Thursday, December 30, 2010

Review: How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, by Charles Yu


Published: September 2010

Finally got around to it: December 2010


At some point in your life, this statement will be true: Tomorrow you will lose everything forever.


***


Science fiction wrapped up in science fiction, attempting to unravel the merits and difficulties of living in a time-displaced science fictional universe with a moderately depressed operating system named TAMMY as the closest thing to a love interest, and a there-but-not-there, ontologically valid dog named Ed (whose gas can diffuse even the tensest of situations). Such is the life of an intrepid time travel machine repairman, conveniently named Charles Yu, who seeks to discover the fate of his possibly time-abandoned father (or merely family-abandoning father) and at the same time save himself from shooting… himself. All with the help of a book he will one day write and at the same time has already written titled, again, conveniently, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe.

And yet, it all makes perfect sense.

Charles Yu’s debut novel is a work of lyrical trickery and poetic manipulation. It thinly veils the allegorical beneath a tidal wave of science fictional tropes and concepts, yet never sacrifices an ounce of the plot or its detail in the process—in essence, the allegorical loss and disposition within one’s life and family drive the science fiction, and the science fiction adds the foundation by which the family drama is spun, winding itself ever tighter around a paradoxical core.

Try as I might, there’s no way I can do this book justice through such modest descriptive talents. The only way to truly get a taste of Charles Yu’s madness is to read it for your self:


There are gaps, blanks, throughout, which I will need to fill in. There are gaps in my autobiography.

Here is one such gap.*










*NB: This is how the text actually reads in the copy I am working from. The text also includes this explanatory (and somewhat self-referential) footnote, including this second sentence, which is itself a second-order meta-explanation of the already explanatory first sentence. It is unclear what the function of this self-referentiality is, other than to raise doubts in my mind as to the actual provenance of this manuscript, although I do note that this third sentence, just like the rest of this footnote, is also in the text that I am copying from, verbatim, which makes it seem almost as if I am, in a way, telling myself what to think, that my future self has produced a record of the output of my consciousness, of my internal monologue. Or rather, a dialogue, between myself and my future self, in which my future self is telling my present self what I have already finished thinking but have not yet realized I thought.


If reading this not only put a smile on your face, but also made some kind of fantastic, nonsensical kind of sense, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe will delight you in ways a never-ending temporal loop simply never will, never could, and has never in the past in which you’ve already experienced it several thousand times over (because no self-respecting temporal loop could ever have an end—not without presenting one hell of a paradox).

This book is a lightning bolt of unrestrained creativity and lyricism all too rare in contemporary science fiction—or science fictional universes for that matter.

Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Review: Bedtime Story, by Robert J. Wiersema


Published: November 2010

Finally got around to it: December 2010


Gonna go out on a limb here: Robert J. Wiersema has a thing for broken families—maybe not even broken, but in the process of slowly, agonizingly falling apart. That, and childhood trauma of the sort that would likely scar one for life.

The narrative in Bedtime Story is charmingly simple, but layered with an almost unsettling amount of emotional honesty (as much honesty as one can convey through layers of magical realism). A writer whose second book is years overdue, struggles to connect to his wife and son. On his son’s birthday, Chris, the protagonist, gives him a fantasy book by an author he loved as a child. While reading the book, his son, David, suffers a dramatic seizure and becomes trapped within the narrative, fighting to resolve the story. What follows is, in essence, two interwoven narratives striving towards a unified climax.

This calendar year, I’ve read all three of Wiersema’s books: Bedtime Story, Before I Wake, and the novella The World More Full of Weeping. To clear the obvious from the table, I loved all three. He’s an incredibly creative, intelligent, and most importantly, reserved writer. Wiersema has a gift for giving a scene exactly the amount of severity it needs, never giving in to the ever-alluring pull of melodrama. He’s able to sell us narratives of magical realism, to convince us that the fables he spins are as possible as anything in our world by anchoring them to characters that break, that lie to one another, that hurt and betray one another, but still love each other and never, ever fall into the territory of the black-and-white archetypes whose villainous or saint-like behaviour can seemingly never be forgiven or related to.

Bedtime Story gives us a trio of characters in the protagonist Chris, his estranged wife Jacqui, and their son David that are an absolute joy to spend an entire novel with. Though in some ways Chris and Jacqui can feel like modest iterations of the husband and wife at the heart of Before I Wake, they are fully formed and three-dimensional in the sense that their language and actions never feel alien or hyper-realized, as so much lesser fiction would attempt to convey in an effort to increase the drama of a given scene or moment.

Though the structure of Bedtime Story is not terribly unique—many books have used the interwoven narrative approach to varying degrees of success—its payoff is worth the journey, as the manner in which the two worlds come together, both in terms of narrative as well as the visual avalanche of universes bleeding together, is truly climactic. As the individual parts become more entwined and less segregated into individual chapters, Wiersema aptly brings several lingering—but never extraneous—threads to a head that feels entirely earned.

In fact, if I were to lob any criticism onto Bedtime Story, it would simply be that it feels, in some ways, too similar to Before I Wake, especially in the realms of theme and characterization. That’s not to say that what is accomplished isn’t impressive—as it clearly is—but I was left with less of a feeling of genuine exploration into a new world, and more as if I were traversing a slightly less biblical and more Tolkien-esque iteration on a previous blueprint. Part of this feeling might be rooted in the fact that I have read all of Wiersema’s works in such short order, but that doesn’t change the fact that the similarities are there, and they are obvious to a fan of his work. And if I had to choose, the characters and narrative in Before I Wake are still the most captivating of his creations.

Wiersema is a gifted novelist, and I would be remiss if I didn’t mention other authors I happen to love who also tackle similar character archetypes again and again (Murakami, Auster, King), but for his next work, I would love to see him step away from the broken family/childhood trauma themes and to really challenge himself on startlingly new terrain.

Saturday, December 25, 2010

Reflections: A Drifting Life, by Yoshihiro Tatsumi


Published: April 2009

First read: May 2008

Finally got around to it (again): December 2010


First thing’s first: this is not a review. In fact, do not trust my critical opinion on this book at all. I’m in love with it, and I have been since first laying my hands on the original Japanese manuscript and the Microsoft Word translation document back in May 2008. If you want my opinion, anyone with even a passing interest in graphica and/or manga and gekiga should pick this brick of a book up. It’s epic, sweeping, and an absolute joy to get caught up in.

But again, might be best to make up your own minds on this particular piece, as I have had more of myself invested in this project than in any other book I’ve worked on to date.

Back in May 2008, as part of my Masters Degree in Publishing, I embarked on an internship with Drawn & Quarterly in Montréal. It was to be a three-month stint, after which I’d come home, write up my thesis, and hang up my educational spurs (until I finally decide to torment myself further by tackling a PhD… one of these days).

My second week at work for Drawn & Quarterly, I was handed two rather obscene stacks of paper. The first was 820 pages of photocopies—the original Japanese-language version of the 48-chapter epic (then tentatively titled A Drifting Life in Gekiga), and the second was the printed page-by-page translation, written out to minimal effect in Word. I was given three tasks: the first was to read through the story with the translation in hand, to make sure it read well and was compelling; the second was to catch any and all parts that, editorially speaking, made little sense (including basic grammatical problems and structural issues and matching each section of the translation with each panel in the text—something that the translator neglected to do); and the final part of this multi-stage reading was to catch the inconsistencies between Japanese and English structures—namely, seeing which panels had to be flipped, to ensure that the speech bubbles work properly in each scene to read the dialogue and action from left to right and not right to left, as is how Japanese books are read.

Upon completion of this work, the documents cycled between us in Montréal, the translator in Japan, the editor-in-chief of the project in Los Angeles, and eventually myself back in Vancouver. Interspersed with all the other work I was doing at Drawn & Quarterly, A Drifting Life always came back to me at another stage of its progress. It wasn’t long before I realized two things: I had my thesis topic buried in the construction of this book, and I would see it to the end, no matter what. And that’s exactly what I did.

I left Montréal late that August, a changed man in many ways, with A Drifting Life in tow. The next three weeks were a caffeine-fuelled haze as I input the English-language text into each and every speech bubble across more than 800 pages, simultaneously noting the items needed for an appendix (things that couldn’t be translated because they were a part of the artwork). Once that was finished, I immediately followed up one marathon with another and got to work on my thesis—a paper documenting the history of comics and manga, the correlations between the two, and the production of A Drifting Life from start to glorious finish.

From the fall, through the winter and into the early stages of the following spring, I finished my work on the book, giving the project and its appendix a round of final proofs, and completed work on my thesis, which was accepted in December 2008, bringing my whirlwind Masters Degree in Publishing to a dramatic close. Around February or March 2009, I received a package in the mail from Drawn & Quarterly. My heart practically stopped as I pulled out a copy of the book, which was then and is today the most beautiful book in my collection. Even with everything I’ve had my hand in since, in a lot of ways my work on A Drifting Life has come to represent a very precise period in my life—a period of great change, a tremendous amount of growing up, and a time when I discovered what I was truly capable of (and how many hours it was possible for me to go without sleep).

In May of 2009, I was able to bring the work full circle, when I flew out to Toronto to meet the man himself, Yoshihiro Tatsumi, and the editor-in-chief of the project, Adrian Tomine. The signed copy of the book (with an original illustration no less) that sits on my shelf at home is the one item I would race to grab if my apartment were on fire. There’s little in terms of material objects I treasure more, and there’s nothing I’ve worked on that has as much of myself poured into it, save for my own writing projects.

Yet with all this, I had not read the book. Let me clarify: I read it more than a dozen times while working on it, and subsequently writing about it, but I had not once read the finished product for enjoyment.

I corrected this three days ago, sitting in a Second Cup on Jasper Avenue in downtown Edmonton with a gingerbread latte in one hand and the book in the other as I waited the four or five hours I had before my flight home for Christmas.

As I read the book, seemingly for the first time as a reader and not a student/editor/production grunt, I was struck by how much I was still in love with the story. Chronicling the author’s youth and introduction into the manga scene in 1940s post-war Japan, there is a lot of A Drifting Life that I feel a kinship with—namely the struggle one has with their artistic desires in a world that will forever value practicality and production first and foremost. But what I was happiest about, reading it again, in some ways for the first time, was that I was able to detach from it—to enjoy it for what it was, without my interaction with the book being at the forefront of my brain. I wasn’t looking for mistakes, or areas where I could have done a better job; rather I was losing myself to the narrative without having to force myself to do so.

What I did feel, reading it in that extended coffee shop sitting, was a strong sense of reflection. In many ways, A Drifting Life is representative of the many turns my life has taken in recent months and years. I was able to live, albeit for a short time, a dream I had had since elementary school: working with comics. As someone with strong visual and narrative ideals, the form has the ability to represent the best of both worlds. I was certainly changed by the experience—and the location—which fostered so much personal growth and a divergence from the safety I had come to surround myself with.

After completing my degree, I hit a wall. I couldn’t find work in publishing if my life depended on it. Sure I was able to get freelance editorial gigs here and there, but something stable and dependable with a 9-5 schedule? Ha!

For two years I applied, interviewed, and got nowhere. Maybe I didn’t know the right people, maybe I just lived in the wrong location, or maybe I just wasn’t good enough. Either way, the literary fish weren’t biting. But late last year, I had an opportunity I never thought would come—an offer from a filmmaker friend to write a spec script on an idea he had brewing for some time. I took the chance and tackled the project. Over several months, from the end of 2009 to the middle of 2010, I wrote like a mad fool. In between editorial contracts and job applications, I wrote the script, and really fell hard into short story writing. I began submitting my writing work after completing and selling the script, and eventually, in the middle of this year, gained traction—finally getting a story published. Since then, my world has taken off, albeit in an unexpected direction.

A bite, from a small literary publisher in Edmonton, Alberta called NeWest Press. In August, I picked up my life and moved one province to the east to begin work as the production and marketing coordinator for NeWest, finally giving myself not only the stability I was craving, but also the opportunity to expand upon my writing and freelance editorial work. Since moving, I’ve had the opportunity to get to know many authors and to increase my presence in the publishing community, which I had sought to become a greater part of for several years. I’ve seen several books through at various stages of their production, and I’ve had a chance to dip my toes into marketing in a way that I had not ever had reason to before. I’ve even had the tremendous opportunity of dealing with publishing on a national stage as one of our books has been thrust into the limelight as a 2011 CBC Canada Reads finalist.

All of this has given me such a push, a feeling of momentum that I had been missing for so long. Since beginning this job, my freelance work has picked up, the film has gone into pre-production, and I’ve begun posting my short fiction and book reviews online, to increasing exposure. I’ve stepped out of my shell, my comfort zone, in ways I had never expected, and in the process have met people from around the industry—and around the world—that have changed me in incredible ways.

To look at myself only two years ago and to look at myself now is to look at two completely different individuals. But to trace the path from one to the next is to start in the simplest of places—with one hell of a thick book and a level of devotion I never knew was in me.

A Drifting Life was the starter pistol in a new chapter. I stumbled for the first few metres, but eventually I found my footing and only now the race has begun. As I’ve reached this point in my life and met several long-term goals, I can look back on this stretch of time and the growth included—both good and bad experiences alike—and see how much I’ve changed for the better, how much stronger and more experienced I have become, and most importantly, that I have absolutely no idea what’s next.

I’ve been adrift for long enough. And like Hiroshi, the protagonist of the book at the heart of all this, my focus—my passion—is what it has always been. Only now I know that I’m capable of achieving it.

Monday, December 20, 2010

Review: Apocalypse For Beginners, by Nicolas Dickner


Published: December 2010

Finally got around to it: Pretty much right away, actually


Despite devouring this book as soon as it was in my hands (the synopsis was just enticing enough), there was some trepidation on my part. Nicolas Dickner gained recognition last year after winning CBC’s Canada Reads competition for his previous book, Nikolski. For the life of me, I don’t know how that came to pass. Nikolski, for me, represented what some claimed to be a growing problem with Canadian literature—that it was limp and non-committal, with narratives that lacked direction and too many esoteric plot threads just quirky enough to sound great on the jacket of a book, but sadly remain one-dimensional, never really seeming to propel the characters or story. In other words, no beginning, no real arc or ending to be found, just a whole lot of self-exploratory middle. I remember finishing Nikolski and wondering what, if anything, there was to take from the book.

It was the premise that drew me to Dickner’s new book, Apocalypse for Beginners. At the tail end of the 1980s, the young narrator, Mickey, meets a girl named Hope Randall who lives in a converted pet shop with her borderline-insane mother, Ann. Why is Ann teetering on the edge of sanity? Because every member of the Randall clan, reaching back for generations, has had a crystal clear vision of the apocalypse, right down to the exact day and date. Upon the passing of each suspected final day, when the world continues to spin and another seemingly unavoidable apocalypse has passed by without so much as a whimper, the owner of the failed prediction would leave their sanity at the door and lose whatever was left of their mind. Hope’s mother, for some reason, was given a less than precise date to go on, and spends her days neglecting her daughter while she researches all possible ways to extrapolate a more precise day for her anticipated apocalyptic event. Why would she do this? Because you can’t be a proper Randall without the precision of the vision.

Hope, on the other hand, has been offered a day and date for her own end of days countdown, and it is the journey of discovery she takes with Mickey—and on her own—to understand the date and the seemingly impossible coincidences surrounding it that provide the book’s structure.

Instantly the characters of Hope and Mickey are likable and, though potentially too quirky for some, very relatable. Dickner is a self-professed child of the 80s and it shows, as such things like the fall of the Berlin wall (and talk of its rather shoddy construction) and the fall of the USSR provide much of the contemplation behind not only the coming end of the world, but what it means for a world to end in the first place.

Though there are still some elements that feel almost too esoteric for their own good (such as the ghostly disappearance of a surveillance-happy Japanese not-so-wannabe prophet from the bathroom of a Tokyo baseball stadium), Apocalypse for Beginners is a much tighter, more focussed work than Nikolski. Dickner realizes his strength is in his characters and the connection they’ve forged, and it is only when that connection is strained that the disquiet of the subject matter becomes a little overbearing. But that strain is absolutely necessary, and the distance it enforces sets emotions in play for a genuinely heart-warming finale. And when I set the book down, I was smiling.

That should say it all.

Sunday, December 19, 2010

Review: Hate List, by Jennifer Brown


Published: September 2009

Finally got around to it: December 2010


I was in Grade 12 when Columbine became a loaded word. I can remember the exact day, even where I was and what class I was in when the news came over the television bolted to the corner of my Literature 12 classroom. There had been incidents throughout the years of kids bringing violence and weaponry to the classroom, but few as world-changing as the massacre of 12 students and one teacher on April 20, 1999 by the hands of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, two unsteady individuals who had decided to punish as many as possible for the hurt, the bullying and the persecution they felt they had been the victims of for all too long.

I remember thinking at the time, in spite of the horror, that I could see how they got from point A to point B. I couldn’t relate, I didn’t sympathize, I sure as hell didn’t understand what it would take for a person to go to such extreme lengths, but objectively speaking, I felt that it was possible to draw a map from Insult One all the way to the final shots as they took themselves out of the picture. Toss in some neglectful parenting and a little psychosis and the recipe was there.

To say I wasn’t popular would be like saying snow is cold. I was, for four years, a soft, short, well-tenderized stub of a student content to see any day that I flew under the radar as a pretty damn good day. Then there were the days when you had had enough—when you daydreamed about lashing out at your French teacher for giving you an especially undeserved hard time, or finally getting the upper hand on someone before they could take advantage of you. I’d say the number of students who find themselves with these thoughts is probably far greater than those who would grow up to say “Man, high school, now those were the best years of my life.” But to dream about showing up a tormenter, and to take a gun to them and everyone in the vicinity—guilty or innocent—are two dramatically different things. So different that to understand the brain of someone capable of mass murdering a student populace would, I imagine, be next to impossible.

This is what Jennifer Brown attempts to do in Hate List.

Set in the aftermath of a May 2nd school shooting that leaves a half dozen dead and an entire school psychologically wounded, Hate List follows Val, the girlfriend of Nick Levil, the gunman who, using a notebook they had written together of those they wished to punish, snapped and took it upon himself to exact vengeance for all the shit he had been forced to put up with at the hands of everyone who felt it was their place to call him a freak. But Hate List isn’t about Nick. It’s about Val, how she deals with what has happened, and the changing relationship she has with her family, friends, and the victims of the list she had concocted with Nick—a list she had never intended to see the light of day. For Val, it was a harmless way to vent, to take aim and fire at those that took so much glee in making her life a day-to-day living hell. For Nick, for someone just unsteady enough to see reality in the lines of fiction, it was a roadmap to justice.

Brown has written an intelligent, thoughtful look at not only what it takes to push someone to such horrific actions, but also the little tragedies that follow in its wake like aftershocks, forever shifting the uneasy ground beneath the feet of those left behind. For Val, the world changed when Nick began his attack, and a part of her died when he turned the gun on himself. But her journey is one of understanding—understanding that the man she loved and the monster that had been revealed were both one and the same, but also different. Understanding the implications of hate and what it means to hate. Understanding that some people are incapable of forgiveness, while others prove more capable than ever imagined—and that those elements are not confined to the intimacy of the connection (case in point: Val’s father, who couldn’t win Father of the Year if he discovered the cures for cancer, AIDS, and the common cold and made it all taste like Belgium hot chocolate).

There were parts of Hate List that were genuinely hard to stomach, such as people you so desperately wanted to grow receding into the shells of their own creation, family and friends so horrible and spiteful that you wish for comeuppance that will never come. But that frustration, those missed opportunities for reconciliation are what give this book its grounding in reality. Because death changes everyone and everything. Because some things can never be fixed. And because sometimes the only way for life to go on is to a new place, somewhere that has no map, no destination, and no lists of any kind.

Because every victim deserves a second chance.

Review: In The Mean Time, by Paul Tremblay


Published: October 2010

Finally got around to it: December 2010


Wordlessly, Jody and Joe climbed down the ridge. They crept behind the jagged boulder and found his body, lying adjacent to the flat rock upon which he landed. The boy looked like Joe and the boy looked like Jody, but only smaller, younger. The left side of his head was dented, caved-in, and was missing a flap of scalp. His left arm was held out stiffly and twitched, beating like one wing of a broken hummingbird. The lower half of his face had crumbled, ice cream melting over a cone. He was breathing, but irregularly. They crouched, hands over their mouths, but not over their eyes. His chest inflated sharply, then deflated slowly, a sagging balloon. The right side of his face was perfect, asleep. His left eye was swollen shut, or missing. It was hard to know for sure with the orbital socket broken, pushed in, along with the area around his temple. Everything leaked slowly. There were too many colours on his face. And his teeth, his teeth, they were baby teeth, as small as seeds, and they peppered the sand and dirt around his head, those miniature headstones in the sand. Then there was one long sigh and the boy stopped breathing and his arm stopped moving.


***


A collection of 15 dark fantasy/surrealist tales, Paul Tremblay’s In The Mean Time is a wildly uneven book—at times brilliant and subversive (such as the frame-by-frame creeping of a security video taken in a classroom that forever disrupts the life and mental state of a student), but equally capable of being overtly mundane and obtuse. Already a published author several times over, Tremblay’s skilful use of language shines in every story (as seen in the disturbingly brilliant portion up above). But it’s the tales themselves that suffer from a somewhat discombobulated tone.

Narrative is clearly not Tremblay’s intent with these tales. He’s not interested in telling us a story or taking us on a ride. No, what drives these disparate stories is the onion peeling of layers and layers of distress, trauma and psychosis—all captivating conceptually, but not always relayed in an intriguing manner.

In cases where this style absolutely works—“The Teacher”; “The Two-Headed Girl”; “There’s No Light Between Floors”; “Headstones in Your Pocket”—the characters provide just enough three-dimensionality to really succeed at pulling the reader into the layers of subtle distress (particularly with the last story mentioned, which I felt to be the highlight of the book). They exist apart from the tales, and not as products for the writer to experiment with.

Conversely, where this stylistic approach doesn’t work as well—“The Strange Case of Nicholas Thomas: An Excerpt from A History of the Longesian Library”; “We Will Never Live in the Castle”; “The People Who Live Near Me”—the author’s experimentation results in characters who feel less approachable/relatable and more as if they were avatars for a concept only partially realized. In this regard, the collection suffers from a strange duality that prevents it from ever feeling like a complete work; many of the stories wind up feeling anticlimactic when paired with others, their intent diluted from the lack of a complete vision that is sometimes endemic of works of short fiction. This is not to say that all short fiction collections need to have a mosaic-like approach to them, but I have always felt that the more successful ones in this regard have at least an understandable focus or conceit that guides the selections and how they are paired with one another.

Sunday, December 12, 2010

Review: Sub Rosa, by Amber Dawn


Published: April 2010

Finally got around to it: December 2010


One man said, “Bury me alive.” He lay on the bed with his arms dead-man crossed over his chest. First knelt at his feet and dropped her body down, little by little. I imagined it felt like heavy clods of sod covering him from the ankles up. She unhooked her bra, and her breasts fell over his face. I heard his gasps, his muffled “yes”; I watched her hold her breath and her body grow even bigger so that not a hint of him was left.

“Do you want to revive our dear departed man here?” First signalled me over as she rolled off of him. His eyes were closed, his skin purple. A smear of semen on his thigh. I blew into his mouth.

“Come toward the light.” What else could I have said as I propped his head on my lap? First nodded in encouragement. “Come to the light,” I repeated in what I hoped was an ethereal voice.

“I’m a new man,” he cried as the colour returned to his skin. I bit down on my disbelieving smirk as he pressed a hundred-dollar bill into my hand. The money seemed alive, like I was holding a baby bird; it pulsed.


***


Memory and identity are at the core of Sub Rosa. Amber Dawn’s debut explores these broad concepts through a densely plotted magical realism narrative of gifted prostitutes called “Glories” whom each have an ability not of this world, the “live ones” that seek to escape from the city—from the Dark—by visiting Sub Rosa every chance they get, and representative fathers and mothers that run their respective houses full of working girls like high society families, respectful of one another in the open while burying their mutual distaste beneath twisted strands of town gossip and ghost stories.

Dawn’s prose is a treat. She writes sparingly, using embellishment only when necessary to create the feeling of a lucid dream when travelling between the Dark and the vibrant, hyper reality of the Sub Rosa strip. She lays out the reality beyond Sub Rosa as a muted, oppressive state of being that siphons the life of young, runaway girls, or threatens the survival of an unfortunate Glory who, because of the protection of Sub Rosa, is unprepared to deal with the harshness of a reality that they’ve forgotten over time.

As beautiful and loving as the prose may be, it only serves to accentuate the dark allegory of Sub Rosa as a subversive Neverland, where a prostitute can work safely, so long as she plays by the rules and stays within the hidden realm. To take oneself out of Sub Rosa is to throw one’s life away to ambling, zombie men who can only take and salivate, no matter the cost to a young girl’s life. But to remain in Sub Rosa, is to discard the memories and identity of one’s past—a sacrifice which, in many ways, becomes the core question of the book: are safety, security and comfort worth the cost of burying the past without having to first confront it? It’s an interesting question, one that guides the main character, Little, through the connections and risks she decides to take in the latter half of the 317-page novel.

Sub Rosa is wonderfully immersive, moves at a very fast pace, and is filled with so many magical, tantalizing visual metaphors that it leaves you feeling a little drunk by the end. As a debut, it marks the arrival of one hell of a talented storyteller, and I’m eager to see what she does next.

Review: In A Strange Room, by Damon Galgut


Published: April 2010

Finally got around to it: December 2010


Part travelogue, part psychologically deconstructive journey, In A Strange Room kept me at arm’s length for almost the entirety of its 180 pages. Structured as three mid-length stories strung together loosely as a novella, the most pressing thought I’m left with is that the book lacked focus—both on a macro and micro level, as none of the tales, independent of the whole, came together with any level of clarity beyond the objective curiosity they first inspire.

The three sections—“The Follower,” “The Lovers,” and “The Guardian”—take the main character, Damon, on journeys through Africa, India and parts of Europe, but at no point do the destinations have life breathed into them beyond the most basic clinical descriptions. The same could be said for the manner in which dialogue and interaction of any kind is handled—surgical, detached, and lacking all emotion.

I’ve been stewing over this review for days now, as I really don’t know what to say. I didn’t hate the book by any stretch, but neither would I recommend it to anyone. What is described as a journey not only through a series of exotic, sometimes treacherous, sometimes serene, landscapes, but also as an adventure as one man experiences a series of encounters that would change his life, feels like a limp, disaffected series of uncomfortable conversations from a man that seemingly wants and does not want to connect with the world around him at the same time.

The narrative choice of switching back and forth from third person to first, sometimes within the same paragraph, did not have the intended effect—I did not feel, at those moments of first person narration, an increased attachment or intimacy with Damon’s thoughts. Instead, it felt clumsy, as if I were reading the work of a writer who could neither decide to be here nor there with his thoughts.

As a purely psychological experience, there is a lot that could be dissected from Galgut’s writing style and affectations. But is it an enjoyable, intriguing, mystifying read? Not in the slightest. He approaches intrigue only with the last story, “The Guardian”, in which he takes charge over a severely bi-polar friend. In those final pages, glimpses of his humanity sparkle in and amongst some rather laborious literary choices, but never do they shine bright enough to provide you with an entry point into the young narrator’s heart.

Sunday, December 5, 2010

Review: Essex County, by Jeff Lemire


Published: Part 1 – March, 2007

Part 2 – September, 2007

Part 3 – August, 2008

The Complete Saga – September, 2009

Finally got around to it: December, 2010


Full disclosure time: I hadn’t heard more than passing comments made about Jeff Lemire’s Essex County before this year, and I might not have picked it up had it not made the top five of this year’s Canada Reads competition. That’s not a knock against the book by any means, I simply had not given it the attention it deserved.

I am so happy to have rectified this gross oversight.

Bundling together the three independent-yet-interlinked volumes that made up the saga (Tales From The Farm, Ghost Stories, and The Country Nurse), The Complete Essex County is a remarkable title of beauty, scope and serenity. Using the backdrop of a small Ontario town to bridge together the lives of two intertwined family trees over the course of nearly one hundred years, Essex County is, in fact, charming in its simplicity. That may sound trite to some, but there is no other way I can think to describe the tenderness by which Lemire writes and illustrates his populace. This is a lovingly crafted set of tales.

Most interesting is the emptiness that Lemire embraces as an intrinsic part of his visual design. The loneliness of lost souls on farms—or of those facing just as much isolation in the city, despite the densely populated surroundings—is depicted with careful attention to long, drawn out horizons and fields of vanishing points, where a tractor could work all day and barely cover the ground it needs to. Where a single crow stands out against a sea of blue and white and little else overhead. The characters are just as lovingly illustrated, but no two greater than Lou and Vince, the two brothers at the core of the second volume, Ghost Stories. The lines on their faces say more than most authors could dream of doing. The willingness to embrace nothingness or minimalism as an aesthetic conceit is something few graphic artists have the confidence to attempt, but Lemire does it with style to spare.

As the first graphic novel to break the Canada Reads barrier, I don’t think we could have a stronger contender than Essex County. The book wears its Canadian heritage with pride. This is a work of art in so many ways. A new printing of the complete saga is coming in early 2011—don’t miss this one.

Saturday, December 4, 2010

Review: Transubstantiate, by Richard Thomas


Published: April 2010

Finally got around to it: December 2010



Tran-sub-stan-ti-ate

tr.v. tran-sub-stan-ti-at-ed, tran-sub-stan-ti-at-ing, tran-sub-stan-ti-ates

1. To change (one substance) into another; transmute.

2. Christianity To change the substance of (the Eucharistic bread and wine) into the body and blood of Jesus.


***


Richard Thomas’ seven-voice neo noir thriller borrows heavily from obvious sources (Lost, the Matrix films, Ghost in the Shell, and any number of psychological thriller/horror/sci-fi tropes, but the end result it entirely its own thing. As an examination of seven broken, lost, murderous, Machiavellian, and generally fucked up souls, the mosaic painted at the end is both a rich, detailed thriller that moves with a definite sense of urgency, and a social deconstruction of what it means—and what it takes—to create a utopia.

Using the premise of an experiment in population control spawning a global virus that leaves only a fraction of a percentile still breathing, Thomas uses his seven avatars—the shopkeeper, the nymphomaniac, the exile, the guardian, the vengeance seeker, the mind behind the curtain, and the disgruntled youth—to construct a non-linear narrative that is as much a mystery of what their island utopia/prison represents as it is the whys and wherefores of the seemingly disparate threads that connect the many narrators.

The ghost-in-the-machine/mind-behind-the-curtain concept is nothing new to noir or science fiction, and neither is the last-happy-spot-on-the-ravaged-world setting that may or may not occasionally travel back to the desolate mainland, complete with its semi-mutated, likely drug-addled wanton-rape-and-pillage gangs. Thomas makes these ideas feel fresh, however, by the division of the seven narrators. Through such a tactic, we never get a total sense of omniscience. In essence, we see what we need to see in order to understand why several random individuals might find themselves as mice in a cage for the purposes of an ongoing investigation into social control mechanisms, but not much more than that. The reader is similar to a bird flying over a city, snagging only the bits of story that appear when people walk between buildings, but losing the greater sense of what goes on inside before moving onto the next voice. That’s not to the book’s detriment—if anything, its slightly-obstructed set of perspectives are what keep it from feeling as if it is something seen and experienced before.

Taken as one, the seven voices of the tale pull together a set of strands that transforms what could have been a very predictable Big Brother-esque plot into a more painterly abstraction of the desire to live in a safe haven, and the ramifications of a single perverted mind that seeks to deconstruct the utopia it has infiltrated. An interesting ride, and a very worthwhile experiment in storytelling if one can get past some rather glaring editorial shortcomings.