point in the early going a pair of characters turn away from watching a lunar training vehicle doing a practice run to look at a jet taking off because “Pilots like airplanes.” Hadfield obviously likes airplanes, and rockets and spaceships too. It’s a feeling that’s infectious, and one that takes us on quite a ride.

Notes:
Review first published in the Toronto Star, October 14 2021.

DANTE’S INDIANA
By Randy Boyagoda

Written in the early fourteenth century, the Comedy of Dante Alighieri (only later designated as “Divine”) is considered by many to be the greatest poem ever written in any language. One test of that status in our own time is the continuing popularity of its many translations into English and its widespread presence in contemporary culture.

Randy Boyagoda’s Dante’s Indiana, the second volume of a projected trilogy about a Toronto academic named Prin, takes that ongoing process of cultural assimilation as a starting point.

Following closely on the events of the previous novel, Original Prin, things kick off here with Prin experiencing a full-blown mid-life crisis. He has, in the language of Dante, lost his way. His marriage is under stress, and when a trip abroad leaves him with PTSD and unemployed he finds himself taken on in an advisory capacity by a family-run packaging business whose patriarch is building a Dante-inspired theme park in Terre Haute, Indiana whose goal is “to put fun back in the fear of God.”

Chaos ensues as the opening of the theme park runs into the buzz saw of life in twenty-first century America. Terre Haute is caught in the grips of the opiate epidemic and race riots break out when a young Black man is killed by the police. All of this has an immediate impact on the team Prin has joined at the park, and while he tries to keep everything on schedule he has to also juggle his disintegrating life. Prin’s family is threatening to come apart as he has to manage a long-distance relationship while an old boyfriend is making moves on his wife.

It’s the emphasis on family that connects all of the different stories in Dante’s Indiana. One of Prin’s co-workers has a daughter who is a heroin addict. The family of the murdered teen is another focal point, as is a Sri Lankan family that wants to adopt Prin.

Dante himself was married with children, but they don’t figure at all in the Comedy. He was interested in genealogy, but not family in the nuclear sense.

This is enough to let you know that Boyagoda isn’t interested in writing a modern version of the Comedy, on the order of what James Joyce did with Homer in Ulysses. He’s telling a story of redemption, but not following any formal model laid down by Dante, or even alluding to the Comedy much beyond a few obvious winks.

Still, given the precedent being invoked it’s clear that Boyagoda set himself a challenge, and it’s one that he’s up to. It is, for example, notoriously hard for writers to represent or evoke the sense of smell, but Boyagoda makes it seem easy with a series of apt similes: tap water in a public school that “smelled like flat Coke,” a truck interior that smells “like a lemon grove of baby wipes,” and fast food that gives a car an odour “like steaming bodies.”

This is the sort of imaginative verbal panache that in our own vernacular pays tribute to Dante as literary guide. As a spiritual guide the link is harder to make out, mainly because Boyagoda wants to explore domestic virtues – caring, mutual support, stability – that Dante was less interested in. The classics, however, are always reimagined in ways that respond to the personal anxieties and public crises of our own time. In the shattered funhouse of the twenty-first century we have to to redefine the content of a faith that sustains.

Notes:
Review first published in the Toronto Star, September 3 2021.

AN IMPALPABLE CERTAIN REST
By Jeff Bursey

A few years ago I started noticing a trend in literary fiction toward the new, or newly labeled, genre of the Weird. The origins of the Weird lay in a fusion of genre elements: primarily science fiction, horror, and fantasy. There was something subversive in this, as genre is essentially conventional and the Weird uses many of those same conventions to unmoor readers, leaving them to wonder what was going on.

I think the stories in Jeff Bursey’s an impalpable certain rest are located in the same Weird neighbourhood, though approached from a different direction. It is a landscape both generic and uncanny. Where are we? Someplace familiar but unspecific. “Where I work doesn’t matter,” the narrator of the first story tells us, and tells us no more. In the most fantasy-oriented story the survivor of a shipwreck finds himself on a magical island in some unnamed sea or ocean. In “A Livid Loneliness” a woman comes to another island, apparently a tourist spot, that’s only described as “this idyllic land where she had longed to live for so many years, this bright speck of color on a map of a drab, increasingly bleak and hostile world.” The Caribbean, maybe? We just know that it’s “the country of her fantasies.” “The Frequency of Alarm” is set in a country at war, or one that was at war until recently. But where? Eastern Europe? The people speak with accents, sometimes, but it’s anyone’s guess where they hail from.

This sense of a vague location is very much a part of the Weird, but Bursey comes at it not from a genre background but from the field of experimental fiction and the traditions of an earlier avant-garde. An entire previous novel, Verbatim, takes the form of a Hansard record. Another, Unidentified man at left of photo, uses frequent authorial interruptions to draw attention to its artificiality in a way that’s thrown down before the reader as a challenge. The characters aren’t real, the plot is just whatever convention or expediency dictates, and even the words on the page are just that: words on a page. A phone rings not for any reason other than the fact that the author “desperately needed to get out of that paragraph.” He needed a break. And so a character picks up the phone, or “the object described on paper as answering to the letters t, l, p, h, o, n and three es.”

an impalpable certain rest isn’t a book as self-conscious as this (the lower-case title is one of the only flourishes in this regard) but I wanted to mention the experimental background because I think it shares in the same sense of weirdness, if not Weirdness, I started off by talking about. It employs alienation techniques instead of aliens, but I think some of the effects are the same.

What grounds it in Bursey’s case – here and in the other books I mentioned – is his use of voice. Bursey is a writer of the spoken word: speech, dialogue, and what literary types call free indirect discourse. When you read you have to imagine someone talking. This is an essential quality, even in the stories that aren’t driven almost entirely by dialogue (as several here are). It’s a matter of style that comes across clearly in the first story. Listen:

If we had a boss who came in regularly I suppose things would change, but even a new boss couldn’t alter the fact that fewer people are buying what we’re selling like they once did.

That colloquial redundancy at the end nicely captures the rhythm of an interior voice. It’s not something that’s easy to represent in prose and few writers do it well. Here’s another good example:

What I think every day is at least for now I have a job, though the idea of not having one doesn’t worry me, because I have one, I know, but really, it doesn’t make me sleep any worse than I do when I think about losing it some time.

You don’t want to teach someone to write like that, but when it’s done well it has the effect of making you nod your head and shake it at the same time.

This use of language is both familiar and strange. It can work well in a naturalistic vein in stories like “Certitude” and “A Torch Did Touch His Heart, Briefly” that feature first-person narrators who expertly (or unconsciously) walk a line between despair and self-awareness. Or perhaps we might say they pitch into the former without ever quite achieving the latter. But in other, less conventional stories, voice is more disruptive, giving the sense of the Modernist project of dialogue-as-form, with the story itself dissolving into a medley or even cacophony. “What in Me is Dark, Illumine” has a Prufrockian quality to its gallery of voices coming and going, while “The Frequency of Alarm” almost reads like a play in its latter half. Both stories are grounded not so much in place (which remains obscure) as in voice, and voice used in such a collage-like way that it creates its own imaginative space that feels disembodied and alien. These stories are also the most difficult: requiring a rerun just to sort out of what is being said and what is happening. Always keeping in mind that “what happens” is something that’s often up for grabs in experimental or Weird fiction. It doesn’t want you to get too comfortable.

The tone of the collection is downbeat if not bleak, but there’s a great variety to it and it’s Bursey’s strongest work yet. The short story form suits his kind of experimentation, giving the results a more purposive and intense quality. I think this is also in part due to that inheritance I mentioned from a previous century’s avant-garde, here adapted to contemporary manners and mores. The cutting edge of culture is now somewhere behind us, but it can still light the way today when so much else, from our literature to our politics, is sliding into reverse.

Notes:
Review first published online July 19, 2021.

THE BRAVER THING
By Clifford Jackman

In his widely heralded 2015 novel The Winter Family Clifford Jackman mixed pulp fiction with broader social and historical speculations as he told the story of a brutal gang of American outlaws. In his follow-up The Braver Thing he does something similar with the crew of the Saoirse, a pirate ship in the eighteenth century, though it’s a book that sails into different waters.

To be sure, the genre elements are all in place. This is a pirate novel so there’s a captain with an eye patch, a talking parrot, and sea battles that see men “pulped into tripe” with grapeshot and “hacked into meat” by swords. There are treasures lost and won, storms and duels and mutinies, and maybe even a giant sea beast at the end.

But in addition to all this swashbuckling there is a political theme introduced, signaled by an epigraph from Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan and chapter headings announcing the different forms of governance that are attempted on the Saoirse.

The ship of state is an ancient metaphor that goes back to Plato’s Republic, but it’s put to an extreme stress test here. That’s because these are men for whom violence isn’t a last resort but a profession and entire way of life.

As it sets out on its voyage the Saoirse is likened to “a wooden world . . . a parasitic nation at war with all the world, enemies of all mankind.” The crew are warrior monks of the sea: men without women, or much in the way of any human bonds at all. There are no female characters in the novel, and though lip service is paid to the notion of pirate brotherhood they are not a family. Real family being one of the few social units Winter presents as giving life purpose and meaning.

As with the gang of Winter desperadoes, the pirate ship in The Braver Thing is a radical anti-polis more than a microcosm of any sort of functioning society. The Gentlemen of Fortune and Honest Fellows, though bound together by articles of service and given to holding lots of shipboard meetings and votes, have little sense of loyalty or a social contract. The shipboard state, to use the language of political science, is prior to the individual.

What identity the crew have is submerged in rank and function. This is especially so at the top, where the isolation and burden of command results in self-flagellating pathologies. It’s not that absolute power corrupts so much as it breaks men into pieces.

The Braver Thing isn’t a novel that goes deep into the heads of any of its characters. There’s more a sense that anyone is expendable, with even the captains of the Saoirse coming and going almost by accident. But that is by design. Winter is less interested in psychology than he is in the behaviour of the group and the timely question of how to get by in a world where politics has gone mad and the ship of state is plunging into the blackness of darkness. Pro tips: keep your head down, do your duty, and you might get out alive.

Notes:
Review first published in the Toronto Star, September 4 2020.

HOLLYWOOD NORTH
By Michael Libling

Hollywood North is a terrific novel about growing up in mid-century Trenton, Ontario, but it’s also a great deal more than that.

Michael Libling proceeds by way of subtlety and misdirection. On the face of it, Trenton in the late 1950s and early 1960s seems like a dark idyll from the pages of Stephen King, with a gang of kids – narrator Gus, buddy Jack, and budding love interest Annie – slowly becoming aware of something sinister going on in town.

It seems a lot of accidents and disappearances have been happening in Trenton, going back nearly a hundred years. Adults, however, are curiously apathetic, if not hostile, to the gang’s investigations. Is Pennywise the Clown up to his old tricks? Or does this all have something to do with Trenton’s brief incarnation as a movie hub, dubbed Hollywood North, back in the days of silent film? Perhaps the cache of silent-film title cards that Jack discovers holds a key to the mystery.

Or perhaps there’s no mystery at all. Movies are, like the idylls of childhood, illusions. As we get older both fade from our memories, or are reimagined as something less dramatic.

Hollywood North is a coming-of-age story like no other, masterfully using the guise of supernatural horror to wrap its poison pill. Childhood idealism gives way to deceit. We give up the freedom of youth for weary resignation to the inscrutable and mostly grim workings of fate. Cold revenge is not a dish to be enjoyed but only a petty and bitter satisfaction. Dreams are a source of regret, and their loss a welcome oblivion.

That probably sounds rather downbeat, but while Hollywood North is a dark fantasy it’s presented in such a lively way, right down to the book’s delightful interior design elements, that you don’t notice the darkness falling until the curtain is pulled on The End. The writing has an immediacy and power of observation that tears the reader through the story like a dangerous set of rapids leading into a whirlpool of horror.

The psychological and emotional business of growing up is a familiar theme in fiction, but it’s rarely been handled with this much sophistication while being so entertaining in the bargain. The balancing of pop, or pulp, fiction with profundity is hard to maintain, but Libling makes it seem easy. As a novel containing history, real and imagined, we might even say the epic of Trenton has arrived.

Notes:
Review first published in the Toronto Star, December 20 2019.

FALL; OR, DODGE IN HELL
By Neal Stephenson

Exposition, or the background explanation necessary to make a fictional plot understandable, is often seen as the bane of narrative: usually introduced in a clumsy fashion and bringing the action to a halt until the reader is brought up to speed.

This is not the case in a Neal Stephenson novel. Exposition is Stephenson’s métier. There is nothing he likes better than to have his characters break into mini-TED talks and go into full explainer mode.

But these discursions are never a drag on the story. Stephenson’s lecturing has the same energy and imagination as his descriptions of nail-biting action. He is as informative as he is entertaining when dealing with just about any subject.

Such as, for example, the next step in our digital evolution.

Fall; or Dodge in Hell is a book with a lot of explaining to do. As things begin, Richard “Dodge” Forthrast, the billionaire videogame developer we first met in Stephenson’s 2011 novel Reamde, dies during a routine medical procedure. But, being a titan of tech and having more money than God with the hubris to match, death no longer has to be the end.

Cheating death by having one’s consciousness digitized is currently a hot topic in silicon circles, and it provides the launching pad here for an epic account of just how such a process might work and what a digital afterlife might look and feel like to the saved and uploaded.

It’s an ambitious agenda for any author to pursue, but Stephenson has never been one to shy away from epic undertakings. And with Fall coming in at nearly 900 pages, he’s again given himself room to approach his subject from many directions: scientific, social, political, economic, religious, and philosophical.

With all of this, we’re 300 pages in before Dodge’s brain gets a reboot and awakens in the digital dimension known as Bitworld (the virtual counterpart to Meatspace). Bitworld is a blend of SF and Fantasy, mythology and science, that may be the next generation of cyberspace, an outmoded construct Stephenson sees as being badly in need of a conceptual update anyway.

As Milton put it, “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” And if we replace the mind with a connectome in cyberspace? Bitworld, like any imagined afterlife, is the product of a certain culture or historical moment, casting its creators into a heaven or hell of their own making. A scary thought for the rest of us.

Notes:
Review first published in the Toronto Star, May 31 2019.

SONGS FOR THE COLD OF HEART
By Eric Dupont

Eric Dupont’s Songs for the Cold of Heart (the Giller-shortlisted English translation by Peter McCambridge of the Quebec bestseller La fiancée americain) begins with a father telling a story to his three children. It’s the winter of 1958 and what makes the date significant is the fact that television hasn’t yet arrived in the town of Rivière-du-Loup, which means that the tall tales of Louis “The Horse” Lamontagne are still the best way to pass the time.

Songs for the Cold of Heart is a novel built out of such stories, beginning with that told by Papa Louis but then taking us much further afield. The way the narrative spreads through time and space is a leitmotif, as the act of storytelling (taking in all forms of gossip, rumour, and fabulation) is likened to the flow of lava or the contagion of smallpox. There’s no stopping the fiercely readable voice of this book once it gets going, no holding its incestuous proliferation of stories down.

Each of the stories, in turn, has a granularity of detail and willing waywardness that suggest a depth and familiarity that goes beyond the page. Then the bounds of realism also dissolve as supernatural characters and events are introduced or invented. Just as the narrative spreads out from Rivière-du-Loup so the particular and local events described take on a larger significance as the context for viewing them enlarges to take in whole swathes of the collective consciousness of the twentieth-century.

The usual label given to this sort of fiction is “magic realism,” and Dupont has been compared to the Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez in his employment of the technique. However there have been a number of prominent Canadian novels whose family sagas are directed toward the same operatic intersection of legend and history. For some reason it’s a particularly popular mode among Newfoundland writers, with such books as Galore by Michael Crummey and The Son of a Certain Woman by Wayne Johnston coming immediately to mind.

Such a large, complicated novel is a balancing act. Songs for the Cold of Heart is rambling and spontaneous but also coherent and carefully structured, rooted in the local but never sentimental or provincial in its outlook. Though some of the energy flags in the middle it’s a wonderful read, a testament to the continuing richness and vitality of the art of fiction.

Notes:
Review first published in the Toronto Star October 26, 2018.

NO QUARTER
By John Jantunen

Who knows what horrors lurk beneath the surface of Northern Ontario’s cottage country?

Perhaps George Cleary does. George is the former publisher of the Tildon Chronicle and author of a series of twelve melodramatic novels ripe with an excess of sex and violence. One of these novels is even titled No Quarter. It seems that life imitates art in the town of Tildon, and Cleary’s “Fictions” have a prophetic cast.

Unfortunately, George soon dies, leaving behind an unfinished manuscript for a new novel offering cryptic clues to Tildon’s dark history and fiery fate. So it falls to reporter Deacon Riis, George’s adopted son, to figure out what’s behind a recent crime wave involving people from the top and the bottom of Tildon’s food chain.

At the top we have the uber-rich Wane family, enjoying a life of Chandleresque decadence in a gated lakeside mansion. At the bottom there’s René Descartes, an ex-con living in a trailer and trying to get by doing pick-up manual labour. Remarkably, their paths will cross. Sparks will fly.

Jantunen’s previous novel, A Desolate Splendor, had a similar taste for violence set in an unforgiving, apocalyptic landscape. With No Quarter he has added more self-reflective literary elements. In its end is its beginning, and the story closes in upon itself while still leaving key questions unanswered. There are also hints at some deeper, metafictional or mystical connection between George Cleary’s Fictions and what’s going on in Tildon, though this is finally left up in the air.

No Quarter is presented as the first book of The Tildon Chronicles, which helps explain much of its elaborate, in-depth world building. Readers would be advised to keep track of the names and family genealogies as they go along. There is a lot of back story to get through and many detours into stories within stories, not all of them as yet fully digested.

There’s an ungainliness and energy to No Quarter, its unevenness being the result of an ambitious reach. How far that reach extends remains to be seen. It’s hard to make out the road ahead, but it seems as though the twisted chronicles of this town have a way to go.

Notes:
Review first published online December 26, 2018.