Category Archives: Aaron Shepard

Zombie tale served with literary twist

All Day Breakfast

By Adam Lewis Schroeder

Douglas and McIntyre

378 pages, $22.95

Reviewed by Aaron Shepard

Zombies, as cultural icons go, are surprisingly durable and versatile: they can do straight-up horror or gross-out comedy horror. And they seem to have something more to say about us humans than the one-note, sexy vampires. Their shambling gait and rotting flesh suggests the entropy of society, the emptiness of our consumer culture. Their mindless rage reflects the futility and irrationality of our own. Zombies are the scapegoats we send out into the wilderness (and decapitate when they come stumbling back).

But what if zombies weren’t just the brainless seeking brains? What if they were just like you and me, only more flippant when losing a body part? What if their rage could be entirely– well, mostly – justified? What if they didn’t need to eat brains at all, just a bottomless supply of bacon?

That, in a nutshell, is Schroeder’s premise. When substitute teacher, vegetarian and recently widowed father Peter Giller leads his grade 11 class on a field trip to a plastics factory, an accident seems to trigger bizarre changes in them, including a ravenous urge for nitrites, and limbs that randomly fall off (“I must have slept on it funny,” one student mumbles nonchalantly about her missing arm). When it becomes apparent that someone – a mysterious corporation, the military – is hunting down everyone involved in the accident, Peter leaves his two children with his mother-in-law and hits the road with his fellow undead in search of a cure. Along the way they struggle with identity crises, anger management issues and their imminent decay.

Given Schroeder’s well-acclaimed past works – two novels and a short story collection that offered new takes on historical literary fiction – the question arises: is he merely slumming in the horror/comedy genre with All-Day Breakfast? Or is this literary fiction in disguise?

The answer is that he’s bringing the best of both genres together. While there are nudges and winks toward the CanLit scene (the name “Giller” is likely no coincidence), including a sly allusion to the late Paul Quarrington’s band, Pork Belly Futures, the story is heavier on action and plot than your average CanLit read. In fact, with subplots that include genetic experimentation, military contracting and the Congolese civil wars, All-Day Breakfast has more twists and turns than most horror novels. Packed with dense prose, the long ending threatens to lose steam while tying up loose ends, but is salvaged by a satisfying act of revenge. This is a loose, anarchic read tempered by intelligence and wit.

What really sets the book apart, though, is the depth of characterization. Schroeder’s characters, armed with razor-sharp dialogue and exquisite attention to detail, are (ironically) so full of life, the reader becomes quite attached: a dangerous thing in a novel where not everyone gets to live, true, but this lends his story a surprising poignancy. Peter Giller’s grief for his dead wife, absent children and undead students, serves to unify and enrich the often horrific imagery. As Giller frequently tells us: We each fall apart in our own time and in our own way.

Aaron Shepard’s first novel When is a Man is published through Brindle and Glass.

Henderson’s new novel shocks with depth and heart

The Road Narrows as You Go

By Lee Henderson

Hamish Hamilton

512 pp. $32.95

Reviewed by Aaron Shepard

Set almost entirely in the mid-1980s, The Road Narrows as You Go is both satire and Künstlerroman, chronicling the rise and fall of Wendy Ashbubble, a budding cartoonist who dreams of a career like her hero, Charles Schulz. She resides at No Manors, the home of San Francisco’s beloved artist Hick Elmsdales, who succumbs to AIDS at the story’s beginning. The aftermath of his death includes a two-day wake attended by both fictional and real legends such as Art Spiegelman, Berkeley Breathed and Schulz himself. There’s also a cannibalistic ritual initiated by the mysterious artist Jonjay, Wendy’s muse, which establishes the novel’s anarchic tone.

Wendy’s strip, Strays, finds success thanks to Frank Fleecen, a financial wizard and junk bonds trader who hooks her up with increasingly lucrative syndication and merchandise deals. No Manors becomes a comic strip factory, a commune fueled by coffee, weed, sex and a collective love of comics and art.

Wendy’s story is narrated by her four assistants, who serve as a Greek chorus to this ribald tale. The assistants’ Sisyphean task of creating an animated Strays Christmas television special anchors the narrative and allows for interesting digressions on the history of animation and other art mediums. Much like A.S. Byatt, herself a passionate art historian, Henderson unapologetically fills pages with cultural quasi-lectures. It’s tempting to skim at times, but the patient reader is rewarded with moments of insight and arresting detail: “A drawing was the soul of all art….His fences weren’t Berlin Walls, they were barriers between childhood and adulthood, or between the imagination and its prey, easily climbed over, spied through, vandalized and whitewashed.”

Wendy is a conflicted character: ambitious but naïve, free-spirited but insecure. Among her quirks is her belief that Ronald Reagan is her father, though she’s largely ignorant of his politics and – like this reader – the world of finance in general.

If Reagan is the distant father figure, Frank is the sexualized embodiment of Reaganomics. Frank and Wendy rocket through the story riding the shotgun energy of frontier capitalism. As Wendy’s hunger for mainstream acceptance grows, a series of crises presages her downfall: the disappearance of Jonjay; a snooping Securities and Exchanges Commission; the emergence of her polar opposite, Bill Watterson, the famously anti-consumerist creator of Calvin and Hobbes.

John Ralston Saul recently remarked on Nikolai Gogol’s influence on dark comedy in the modern novel. Akin to Chichikov’s encounters in Dead Souls, Henderson’s frequently hilarious and raunchy scenes brim with a manic, moral energy. While the novel pays homage to the comic strip heyday of the ’80s, it is also concerned with the phenomena of excess, the creative impulse colliding with capitalist greed. Even set among motifs particular to that decade – the rise of AIDS, the hysteria over satanic cults – things like “the deregulation of the financial market and privatization of the prison industrial complex” feel immediate and urgent, the roots of our social and financial crises laid bare.

The final chapters, which speed through the next two decades while still engaging the reader, offer a poignant, surprising denouement that recasts the entire story in a wondrously different light. As in Henderson’s first novel, The Man Game, there is a note of yearning here, a desire for a world where aesthetics and the pleasures of art are accorded greater value than they’re given in our humdrum, market-driven reality. Like a good comic strip, beneath all the hijinks, The Road Narrows as You Go shocks you with its depth and heart.

Everything Aaron Shepard knows about Ronald Reagan he learned from reading Bloom County as a teenager in Salmon Arm. When is a Man (Brindle and Glass, 2014) is his first novel.

Gateway expose shows inaction no option

The Oil Man and the Sea:

Navigating the Northern Gateway

By Arno Kopecky

Douglas & McIntyre

264 pages, $26.95

Reviewed by Aaron Shepard

Part rousing adventure and travelogue, part exposé, The Oil Man and the Sea follows journalist and travel writer Arno Kopecky and photographer Ilja Herb as they sail from Victoria up B.C.’s central coast. They travel not just as reporters but as activists, hoping to raise awareness about the environmental risks the Northern Gateway pipeline poses to one of the world’s last great wildernesses.

As with most books of this sort, we begin not with big themes, but the adventurer-writer beset by anchor mishaps, engine failure and an overwhelming array of nautical charts and equipment. At times in the first few chapters, their quest seems not just quixotic, but forgotten altogether. But the fumbling of these novice sailors is an intimate, effective way of immersing readers in an unfamiliar landscape. And their early misadventures dovetail nicely with one of the book’s main themes: the vibrant, hazardous complexity of the coastline and its people.

Kopecky introduces us, directly or indirectly, to the multitude of big names at the centre of the Northern Gateway drama, including Enbridge, the federal and provincial governments, the Joint Review Panel, the Heiltsuk, Gitga’at, Haisla Nations, the Pacific Pilotage Authority (the pilot boats that would lead oil tankers through the treacherous coastline), and Bill C-38, the federal omnibus bill that inexplicably closed B.C.’s oil spill response centre. We also meet a host of memorable characters: fishermen, engineers, environmentalists, First Nations elders and band councilors who offer their different opinions about pipelines, refineries and oil tankers.

But it is the coastline itself – a “labyrinth” of channels, straits, bays and islands – that remains the biggest player on stage, a place both robust and fragile with its turbulent seas, salmon runs and rich wildlife. Perhaps the most vivid evocation of place is near the book’s end, when Kopecky explores Douglas Channel and the humpback whales that may have to share their once-quiet waters with tankers bearing bitumen and liquefied natural gas.

Between conversations with the locals, fishing and grizzly bear watching – the book contains some gorgeous photos – Kopecky pulls the lens back to show the equally intricate web of national politics, science and economics. An adventure that begins with two young men goofing around on a sailboat becomes a story about Big Oil, and the future of a province, its people and its wilderness.

The Oil Man and the Sea is refreshingly current and vital, with a postscript that includes the deadly explosion in Lac-Megantic this past July. Disasters like Lac-Megantic and the Kalamazoo River bitumen spill in 2010 illustrate our complicity: our consumption drives the need to pull as much oil from the ground as humanly possible, whatever the risk. Kopecky’s quest for a tanker-free coast may indeed prove quixotic, but his message is that we should take responsibility, at the very least, for ensuring governments and industry enforce and follow strict environmental and safety regulations. No matter how confusing or paradoxical the issue of pipelines and the economy, our inaction is not an option.

Aaron Shepard is a Victoria writer. His debut novel, When is a Man, will be published in April 2014. 

 

Dubeau revisits cinema and gaming moments

Silence, on joue! (A Time for Us)
Angèle Dubeau & La Pieta (2012)
Game Music

Reviewed by Aaron Shepard

Angèle Dubeau, a stellar violinist, is one of Canada’s most accomplished and celebrated classical musicians. Along with La Pieta, the all-female ensemble that has accompanied her since 1997, she has recorded rich, exuberant interpretations of composers such as Philip Glass, Arvo Part and John Adams that are faithful to the spirit of the original, yet accessible to a broad audience. Her signature sound of virtuoso musicianship, lush orchestrations and warm production values invariably smooths the edges from the more experimental pieces. Not that you’ll find anything too edgy in Silence, on joue! This collection of soundtrack covers is about giving the people what they want. Featuring selections from films as varied as Memoirs of a Geisha, The English Patient, Modern Times, and Cinema Paradiso, Silence will tug at the heart and memory strings of cinephiles. Some tracks, like “Over the Rainbow” and “Concerning Hobbits,” are instantly recognizable, while songs from Hana-Bi and L’odyssee d’Alice Tremblay are a bit more obscure. Regardless, they all tend toward the romantic, the pensive and the uplifting, and are perhaps too similar, too polished, to truly excite.

I’m not saying these songs lack sophistication. Composers like Ennio Morricone, John Williams and Joe Hisaishi, while mainstream, are too brilliant to turn out mere sugary pap, while Dubeau and La Pieta’s thoughtful instrumentation lends subtle depth to even a sentimental piece like “My Heart Will Go On.” If there is nothing unexpected here, these near-flawless interpretations offer a pleasurable, nostalgic journey for the listener.

Game Music, stretching the boundaries of classical music through interpretations of video game theme songs, is the more interesting of the two collections. Here, Dubeau and La Pieta capture the sense of magic and fantasy inherent in epic games and offer a glimpse into the gamer’s experience of being in another world, similar to the way one can be transported by a very good film (or very good film music). The maturity of many tracks demonstrates the extent to which video games have evolved in terms of narrative complexity and even emotional depth.

Like Silence, Game Music is easy on the ears, but also far more diverse and challenging for both musician and audience. Several songs–like “Heavy Rain,” “Final Fantasy” and “Secret of Mana”–are surprisingly beautiful, balancing tense, ominous crescendos with quiet interludes. “Chrono Trigger & Chrono Cross” soars with Middle-Eastern violins and galloping hand drums reminiscent of Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Project. “Tetris,” with its harpsichord and an exuberant, Tchaikovsky-esque string section, is a far cry from the clunky, electronic version I remember from my youth. Meanwhile, the upbeat “Angry Birds Theme”–from the immensely popular kids’ game–is one of Dubeau’s most purchased tracks on iTunes.

In both collections, one senses Dubeau’s respect for the music, her belief in the ability of each song – yes, even the tired Titanic love theme – to exist apart from the scenes and images for which it was originally created. Through that respect and sincerity, she’s succeeded in giving the songs of Game Music and Silence a life of their own, freeing them to become soundtracks for new memories and associations: perhaps a comfy chair by the fire on a rainy day, or the view from a seaside cottage, if the listener is lucky enough.

 

Aaron Shepard, a former musician, is shopping his first novel around publishers’ desks and writing his second.