Category Archives: Reviews of the written word

Quiet novel offers subtle pleasures

The Insistent Garden
by Rosie Chard

Published by NeWest Press

320 pages; $19.95

Reviewed by Margaret Thompson

Once upon a time, in a sleepy town in the Midlands, there lived a sad girl called Edith.  Rosie Chard’s debut novel, Seal Intestine Raincoat (NeWest, 2009), which won the 2010 Trade Fiction Book Award, is a tense portrayal of social breakdown. By contrast, any description of  Chard’s second novel, The Insistent Garden, is likely to sound like a fairy tale. This is no accident, for the elements are all there: the bereaved household; the father distracted by obsession; the wicked female, in this case an aunt; the neglected daughter; sundry outsiders whose role is to enable the heroine to break free of the spell that binds her.

The dysfunctional family mired in secrets has an ancient history in fiction. Edith’s family is very odd indeed. She lives with her father in a semi-detached house, and Cinderella-like, spends most of her time as an unpaid housekeeper, often ignored, but relentlessly harassed by her dreadful Aunt Vivian, who descends like a blight every Tuesday. Edith’s father pours his energies into building a wall in his garden as a bulwark against a hated and permanently invisible neighbour. To reinforce that defence, he also plasters layer after layer of wallpaper on the party wall. Edith is forbidden to go into the attic, and finds privacy and consolation only in the cellar, where she reads her dead mother’s books of poetry in the middle of the night. Essentially, she is a prisoner of habit, ignorance, and the past.

But fairy tales, as Bruno Bettelheim observed, are road maps to adulthood and Edith’s story is no exception. There are breaches in the defences: cracks appear, literally, and a loose brick in the wall creates a spyhole; a magazine drops through the letterbox; a receipt falls out of an old book. All are messages from the outside world, and Edith has allies out there, too, who appear when necessary—sometimes, like Dotty Hands, even arbitrarily— to point the way. For the most part they help Edith realize her dream of a garden, her first independent aspiration, but they also lighten her darkness as she moves towards the truth.

This is a quiet novel, restrained as its narrator, but it has many subtle pleasures. We see the bizarre through Edith’s sheltered eyes, but there is a counterbalance offered by the ordinariness of Jean’s chatty letters. The language reflects Edith’s poetic sensibility, especially in descriptions of the growing plants and changing seasons, and the garden itself, from the first few seeds to the hop vine rioting over the wall, is a powerful symbol of Edith’s redemption. The novel is populated by baroque characters, vivid in their oddity, but they are not allowed to distract us from Edith, for this is the story of a lonely, marginalized individual in transition, the beginning of the rest of a life. There will be no “and they lived happily ever after,” for that has nothing to do with reality, but with the revelations at the end, the prison walls crumble and there is satisfaction in knowing that Edith is free to make a start.

Margaret Thompson is past president of the Federation of BC Writers, She is the author of six books, most recently Adrift on the Ark: Our Connection to the Natural World. Number seven, a novel entitled The Cuckoo’s Child, will be a Spring 2014 publication.

 

Editor reminds us of forgotten journalist

Travels and Tales of Miriam Green Ellis: Pioneer Journalist of the Canadian West
Edited and with an Introduction by Patricia Demers (pictured left)
University of Alberta Press, 215 pages, $39.95

Reviewed by Myrna Kostash

Very few readers of newspapers and magazines notice or remember journalists’ by-lines.  Even those journalists–think of Doris Anderson or Barbara Moon or June Callwood–who once were memorable soon fade from public memory as a new generation of readers arrives. Such oblivion has doubly been the fate of women journalists in the early twentieth century who never wrote a book and who laboured under the heavy hand of paternalism in newsrooms. Journalists such as the all-but-forgotten Miriam Green Ellis (1879-1964) wrote over a period of four decades in such publications as the Edmonton Bulletin, Grain Growers’ Guide or the Family Herald and Weekly Star, but managed to stay away from the dreaded Women’s Pages. Ellis was an agricultural reporter when this was undreamed, of until E. Cora Hind came along in 1901 at the Manitoba Free Press where she became a noted journalist famed for the accuracy of her crop estimates. Ellis and Hind liked to scandalize Toronto high society by showing up in breeches at the Royal Winter Fair.

Ellis also kept diaries and gave public lectures, to horticultural societies, University Women’s Clubs and the Canadian Women’s Press Club. She had a life-long commitment to the press club’s ideals as cited in its Constitution: “To improve and maintain the status of journalism as a profession for women and to provide counsel and promote understanding and assistance among press women.”

University of Alberta professor Patricia Demers has recovered Ellis for new readers by delving into the twenty-two boxes of Ellis’s archives bequeathed to the Special Collections of the U of A Library.  Demers has edited this representative selection of her writings and photographs as well as providing the book’s Preface and Introduction.  She makes the case that, in reconsidering the life and work of Ellis, we encounter “reflections of a past and culture that continue to inform our understanding.”  In the manner of academic scholarship, Demers’ own reflections turn to what philosopher Jacques Derrida had to say about archives, to a defense of Ellis the travelogue-journalist as one who “enacts the drama of departure and return, without overlooking experiences of frustration and disjuncture,” and to a characterization of her as a “liminal figure.”

But the point of this edition of Ellis’s work is the work itself, and here the reader is in for a real treat. Demers has chosen a judicious selection of travel writing (the lively 1922 account of Ellis’s trip from Edmonton to Aklavik which she took on her own, her editor at the Bulletin refusing to assign the story);  unpublished fiction based on reported events; agricultural reports in the 1930s full of human interest as she travelled the drought-stricken prairies: “By July the water holes had all dried up . . . stories were told of farmers shooting their animals.” Included are such miscellanea as an observation of a Sun Dance at Hobbema–“I felt saddened  that I was to witness what would, in all probability, be the last Sun Dance ever to be seen in the West,” and an account of a visit to the Banff Fine Arts School, as it was known then in 1947.

Demers sizes up Ellis as “a self-sufficient woman eager to tell a story, by turns candid and sharp-tongued, intuitive and curious.” In other words, the compleat journalist.

Edmonton writer Myrna Kostash is author of Prodigal Daughter:  A journey to Byzantium.

Author protests Haiti’s latest labels

The World Is Moving Around Me: A Memoir of the Haiti Earthquake
By Dany Laferriere (pictured left)
Translated by David Homel
Arsenal Pulp Press, 183 pages

Reviewed by Arno Kopecky

“The minute” began at 4:53 in the afternoon of January 12, 2010, just as Dany Laferriere was biting into a piece of bread. The Haitian-born, Montreal-dwelling author of How To Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired (and 19 other novels) happened to be in one of the few concrete buildings in Port-au-Prince that didn’t implode—the Hotel Karibe—when the 7.3 magnitude quake struck. Some 300,000 others didn’t have the same luck.

“Very rare were those who got a good start,” he writes, recalling his own belated rush to the roofless safety of the hotel’s courtyard. “Even the quickest wasted three or four precious seconds before they understood what was happening.”

We all know what came next, and yet Laferriere’s account of the subsequent hours, days and weeks is anything but predictable. This is thanks largely to the astonishing lyricism of his writing.  The World Is Moving Around Me reads more like an extended prose poem than a memoir, broken into titled sections that range in length from a single paragraph to three pages. One of them, The Revolution, reads as follows:

“The radio announced that the Presidential Palace has been destroyed. The taxation and pension office, destroyed. The courthouse, destroyed. Stores, crumbled. The communication network, destroyed. Prisoners on the streets. For one night, the revolution had come.”

And yet, the mass looting that the international press half-hoped would ensue, never did. Order prevailed. The instincts of the collective trumped those of the individual, yielding miracles great and small. The day after the minute, Laferriere walked past a mango lady sitting in front of her small pile of fruit, calling out her sales pitch just like any other day. “These people are so used to finding life in difficult conditions that they could bring hope to hell,” he concludes.

Laferriere started his career as a journalist, fleeing Haiti in 1978 after a colleague with whom he’d been working on a story was murdered by the regime. His reportage merges seamlessly with a novelist’s grasp of the zeitgeist. But the thing that impressed me most about this book was the way he captured the disaster-sensation of being dazed and hyper-lucid all at once. A dream-like quality pervades his prose that no camera could capture, suspending the reader between tears and laughter. We hear, for instance, about the woman who sat outside the building her family was buried alive in. She talked to them through the night. “First her husband stopped responding. Then one of their three three children. Later, another . . . More than a dozen hours later, people were finally able to rescue the baby, who had been crying the whole time. When he got out, he broke into a wide smile.”

Laferriere has done the work of sorting through the rubble for us, piling up impressions until some sort of sense emerges from the senselessness. In the process, he duplicates the city’s “stunned air of a child whose toy has just been accidentally stepped on by an adult.”

In documenting this tragedy and his country’s response to it, Laferriere vehemently protests the latest label heaped on Haiti: “All some commentator has to do is say the word “curse” on the airwaves and spreads like cancer,” he laments. “Before they can move on to voodoo, wild men, cannibalism and a nation of blood-drinkers, they’ll see that I have enough energy to fight them.”

Arno Kopecky’s next book, The Oil Man and the Sea, is in its final stages.

Self-taught Poet Turns Modernity Upside Down

This Drawn & Quartered Moon

By Klipschutz (Kurt Lipschutz)

Anvil Press, 121 Pages, $18

 

Reviewed by Chris Ho

Over ten years in the making, This Drawn & Quartered Moon holds some astounding contemporary poetry that, taken all together, amuses and stirs the reader. Klipschutz – (yes, he’s cool enough to have a pen name) – is able to alternate between personal and public poems, and infuse them with decadent romance and poignant comedy without making things too weird. Hailing from San Francisco, Kurt Lipschutz is a poet, satirist, songwriter, and part-time scrivener in a law office.

The opening memo effectively sets the tone for the book, giving us a glimpse of Klipschutz’s tongue-and-cheek style and subtle commentary concerning the economic and social condition of the United States. After playfully filling in Wordsworth on the world today, Klipschutz tops it off with, “Say hi to Sam & Dorothy & the gang / (big hug to the missus) from the bloody future, / […] Brother, you don’t want to know.”

As would be appropriate for an introduction, “In Memory of Myself” further emphasizes the speaker’s ironic voice, and calls attention to the motifs concerning modernity, republicanism, consumerism, romance, and city life. Combining the personal and the public, we immediately get the sense that Klipschutz has carefully plotted out these works, despite their deceivingly colloquial nature:

I.

Renovate me like one of your Victorians, San Francisco –

deck me out in color-coordinated sashwork & trim

& plunk me down beside a looker

on a Sunday cable car

from the turnaround at Woolworth’s

alongside Union Square …

 

II.

O when will you embrace your blinking nipples, San Francisco –

                        tho they tear the rose from her brow

On the Starlight Room dance floor for all to see? …

 

Evidently not the kind of man who takes himself too seriously, Klipschutz gives us that cheeky political criticism just as easily as he interjects with wonderful one-liners that show the humour in romance. The overwhelming corporate influence on government is certainly a thematic concern for Klipschutz, but in poems like “You The Man,” he realizes that dry humour and irony are sometimes the best way to get the point across:

 

Another Ford from Michigan

once coveted the White House.

Henry hated Jews as much as Hitler

hated Russia. Oh but Jerry

 

played the slow-wit to a fault,

handed off the ethnic jokes to others,

with a head like a helmet, two knees to replace,

and assumed the Oval Office in reverse.

 

As Henry Ford represents the notion that consumerism is the key to peace, Klipschutz cleverly challenges the idea by sharply joining together the two major economic and political American Ford figures. This effectively draws attention to the implications of allowing huge corporations to have so much power over a country’s government and destiny.

 

There is something pleasing about the way Klipschutz both invites the reader to live and breathe the streets of San Francisco, and connect it to Western Civilization as a whole. The overall development of consumerism has been a huge focal point for many contemporary poets, and, for Klipschutz, the irony is never ending:

 

It’s a good day to have all this–

a promised land to zip around in,

a cruel tipsy blonde by my side,

the heat turned to high and gloves

of polished leather.

We park

to pop out like jacks-in-the-box,

to survey our immediate surroundings.

Are they not to our liking?

Well then

we shall stuff ourselves back

in our coiled cube and be gone …

 

Once again, he interweaves decadent romance with decadent living, turning everything we know about our lifestyles right on its head, (and then pulling out a few white hairs just for laughs).

 

Some of the more solemn works help balance out Klipschutz’s comedic propensities with a tangy compassion and underlying tenderness. This is beautifully shown in the title poem of This Drawn & Quartered Moon, as the harsh consonant sounds of the words emphasize the dark underlying political motifs:

 

It hangs there like a broken toy

cut out, unpainted, crude

a toothless faceless grin

stationed over Talllahassee

 

the election given, Rehnquist’s gift, outright. . .

 

Kurt Lipschutz’s downplayed comedy and moving tragedy give the reader a mixture of hard-hitting, and softly meandering poetry that is all at once relevant and subtle. The “autodidact and gregarious loner” boldly (but humbly) takes the stage for This Drawn & Quartered Moon and then earns himself that glorious encore we all dream of.

Chris  Ho is a Uvic graduate, musician and avid peach eater

Author’s prose elegant but avoids risk

The Eliot Girls
By Krista Bridge
Douglas and McIntyre, 336 pages, $22.95

Reviewed by Jenny Boychuk

There are books you pick up and, after reading a few chapters, they begin to feel achingly familiar.

Krista Bridge has created the fictional-based-on-fact George Eliot Academy, an all-girls private school in Toronto. The school sits regally atop a hill, surrounded by iron gates; the wood floors are always polished, the soft orange glow of hanging lights reflecting off of them. The walls are lined with historic and influential women leaders. Ruth Brindle has taught in the Junior School since Eliot was founded by its strict, feminist principal, Larissa McAllister. Ruth dreamed of the day her daughter, Audrey, would be accepted into Eliot; but, after many tries at the entrance exams, it isn’t until Audrey is about to begin Grade 10 that she is finally admitted.

Ruth delights in seeing Audrey in her uniform for the first time, but Audrey is not so excitable—she is shy and uncertain of this image her mother has wished for her.

“Now, she required something more than imagination to help her effect this transfiguration, and here in the dimness, it was easier to impose on her image a quality that was not otherwise there.  The sensation was romantic, a fleeting escape, and she lingered before the mirror, letting her gaze drift in and out. Then she glanced down and remembered herself.”

As the story progresses, we learn that the integrity and morals Eliot was built upon act as mere scaffolding, and what the school holds inside is much more sinister and dark than Audrey could have imagined. It does not take long for a particular clique of pretty, mean girls to manipulate Audrey into doing their dirty work—though this still doesn’t make her accepted, it still doesn’t protect her from peer-pressure and bullying. It only buys her a little more time to be left alone in the shadow of her well-liked, beautiful mother.

“Female cattiness was a knowledge into which women were born, like the formation of language, the thousands of words saturating infant brains, lodging there with growing meaning until they are ready to emerge, allusive and unquestioning labels on an already known world. The surprise lay in how much it thrilled her, how its heat enfolded her: the unifying sensation of scorn, the closeness of it almost indistinguishable from love. Even more intimate, perhaps, than love.”

Ruth’s integrity is also tested by the handsome and intelligent Henry Winter, Eliot’s new English teacher. She finds herself questioning her marriage, and what exactly it is she had wanted in a life.

“She knew how it was supposed to go. You think of the fact that you shouldn’t be doing this. You think of what can go wrong. You think of the minutes, the seconds that remain for you to change your mind.”

In the end, both Audrey and Ruth are given the chance to own up to their mistakes. One will; one will not.

Bridge is successful in fleshing out the politics of private schools and rendering the image of the teenage girl trying to fit in. It is an accurate comment on the real-life issues our society is facing with bullying, how backwards teenage logic is: it doesn’t matter if you’re talented, if you’re friendly, if you’re pretty—no one is safe. The novel explores what it means to fit in and how we stretch ourselves to fit the lives we think we ought to have, how mothers mold their children into the people they think they ought to be, and how they try to mold themselves from the ideals of their own mothers.

Bridge’s sentences are elegant and well strung, as though each description is trimmed with fine lace—almost acting as a mask to the ugly occurrences within the school. The third person point of view is effective in acting as a study, an examination as it switches between Ruth and Audrey, and the transitions are seamless.

I wish Bridge had taken more risks with the book. It is a story we’ve seen before, many times, and there is potential for it to be something other than the well-known story of teenage acceptance. So the reader must look past the beauty, past the smiling teenage girls who spend their lunch hours rating their classmates’ looks out of ten on small scraps of paper—for even the prose is keeping up appearances.

Jenny Boychuk is an avid reader and recent BFA graduate. 

Poet sees prairie clearly

Seldom Seen Road
By Jenna Butler
NeWest Press, 76 pages, $14.95

Reviewed by Karen Enns

The title poem of Jenna Butler’s Seldom Seen Road, the Edmonton author’s third book, opens with the line “what is true about this land” and goes on to list these truths: that “ prairie is scant / but wears it well,” that “all signs last,” and “against earth / everything is transitory.” The final image of a sun that “catches your eye like a backward glance / alights  moves on” gives us a sense of the tone of these prairie poems and a glimpse, too, of Butler’s subtle exploration of fragility and strength: how they coexist and at what cost.

Throughout, Butler’s eyes and ears are committed to fine observation–“frantic counterpoint of orioles”, for instance, and  “pinwheels of hummingbirds”–but it is her use of the tough language of farm labour and life that really charges the poetry. Axes and mattocks pack a consonantal punch, as do words like scythes and balers, feeder roots, the east quarter, back forty, a pickup “shunting like a heifer,” fescue and gumbo. Some of the most striking lines combine this aural muscularity with a delicately framed lyricism:

from the hill    you watch
the back forty gone to muskeg
& tamarack     the shifting dance of
slough birds    white pelican lifts
a pleated wing
to steer out over dark water
navigating the skin of things

these still     black places
this accidental light

The central section, Lepidopterists, is a collection of epitaphs to prairie women interspersed with poems named after butterflies like “Riding’s Satyr,” “Gray Copper,” and “Jutta Arctic.”  Images of women like Mary Norton, who starved to death in 1728 near Churchill at the age of twenty, become bold points of focus, like eye spots, against understated poems such as “Afranius Duskywing”:

unremarkable
she rests amongst
the buffalo bean

what is slight
goes unnoticed

hush of two generations
finding flight
lapis wings
bluing the air

The poems are filled with abandoned towns and farmhouses, deserted railway tracks, the many signs of human interaction with the land that last: a “bell tower gone to pigeons,” and a church “down to staves”. There is haunting and grief in “the way heat eases & / pummels a town / when the elevators fall  when / we are faced with / the rubble of their passing”. Fragility and strength are sometimes interchangeable, and solitude is simply part of it, the toll: “Look back all you want / one cart track ambling / mercurial skyline.”

But there remains a deep commitment to the prairie that “knows the right of it / where you are is where you stand”. That place, it seems, is not necessarily static. Butler chooses a quote from Alberta Wriiter George Melnyk to introduce her collection: “On the prairie, one twists around and around until the straight horizon line turns into a circle, and the visual turns visionary.” That gradual shift, that process, according to the poet, has much to do with the gaze of the seer. And tough love. In “Called Back,” a husband returns with his elderly wife to the place they know so well. Her weathered focus on what matters most is clear:

she scours the porch
at the seniors’ residence
thinks forty years of northern spruce
slimwillow loon-call

nothing to fasten on here but
claretcup     paintbrush
sunbruised petals she spots & loves hard.

Karen Enns is a Victoria poet and musician.

Collection reveals largesse of Planet Earth

Poems from Planet Earth
Edited by Yvonne Blomer and Cynthia Woodman Kerkham
Leaf Press, 208 pages, $20

Reviewed by Candace Fertile

Planet Earth Poetry is a reading series at the Moka House in Victoria, and over the years many poets have offered their work to an appreciative audience. Editors Yvonne Blomer (who runs the reading series) and occasional host Cynthia Woodman Kerkham have assembled a diverse collection from over one hundred poets who have read, showcasing the richness of Planet Earth.

Patrick Lane, a star not only in the local poetry scene, but also in the poetry world at large, contributes both a poem and the introduction to the book. He explains the genesis of the series’ name, which is taken from P.K. Page’s poem “Planet Earth,” and notes that Page “is one of the masters, the progenitors of the poems that live among these pages.” Lane eloquently shows poetry’s importance: “We reside forever in this one precious moment. Life seethes around us. It lives, it dies, it lives again. A poem is at times our only stay against all that assails us.” Poems from Planet Earth presents an exuberant cacophony of voices examining uncountable facets of life.

Blomer and Kerkham had a monumental task in creating the volume; choosing how to organize the book must have been a challenge. The editors have opted for seven broad categories into which they have placed the poems, with a short introduction to each section: Life and Loss, Nature, Place, Love, Death and Hope, Music and Art, and Family. Obviously, many poems could be slotted into numerous categories. The volume also includes acknowledgements and biographies, so it’s a handy tool for further investigation. Curiously, the alphabetical contents at the beginning are by poet’s first name, rendering the list less helpful than it could be, but that is a minor quibble as the biographies are alphabetized by last name.

The voices contained include the well-known, such as Lane, Lorna Crozier, Jan Zwicky, Pamela Porter, Patrick Friesen, Patricia Young, and Sheri-D Wilson. But with so many contributors, most readers are sure to discover a new voice. And as over half of the poems are published for the first time in this volume, every reader will encounter something unfamiliar.

The forms vary enormously, with most being free verse, but closed forms such as the pantoum can be found (John Barton’s “Les beaux-arts, Montréal”) or the sestina (Tanis MacDonald’s “Sestina: Whiskey Canyon”). This volume does good job of showing the vastness of poetic approaches.

I’d recommend dipping into this book at random. It doesn’t matter if the poems are read in the order as presented. The content is a bit uneven, but with so much included, readers will get much of value. Kudos to Planet Earth Poetry for its continued celebration of poetry, and kudos to Blomer and Kerkham for creating this engaging and eclectic collection.

Candace Fertile is  Coastal Spectator’s poetry editor.  

Novella captures migrant’s dilemma

 The Lebanese Dishwasher
By Sonia Saikaley
Published by Quattro Books, 146 pages, $14.94

Reviewed by Lynne Van Luven

Born and raised in Ottawa, Sonia Saikaley’s work stirringly represents her Middle Eastern heritage.  In the past year, Saikaley has published both a book of poems (Turkish Delight: Montreal Winter, Tsar Publications) and The Lebanese Dishwasher, which was a co-winner of the Ken Klonsky novella contest.

Through its compression, The Lebanese Dishwasher captures the marginalized but intense life of a 30-year-old immigrant named Amir. The action alternates between his earlier youth in Beirut and his current life in Montreal, where streets are slick with ice and opportunities fall far below his expectations. Not only is Amir unhappy in his work, he is at odds with his very being. For his whole life, he has fought against his nature, attempting to deny his own homosexuality, a situation made more acute after he is violently raped by a male neighbour when he is 12. As he turns 30, Amir faces increased pressure to mimic the norm his family expects: he is constantly urged to  “find a nice Middle Eastern girl,” and get on with raising a family.

For five years he has been trapped in a dead-end dishwashing job in a Middle Eastern restaurant, where his only offer of friendship comes from one of the cooks, Saleem. The tension within the contemporary narrative escalates when Saleem invites Amir to his home for dinner. Over the food-laden table, Amir meets Rami, who is Saleem’s nephew, recently arrived in Canada. As the pair’s sexual attraction blossoms, so does Saleem’s rage and disgust.

In addition, Amir has a casual sexual relationship with Denise, who loves him as an exotic and calls him her “Arabian prince,” but expects far more from him than he can deliver. Yes: complications.

Sonia Saikaley writes affectingly about immigrants who struggle to survive and to attain some modicum of the freedom and “good life” that impelled them to emigrate. And she captures with courage and clarity the patriarchal nature of many of her male characters who see women only as domestic slaves and the bearers of the children necessary to perpetuate the family line. In such men’s eyes, any hints of homosexuality are beyond abhorrent. Young men who do not flaunt their interest in women are suspect, little better than “dogs.”

Amir, like many migrants, thinks often of his former life, where the violence of his shrill mother is offset by the peace he experiences with his loving grandparents when he visits their farm and helps them pick olives and figs. The richness of Amir’s lost life contrasts strongly with the grime and drudgery of his Canadian existence.

The Lebanese Dishwasher showcases Saikaley’s talents well; I look forward to reading more of her work.

Beach’s poetry plays with Bond myths

The Last Temptation of Bond
By Kimmy Beach
U of A Press, 114 pages, $19.95

Reviewed by Cornelia Hoogland

Pop-culture heroes such as James Cagney and James Bond are Kimmy Beach’s passion. In her new book of poetry, Beach facilitates her readers’ insider looks into Bond’s vast and colourful life: into his rooms; “Night[s] In The Life;” and into the Bond props of guns, alcohol and women. Alternately, she places Bond outside the safe confines of his cinematic/Internet world, into that of the sometimes narrator, One, and her sidekick, The Other. Or she moves into an alternate reality–the domestic (human) world that Bond hasn’t (until Beach) led.

The sections in which we meet Mrs. and the twins suggests the books’ underpinnings in Nikos Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation of Christ, a book that considers the dualities of Christ as saviour and human being (and as referenced in Beach’s title). Just as easily, Beach drops One into Bond-type scenarios that (seem to) absorb her. One tells Bond near the end of the book, “You really should know how often you didn’t make me come.”

As a publication within U of A Press’s Robert Kroetsch poetry series, the book’s freedom of movement among genres and voices honours Kroetsch, who would have appreciated both the elevation and the reduction (but not the demise, Bond is eternal) of the cultural hero. The cover (Robert0 Conte’s angel) is stunning. Alan Brownoff should be in the running for Alberta’s Book Awards in book design–and The Last Temptation of Bond in the poetry category.

From the start, through highly detailed second-person, as well as third-person prose, Beach pulls her readers into the world of Bond and his women. Another strategy, dramatic scripts (including stage directions), allows Beach to bring Bond the cultural hero into the living room of One and The Other, the fictional women who watch Bond movies and who ultimately laser Bond up the middle. This play among fictional characters into what the reader understands as “the present” or perhaps even “real life” is effective. For instance, One’s high antics imperative: “Don’t pause,” is dismissed by The Other who pauses the movie and grabs two mini-glazed doughnuts. These gals will eventually be joined by a cast of Bond women who serve as the Greek chorus at Bond’s demise.

The power of this book is its confident enjoyment within fictional and imaginative realities. Beach’s writing aims to give readers as direct an experience of its content as possible; often, it accomplishes this by thrusting the readers–an implied “you”–into the over-the-top scenes. “On the vanity next to the bed is a brown box . . . Pick it up and carry it to the edge of the bed. Lift the brass clasp.”

The book calculatedly engages its readers on an experiential level and demands readers’ responses not only to its content but to the ways the content is delivered. Its light touch is always tongue in cheek; these are never real people, but, rather, highly entertaining cinematic fantasies. Very sexy.

Cornelia Hoogland’s latest book is Woods Wolf Girl (Wolsak and Wynn, 2011). “Sea Level” is forthcoming with Baseline Press.

 

 

Zen of the street

Chase the Dragon 
By Chris Walter
GFY Press, 247 pp, $15.98

Reviewed by Yasuko Thanh

Vancouver punk-band biographer and novelist Chris Walter’s latest book Chase the Dragon centres around Dragon, the protagonist, who earned his nickname for once being “dragged-in” through a doorway. The expression functions as a street metaphor for smoking heroin, “chasing” the smoke as you heat the drug on tinfoil. Throughout the course of the book, a death metal musician and a hit-man with OCD chase Dragon, literally. But Dragon is also being chased by his addictions and a past that’s gaining on him.

Walter’s matter of fact, straight-up style conspires with a darkly comic tone to offer us characters from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES) in a manner reminiscent of Margaret Laurence’s strongest characters–they often ought to be despairing, but aren’t. No Pity Parties here.

This tightly plotted page turner is liberally dosed with a kind of Zen of the Street enlightenment. Yet Walter avoids the misstep of romanticising the skids. His gift is the ability to avoid judgement of the marginalised, showing us how circumstances may force people to live in the now. People make do because they must. Like Dragon, Walter has been around. Like Dragon, Walter understands the upshot to having no life is a potentially greater capacity for selflessness.

Walter pokes holes in the sugar-coated and sentimental rescue by a guardian angel of It’s a Wonderful Life when Dragon risks his life to save a drowning boy. It’s not a wonderful life but real life, and any sudden reversals of fortune are sure to remain cosmetic as Dragon is a man who can’t escape what he’s got coming.

Walter presents his characters stripped bare, standing in the cold. He glosses over nothing, giving us the ugliness of people. Like Dickens, he’s a chronicler of place and time, and his hard-earned realism conveys the freedom of having nothing left to lose.

I asked Walter  if he thought his subject matter makes his work hard to read: “‘Gritty’ subject matter is what I do. I’m beginning to hate that adjective, but I rely on black humour to make hard subjects tolerable, enjoyable even. If readers are bombarded with too much ugliness they will lose interest and stop reading. I want them to laugh despite themselves, and they should then feel slightly guilty for having done so. I want to invite strangers into my head and show them all the rooms, even that creepy, unfinished attic. I don’t want to write about easy, feel-good subjects; I want the reader to think.”

To describe the residents of the DTES in a tragic, sentimental, or villifying light is, at the least, in bad artistic taste. At worst, it could be argued, such representations in popular culture are dangerous, perpetrating stereotypes that lead to dangerous stigmatisation and create the kind of climate from which nearly fifty women could be abducted from the DTES.

Walter’s trademark black humour is rapidly earning him cult hero status. A literary outlaw, he never preaches. “Outlaw literature goes against the grain of the established literary industry,” Walter says. “Outlaw literature does not rely on government funding or grants and springs from a desire to speak the truth without fear of offending anyone. Outlaw literature is not subtle. Outlaw literature exists separately from the mainstream. That being said, I never use that term to describe my work. I prefer to call my stuff street lit because it sounds less pretentious. I don’t swing a sword; I sit behind a desk.”

The writing occasionally stumbles, with lines such as, “Like the cop to the doughnut, junkies were drawn to addiction and madness.” But what he brings off makes pointing out such mistakes seem petty. Chase the Dragon is an accomplished feat of realism. Can Lit is lucky to have him.

Catch Chris Walter at one of his island book launches:

Nanaimo: The Cambie, July 5, 8 pm. Copies available for $10 (only at launch).

Esquimalt (Victoria): The Cambie, July 6, 9 pm, with music by The Capital City Stalkers and The Role Models, $10 at the door or $7 advance.

Yasuko Thanh’s short story collection, Floating Like the Dead, was recently nominated for a BC book prize.