The Only Café was quiet. He stood at the bar, ordered a beer, watched the door. He wasn't sure what brought him back. Perhaps the wall of memory, 1982, perhaps the suspicion that the fat stranger, Ari, might know something from behind that – so far – impenetrable wall. There was no sign of him.
A grey-haired man came into the store the other day, looking for a book on the Cold War-era Soviet Union; a particular book written by a man who had been his colleague back in the day at CSIS (the Canadian spy agency). After helping him locate that book, and having been intrigued by this man's apparent knowledge base, I leveled a mock-conspiratorial look at him and asked if he figured the world was becoming safer or scarier. Without missing a beat he replied, dead serious, “The world has never been scarier than it is right now. If you only knew.” Well, I guess I asked for that (but I was rather hoping a nostalgia for his [presumed] old cloak and dagger days would have prejudiced him in favour of an improving worldview: In my day we hid our phones in our shoes, not our pockets, and the bad guys didn't brag about their intentions on Facebook...). The Only Café, written by career journalist Linden MacIntyre, seems an effort to part the curtain a bit; to show that the things that seem scary to us today have been bubbling away for decades; the world is neither safer nor scarier, there's just a different lead story in the headlines. By trying to translate actual events into literature, I found the first half of this book to be unnecessarily obfuscatory, but by the end, I was glad I stuck with it: this book has some important things to say, and ultimately, it says them well.
This is the last time you're going to ask me a question like that. You know exactly what to do. Was that what Brawley said? Or were they words from another time, another place? Or do time and place make any difference to destiny?
The Only Café opens in 2012 with the reading of a will: After having been missing and presumed dead for five years, some remains of Pierre Cormier have been found; his estate can finally be settled. Cormier's young adult son, Cyril, is present – seeking closure – and when the lawyer mentions that his father had wanted a roast of sorts, to be held at the unheard of Only Café, Cyril decides to look into the place: maybe it's time for him to finally get to know the father who had left him and his mother so many years before. We soon learn that Cyril is interning at a network news agency (obviously the CBC, with superstar anchor “Lloyd Manville”), and by coincidence, he starts researching events that took place during his father's (never discussed) childhood in Lebanon. The story then shifts to Pierre's perspective in the months leading up to his disappearance, and when events in his present begin to remind him of things that happened during the Lebanese Civil War of the 1980s, Pierre experiences a muddling of memory that is so confusing to him that it's confusing to the reader as well (and I didn't understand why MacIntyre decided to layer on career difficulty, a health scare, a new marriage, and trying to have a baby: all of this extraneous experience added nothing to Pierre's core struggle between his past and present and just further muddied the point of it all).
The past is never dead as long as there is memory. Memory is the afterlife, both heaven and hell.
The narrative continues to switch between Cyril's present, Pierre's last days, and Pierre's Lebanese past, and what it reveals about historical events was an education for me: I had never heard of the massacre at Sabra and Shatila in 1982, which MacIntyre apparently reported on as a journalist, and its inclusion here is gritty and realistic, and as an act of commemoration, feels vital and overdue.
In this line of work there's no distinction between what's historical and what's contemporary.
Because Cyril is learning to be a journalist – while attempting to track down clues about his father's past – the historical information that he discovers is added organically to the narrative. And because he is working with other journalists who are trying to dig up a story about the radicalisation of youth in Toronto mosques, there's a very natural line drawn between the events of the past and the present; the format works really well to show the bigger picture. It was especially apt to have so much discussed in the network meetings; to see how news is selected and shaped.
The only way to know what's happening is to be part of it.
The Only Café has the tension of a mystery – Just what happened to Pierre? How does Ari come into it? Will Cyril ever find the truth? Or is he putting himself in danger? – but some of the personal storylines drain the energy from this tension: In addition to Pierre's mounting personal troubles, I didn't see the point in Cyril's hesitant lovelife, or his friend Leo's frequent appearances, or Cyril's mother's limp depiction. It felt a bit deliberate to include a young Muslim, an aging Israeli, a retired Canadian Forces soldier, an RCMP officer: Yes, we get the whole picture, but I was aware of the artist's hand leading me to what he wanted me to see. I have enjoyed MacIntyre's books set in Cape Breton, so I did like that Pierre and then Cyril spent some time there, but as they don't improve the overall thesis, these parts felt like atmosphere for its own sake. I was amused to learn that the Only Café actually exists on the Danforth in Toronto, yet that leaves me confused as to why it's featured by name. Here's the bottom line: I did find much confusing (as I presume I was meant to), but I'm glad I finished this book. While it doesn't work perfectly for me as a novel, The Only Café has much to offer the reader and I suspect it will feature on the literary awards lists later in the year.
It was a teenage wedding, and the old folks wished them well You could see that Pierre did truly love the mademoiselle And now the young monsieur and madame have rung the chapel bell, "C'est la vie", say the old folks, it goes to show you never can tell They furnished off an apartment with a two room Roebuck sale
The coolerator was crammed with TV dinners and ginger ale, But when Pierre found work, the little money comin' worked out well "C'est la vie", say the old folks, it goes to show you never can tell They had a hi-fi phono, boy, did they let it blast
Seven hundred little records, all rock, rhythm and jazz But when the sun went down, the rapid tempo of the music fell "C'est la vie", say the old folks, it goes to show you never can tell They bought a souped-up jitney, 'twas a cherry red '53,
They drove it down to Orleans to celebrate the anniversary It was there that Pierre was married to the lovely mademoiselle "C'est la vie", say the old folks, it goes to show you never can tell
This is one of those weeks where I have a short version and a long version of why I've picked the song I have, so here's the short version: That picture at the top is a screen shot of a video of me and Dave dancing at Oktoberfest last year. Kennedy took the video because she liked the way we were backlit by the crazy lights, and by coincidence, this was taken just minutes before someone from the club presented us with a prize for winning their dance contest; a contest we didn't even know they were running. Kennedy just showed me this video the other day and I thought I could use it on Facebook to mention our anniversary this week (some sweet blah blah about being married to Dave is like routinely winning the dance contest we never even knew we were competing in), and when Mallory saw the clip, she took it and added this song in the background -- a definite improvement over the fuzzy bar band that's in the actual clip -- and while Mal might think she was being playfully mocking by comparing her lame parents to Uma Thurman and John Travolta, you can probably tell from that picture that we are actually just that blithely focussed on each other when we're (drinking and) dancing; it's not an unfair comparison.
And the long story, what I was primarily reminded of this week: When Dave and I lived in Edmonton, the closest family (other than my brother Ken) was my Uncle Mike in Calgary. As my mother's youngest brother, Mike is only ten years older than I am, so while we might have been close if we had grown up around each other, I never actually saw him enough to really know him. I first met Mike's future wife, Carlene, when I was twelve and we went down to PEI for a visit, and immediately, she decided I was to be an ally of hers: Carlene brought me to a jewellery store to pick up the bracelet she had ordered for me (a silver ID bracelet with my name on the front and "from Mike and Carlene" on the back; I still have it in my jewellery box), and as no one had ever given me a piece of jewellery of any kind before, I was pretty easy to bribe into liking her (and especially because I was the only one to be given a special gift like this; they could have easily bought a similar bracelet for my cousin Shelly -- the only other niece and essentially my age -- but they didn't; I was the chosen one.)
Mike and Carlene got married and moved to Calgary, and not long after, my own family moved to Lethbridge (about two hours away). Even so, we only went up to visit them a handful of times; they didn't come down to see us much, either. It wasn't until I moved to Edmonton that Carlene would call me every now and then and invite me for a visit; and especially after Dave was in the picture.
The first time Dave met my grandparents was at Mike and Carlene's house. We had just gotten there, and I introduced Dave around, and my Pop said to him, "Would you like a beer?" When Dave grinned and said, "Sure", Pop replied, "Good. Get me one while you're up." We had such a good visit that time -- Dave got a kick out of my grandparents -- so it was doubly offputting to have Carlene try to enlist Dave into her inlaw-hating club. Because she did hate my grandparents; thought of them as low class and embarrassing (I guess her family would have been tacitly acknowledged as higher classed back home in Charlottetown, where it might have mattered to somebody). Dave refused to even humour Carlene, desperate as she was to create an us-vs-them vibe, and if anything, she forced herself outside our in-crowd of two.
And I suppose I should describe Carlene: She was probably the tiniest woman I've ever met, short and thin and jittery as a rabbit. I know I wrote before about when Mike first showed me the engagement ring he had bought for her and there was a misunderstanding when I said it was the smallest ring I had ever seen (he thought I was referring to the diamond, but it was the circumference of the ring itself that blew my mind) and I may have mentioned before that Carlene told me she found it really frustrating to try and find sexy clothes in her junior miss size (honestly, she was built like an eleven year old). She had hair just on the border between red and brown (which she was happy to point out a couple of times was easier to straighten than mine, even though I never tried to straighten mine), brown eyes, and more freckles than one usually sees on an adult. My Uncle Mike is about the easiest-going guy you can imagine -- Dave has always liked him just fine -- but Carlene was so high-strung, always yelling at him or bossing him around, and Mike would generally just chortle (he's a chortler) and ignore her.
Of course Mike and Carlene came out to Ontario for our wedding, and Carlene tried to give off the vibe that she was closer to us than any of my other relatives (which was probably true). They would invite us to come down and see them at Christmas or whenever, and after Kennedy was born, Carlene came up alone to meet her: I saw more of them in the six years I lived alone in Edmonton than I did over the seven years I lived in Lethbridge with my parents. It was on one trip to Calgary that they started telling me and Dave about this great movie they had gone to the night before, Pulp Fiction, and they pretty much acted out the scene with John Travolta giving Uma Thurman the adrenaline shot to the heart; which is what I picture every time I hear this song or think of that movie; hence the connection this week.
Now, I keep saying "Carlene was" because Carlene is no longer my aunt. For most of the time I knew her, Carlene worked at a bank while my uncle worked long hours at his small business. They never had kids of their own (because, as Carlene said to me while I was expecting Kennedy, she was terrified of the idea of birthing pain), and for the longest time, they were on an adoption waiting list. Near the end of their marriage, when Mike's business started doing really well, they decided that Carlene should work from home keeping the books (which was also supposed to help them transition into parenthood when their baby showed up), but when we were visiting once, Carlene said that working from home meant that all she wanted to do was smoke dope and play computer games all day (and the game she showed us that she was obsessed with was Larry the Lounge Lizard). And eventually, it came out that she was spending her days with some other man (apparently a spy with CSIS -- or at least that's what he told her -- so Ken and Dave mockingly referred to him as Austin Powers). And when Mike was willing to work on their marriage and maybe work less and commit to making a happy family with the baby that would have to come eventually, it then came out that Carlene had never actually done the final filing with Social Services: they were on no adoption waiting lists for all those years. Marriage over.
Mike and Carlene were the first divorce in our family (Carole and Eric would follow suit many years later), and despite them all not really getting along, this was painful for my good Catholic grandparents. My Uncle Mike hasn't married again, but he has been in a longtime relationship with another woman -- and Carole is large and friendly and quick to laugh; pretty much the opposite of my erstwhile aunty. And good for him. "C'est la vie", say the old folks, it goes to show you never can tell.
“Here he is now.” “Here's himself.” “You're a fine figure of a man, Mahony.”
Himself is written in a mashup of many genres — a supernatural/murder mystery/comedic romp – and set on the west coast of Ireland, the brogue drips thickly; every welcoming smile masks a secretive heart; every po-faced denizen reserves the right to decide who may live within their village. Absolutely everything about the plot felt slightly off-kilter, nothing resolved completely to my satisfaction, and yet, I was consistently charmed by the language and the atmosphere. And in a way, that was enough.
Mulderrig is a place like no other. Here the colors are a little bit brighter and the sky is a little bit wider. Here the trees are as old as the mountains and a clear river runs into the sea. People are born to live and stay and die here. They don’t want to go. Why would they when all the roads that lead to Mulderrig are downhill so that leaving is uphill all the way?
The book opens with a prologue set in 1950, in which a young woman is brutally (graphically) murdered, and in the first instance of magical realism, her infant son is hidden and protected by the forest itself. The narrative then jumps ahead to 1976 and that infant, having been raised in a Dublin orphanage and now a twenty-six-year-old greasy long-haired hippie, returns to the village of Mulderrig; led to the place of his birth by a photograph that just came into his possession. This hippie, Mahony, has the kind of smoldering good looks that draws housewives to their windows to watch as he walks past in his tight bell-bottoms, and his natural charm helps him to find allies even among those who never normally talk to anyone. And Mahony will need allies: He learns nearly immediately that the village is divided over whether his young mother had run away from Mulderrig or if she met a grisly end, and as the reader already knows where her bones are buried, we understand that there may be danger to Mahony in his efforts to stir up the past.
The dead are drawn to the confused and the unwritten, the damaged and the fractured, to those with big cracks and gaps in their tales, which the dead just yearn to fill. For the dead have secondhand stories to share with you, if you'd only let them get a foot in the door.
Just like his mother before him, Mahony is able to see and interact with ghosts, but this isn't as helpful in a murder investigation as one might expect: Spirits have their own agendas, replaying events from their own lives, and don't have the consciousness required to be interrogated as to what they may know (this is helpfully outlined in a conversation, but as the ghosts do all react to what is happening in the present around them, it felt like an unsatisfactory explanation for why Mahony couldn't just ask the dead witnesses what they knew about his mother; he mainly ignores them). For the most part, the ghosts around Mahony are played for laughs (the commode-bound priest, the lovesick suitor sunning his organ), but there's a poignancy to the pretty little girl skipping through the forest with her head stove in, and one character awakens a menacing shadow that creeps and terrorises. And the supernatural goes beyond mere ghosts: A venal priest suffers a plague of frogs; a library-bound actress summons the wind to stir her books for inspiration and protection; a storm blows the soot from chimneys into the form of a snapping wolfhound. Mahony is frustrated that his mother's ghost is the one that he has never seen (which makes him question whether she really is dead), but the reader knows that she is following her own agenda:
For nightly, still, she came to him: she rose up out of the Shand, shrugging off her cape of silt. A river goddess, worn smooth as an ancient carving, wearing waterweeds and dropping diamonds with every step. Her footprints dented rocks.
So much of the writing is lovely and lyrical like that, and as I've said many times that I particularly love an Irish storyteller, even the slangy everyday exchanges were charming to me. Much is spooky and much is witty as the narrative switches from past to present and back again (illuminating small town life and the grip of the Church and the hypocrisy of the so-called pious), but the plot doesn't really hold together: I could put behind spoiler tags all the pointless or unresolved threads, but my biggest complaint is simply that there was no emotional payoff (I was holding my breath at the end, waiting for everything to come together in the way I was expecting, and when it didn't and I was forced to release my breath, I felt literally deflated). As this is a first novel for Jess Kidd, I can understand her desire to throw everything in, and I'd be happy to read whatever she comes up with next: this is a strong voice, slightly wasted here.
A virtuous man once walked on water, but today men walk on the water surrounding our city, pouring in the poison and disease that dissolves the bonds of home, faith, and country.
Men Walking on Water begins with an intriguing scene: It is December of 1927 and one of the cars in a rum-running operation has fallen through the ice on the Detroit River; taking with it a full load of booze and twenty grand in cash. Not only will the motley crew need to inform the hapless driver's new widow of the accident, but someone will need to suffer the consequences of telling their iron-fisted boss as well. This opening scene and what immediately follows is really well done, and as author Emily Schultz's intent was evidently to explore the ripple effects of this accident across a wide range of characters, there was an opportunity for the whole thing to be exciting and complex...but it all just fizzled out for me. In the end, I found the characters to be flat, the writing to be dull, and the plot to be predictable. Just not for me.
We men believe we can walk on water. We think we are capable of anything. We are not. We are mortal.
I was so bored by this book that that's all I can muster up for a review.
I really tried, but I couldn't make that review any longer; the book bored me too much to even make it amusing for me to pick apart. I read Men Walking on Water because of this list of "the most anticipated books of the first half of 2017". Just to bulk out this page, here are links to my reviews of the other books I've read on that list:
I only read some of these books because of that list (many I had already read when I first thought to Google for such a list), but oddly, it's the books that I did read because of this list that I regretted the most. Huh.
He was the first punk ever to set foot on this earth. He was a genius from the day of his birth. He could play the piano like a ring and a bell And ev'rybody screamed: Come on, rock me Amadeus.
He was a superstar, he was dynamite and whatever he did (it) Seemed to be alright. And he drank (and) he cursed and he fooled around But when the women would shout: Rock me Amadeus, Amadeus, Amadeus, Amadeus, Amadeus, Amadeus, Amadeus, Oh oh oh Amadeus.
With a bottle of wine in one hand and a woman in the other 'Cause he was a ladies man He never stopped to worry what the next day would bring Because the girls would sing: Rock me Amadeus, Amadeus, Amadeus, Amadeus, Amadeus, Amadeus, Amadeus, Oh oh oh Amadeus.
His mind was on rock and roll and having fun Because he lived so fast he had to die so young. But he made his mark in history. Still ev'rybody says: Rock me Amadeus Amadeus, Amadeus, Amadeus, Amadeus, Amadeus, Amadeus, Oh oh oh Amadeus.
Looking up Rock Me Amadeus this morning, I noted that it ranks #6 on Rolling Stone's list of the worst songs of the 80's, but as someone from that era, I can't help but have a protective spot for both Amadeus and Falco in my memory: this was one of the songs that my friends and I would be sure to dance to when it was played in the clubs in Lethbridge (where we were always happily served underage); one of those songs that I never knew the words to, but would sing along with, loudly, nonetheless. And Rock Me Amadeus eventually served another purpose: When I met Dave, he was a Theatre major, and while I could have listed on one hand all of the live theatre I had seen to that point, he told me stories of going on high school trips to NYC to see some Broadway shows; telling me that the stage production of Amadeus had been his favourite of all time. When The Simpsons later did their Planet of the Apes Musical episode - with its showstopping Rock Me Dr Zaius - that felt like all worlds colliding, in the best possible way: this was my music, his movie, our inside joke about the theatre business. And if it's not obvious from this meandering lead up, it's the Edmonton live theatre scene (of the early 90's) that I wanted to write about this week.
First of all, I should note that (of course) I went to see Dave in his University productions after I met him. That first year, I only knew him in time to see the last show of the season - a compilation of a few Shakespeare scenes from different shows - and from that, it wasn't easy to see if he was any good (what did I know about Shakespeare?) The next fall, Dave had the lead in Loose Ends - a 70's-set growing-to-middle-age relationship play - and he was awesome in it; a real star. (Happily, when their on-camera course decided to do that same play as a film, the actor who was supposed to play the lead didn't show up for the first day of filming, and Dave stepped into the role; we have a VHS tape of that around here somewhere.) Dave had smaller roles in Six Characters in Search of an Author and The Marriage of Bette and Boo, but I thought he was wonderful in both. (I also watched his dance show that year, but his role had to be simplified after he dislocated his shoulder during rehearsals. Youch.)
While Dave decided against actively pursuing an acting career after he graduated, I did see him in a couple more roles: He played the main character in a Fringe show (I Fell in Love With an Eel) and the robot in an episode of Gilligan's Island Live (the role he was born to play, lol). As an aside, the acting group that put on Gilligan's Island Live also did an improv soap opera (that Dave once appeared in), and it was here that Nathan Fillion - although an Education major at the same University as Dave, not an actor - was appearing just for fun when he was "discovered" and whisked away to Hollywood. I can only imagine how that made all the trained actors feel, but, come on, it's Nathan Fillion.
After Dave started working in management at Theatre Network, I saw plenty of shows with him. Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie routinely appeared at his theatre (and their sketch comedy was eventually picked up for one season on CBC). As a matter of fact, my mother came out to Edmonton to visit once, and as the Trolls were having a "let's trash our rental house event because it has been condemned and will be soon torn down", we took Ma to that house, and she made a big deal out of how cool it was to be connected to artists, and she asked if she could have a rubber chicken she found in the house, and it was granted to her. On this same trip, she came to see The Tit Show at the theatre (it was pretty much The Vagina Monologues, but about breasts, before there even was a Vagina Monologues), and she claimed outrage that the Edmonton Journal refused to run ads for the show without censoring the title. In support of the show's right to exist, Ma asked if she could have a poster for the show, which she then had the actresses sign, and she had it framed and hung in the main bathroom of their house back home. As this was the bathroom that really only Kyler used, he found it an anti-man effrontery; both tacky and humiliating. I know my mother was trying to make a statement with all this, and while I found it all embarrassing at the time, I need to remember that she was a lot younger then than I am now; funny how we never see our Moms as real people with a valid engagement with the world around them; as though only our own experiences connect with the way things are, relegating the Moms to supporting roles or backstories.
Naturally, I saw many many shows at Theatre Network, and Dave's happiest experience was meeting Anne B. Davis from The Brady Bunch (she wasn't appearing, just an audience member supporting a friend), and they had a lovely chat about acting and life. We didn't see as many Fringe shows as one might expect, but Theatre Network hosted a "Pick of the Fringe" (where they extended the run of the plays that Steven, the GM, liked), and I saw some of them (being given free tickets in exchange for selling tickets in the beer tent for the theatre).
As I wrote before, I met Gale Gordon (from The Lucy Show) and saw him perform in Mass Appeal while I worked at the Mayfair Hotel. And as I wrote before, I both saw Donny Osmond and met Bruno Gerussi while working at the restaurant at the Citadel Theatre. As I mentioned then, the only play I remember seeing at the Citadel was Man of La Mancha, and only that because Steven (the GM of Theatre Network as I just mentioned, and the friend that Dave initially lived with in Edmonton) took me when I had mentioned that it was my favourite musical. And it was only my favourite musical because, for whatever reason, I had bought the soundtrack once upon a time and usually listened to it if I was alone and cleaning my apartment; so, really, it was just the only musical I knew all the songs to. And even as I type this, I can't really remember if Dave and I saw Phantom of the Opera when it came to the Citadel (as much as Dave doesn't like musicals in general, he hates travelling road shows of musicals), and while I vaguely remember Curtis wanting to go see Cats, I have zero memory of ever seeing it or not. No memory either way. Weird.
After their graduation, many of Dave's fellow classmates did get into the acting scene, and we saw plenty of shows at the other small theatres in Edmonton - and especially if his friends Steph or Patty were in them. The strangest play I remember seeing was one in which one of Dave's friends played a dog - with him romping around fully naked except for body paint - and the set was covered in a thick layer of mixed hair that they sourced from beauty salons. I squirmed all through that play, trying not to look at the guy's flopping bits, and imagining how itchy all that hair would be to his skin as he'd flip and roll on stage.
We saw loads of live theatre when we lived in Edmonton, and continued to see plays after we moved to Ontario. In particular, we've now been to dozens of plays at the Stratford Festival, most of which we've taken our kids to, and it's cool to us that the actor who once played Mr. Howell in Gilligan's Island Live is now a regular company member in Stratford's Shakespeare productions. As I started with, I hadn't really experienced much theatre before I met Dave, but knowing him has certainly enriched my life in that area - I can't imagine how the girls would have turned out if they hadn't had theatre, and theatre training, in their childhoods; if they couldn't get all our inside jokes.
Parker: Troy! Mac Parker. Ever hear of...Planet of the Apes?
Troy: Uh... the movie or the planet?
Parker: The brand-new multi-million dollar musical, and you are starring...as the human.
Troy: It's the part I was born to play, baby!
Rock me Amadeus (Dr Zaius)
Amadeus, Amadeus, Amadeus,
Amadeus, Amadeus, Amadeus,
Oh oh oh Amadeus (Dr Zaius)
Mumble mumble down there. Some sorta big talk to his wife or his girlfriend. An oath, a curse. Talkin about Johnny, gotta be. Big talk, nothin he'd say to Johnny's face. Role-playing. Shag this. Johnny's down the stairs and out the front hall to the door. He dont even bother to put on the sneakers cause he's not gonna be using his feet. You gotta be able to dance, dance, dance whenever the mood takes you. That's the rule, that's the law. Johnny gives the knuckles a good scrape across the panelling in the porch before he opens the door. Sting and burn, bleed, come on bleed. Clench and release, clench and release. Buddy started it, didnt he? Good night, he says. Johnny's night. Good. Johnny raps on buddy's door. It's a new door with a big patterned window to let the light in. Must be nice, letting all that light in. Must be nice to have it all lined up, new doors, taking the garbage out.
We'll All Be Burnt in Our Beds Some Night started off as one of my favourite kinds of book – grittily intriguing with a sociopathic character whose present situation needs to be puzzled out (I mean, Johnny wants to have a little chat with buddy just for saying good night to him, even though Johnny isn't technically supposed to be leaving his apartment after ten p.m.) – and from there it whizzes along, moving Johnny forward through the present while he mentally revisits the events in his past that led him to where he is; how he is. This is a formula that worked so well for me in books like Trainspotting or The Glorious Heresies – that satisfying mental evolution I experienced from initially regarding the characters as trash to recognising their humanity – but in this book it all felt a bit...formulaic. Early conversations that Johnny has with others (and himself) dangle the clues – What do you know about car fires, Johnny? How did that brand new John Deere cap get up in the branches of the black spruce? Just when will we get back to the jeezly hens? – and it becomes obvious that the point is: No matter how bad you think Johnny is, his childhood was worse. Author Joel Thomas Hynes is a bit too obvious in his plotting and pacing here for my taste, but I do love a Newfie tale and enjoyed the voice of his sentences.
We're all looking for a change of scenery, at the very least. We're all lookin for our ticket. Who's not lookin to claw their way out from under what they're tangled up in? Who's not, underneath it all, desperate to let go of what they're hangin on to? And what's really worth hanging on to anymore?
Mild spoilers as I summarise the plot: We soon learn that Johnny is awaiting trial for the assault of his girlfriend, Madonna. We eventually see that she was the love of his life – the only person he ever settled down with; happy whether they were shoplifting, or cooking breakfast, or getting sober, or falling off the wagon – so why did Madonna have to ruin everything by smashing her face into the teapot Johnny was holding and then calling the cops? Because Madonna doesn't appear at the trial, Johnny is set free, and events send him on a cross-Canada road trip; running from the cops and a St. John's crime boss; hitchhiking west in increasingly filthy clothes and a deteriorating body. Although Johnny does share some of his history with the people he hitches rides from, most of the narrative occurs in his own head (where his thoughts return again and again to the same seminal moments until they're fully revealed), and by the end, we're supposed to realise that this broken, violent misanthrope couldn't have turned out any other way. Helpfully, this is spelled out a couple of times:
What do any of us ever know? That we used to be children but now we're not. That what we are now is just a collection of our blunders and our missteps, a mashed and battered accumulation of all our wrongs. Sick as our secrets. And now we mainly gotta lean into our years and hope too much of it dont splatter back into our fucken faces.
And speaking of what splatters back into our faces...no, you'd have to read that part to fully get it. The “road trip” might be a stock plotline, but I can't remember reading another one set in Canada. So as someone who has made this drive many times, I enjoyed the stops in Truro and Edmundston; could picture running into the woods to evade the Sûreté du Québec; winced when Johnny, heading to the west coast, left a car travelling to Timmins to make his side-trip to Kingston. On the other hand, and by coincidence, my husband and brother-in-law were talking the other night about some of their own youthful hitchhiking adventures and bemoaning the fact that those days are gone; no one in their right mind would pick up a solitary young man on the side of the road anymore. And here's Johnny: his face both sunburnt and swollen from ant bites from sleeping in the forest, wearing a stinking, filthy poncho to disguise the disintegrating suit he ran away in, limping from decaying boots, unable to do much more than grunt and scowl at people, and getting enough rides to move himself (and the plot) along. That made me wonder what time period this is actually supposed to be and that's confusing: Johnny mentions having had a DVD player with Madonna, but no one – not even his drug dealer pal, Shiner – seems to have a cell phone, and while a cop is able to run a (stolen) driver's license through his in-car computer, the law doesn't seem interested in tracking down the van he eventually steals. And another quibble: Diane Schoemperlen, in This Is Not My Life, made it sound a bit more complicated to visit an inmate, even in minimum security. I wish I couldn't see the man behind the curtain of this book – Hynes doesn't quite pull off art here – but that's not to say I didn't like it quite a bit. I'm waffling on a rating, so will feel like it's generous to round up to four stars.
*Won by Bellevue Square - a surprise, to me, but not an unwelcome one. Congrats to Michael Redhill! The 2017 Governor General's Literary Awards Finalists:
Won by We'll All Be Burnt in Our Beds Some Night - which seems an odd choice to me. I liked it, but would have personally given the award to The Water Beetles.
Delight is my crunchy granola-type friend with an Environmental Sciences degree who, although never having worked in her field, runs several Facebook groups about environmental issues. Whenever she finds and posts an article about a technological breakthrough, Delight will tag me ironically, saying, “Maybe Krista's right and the Star Trek universe will arrive in time to save us all.” This elicits smirky emoticons from her other crunchy granola-type friends, but I usually reply with a hopeful, “Maybe it will!” All the Birds in the Sky rather perfectly captures this dichotomy of philosophy through its two main characters, and with an intriguing blend of Fantasy and Sci Fi, explores the ethical consequences of where scientific progress has led the planet. This book is a fun romp, even if it totally reads YA, and while in the end it didn't exactly feel deep or 100% logical, it was interesting and compelling. Slight spoilers beyond.
“Your friend would control nature," said the Tree, rustling through each syllable one by one. "A witch must serve nature.”
All the Birds in the Sky begins in the childhood of our main characters: Patricia is a “wild, grubby girl” who learns early that she has an ability to talk with animals, who promptly tell her that she must be a witch. Although she doesn't have any real powers – even the talking with animals comes and goes – Patricia is marked as different and is treated as an outcast at school. Laurence is “a small kid for his age” with “arms like snail necks”, and while the kids at school bully and torment him, he's a techno genius who builds a Two Second Time Machine from obscure online directions and is assembling a Supercomputer in his closet. These two come together as wary allies – neither quite understanding the other but accepting friendship where they can get it – and when the story skips ahead to junior high, the pressures of puberty drive an uncomfortable wedge between them. They both have cartoonishly bad parents to deal with – Patricia's are high achievers who look for any reason to punish their oddball daughter (locking her in her room and “decapitating” her meals as they're slid beneath her door) while Laurence's are underachievers who are so desperate to blend in that they'll end up banishing their son to a sadistic Military School at the first suggestion of notoriety – and in a spoofy (but actually quite funny) subplot, an assassin who has seen the future tries to track down the pair and ends up as their Guidance Counselor.
It's always too soon until it's too late.
The narrative skips ahead again, and the pair reunites after a decade or so apart. Patricia is now a trained witch living and doing benevolent magic in a hipster San Francisco neighbourhood, and Laurence is a tech wunderkind working for an Elon Musk-type character. And this is where the dichotomy of thought (and my biggest spoiler) really comes into play: In response to worsening global superstorms, war, famine, and drought, Laurence's group is attempting to build an antigravity machine that will be able to transport at least ten per cent of the human population to another suitable planet (even though there is the smallest risk of destroying Earth in the process), and Patricia's group is deciding whether or not to implement the Unraveling (a form of chaos that would decimate the human population for several generations and give the Earth a chance to recover). Despite a budding romance between the pair, Patricia and Laurence keep their professional secrets from one another, and when their groups collide, the climax is exciting and cinematic.
Self-awareness paradoxically requires an awareness of the other.
Like I said, this book reads like YA – spanning, as it does, the years between Dumpster swirlies and online dating – and there's a hipster preciousness to the frequent mention of vegan donut shops and Korean food trucks. The very ending **spoiler**That there's hope for the future once the techno AI device melds with the ancient wisdom of the Tree – ushering in a future where “a cyborg will be the same thing as a wizard” – and that this mirrors the romantic melding between Patrica and Laurence /**spoiler** wasn't the perfect payoff for me, but I have to admit that I was entertained throughout. I certainly liked author Charlie Jane Anders' sense of humour:
“We’re doing serious research here,” said Tanaa. “Nothing is a toy. Well, except for Six-Fingered Steve.” She gestured at the tiny tap-dancing robot, who heard his name and made jazz hands with too many digits. Disturbing, as always.
I read All the Birds in the Sky quickly because it was so entertaining, and I appreciate that it explores this modern day dichotomy of philosophy that I seem to confront daily (I know which side Delight would fall out on in this confrontation; she might be surprised to see me join her there), so it feels like it would be miserly of me to withhold too many stars on this one. Ultimately, the four stars reflects this book's ranking against other books of its type.
The irony wasn't lost on me as I joined the other mourners who were assembling around the open grave.
Everything about Magpie Murders is meant to be ironic – embedding, as it does, pastiche within post-modernism – and while at first I found it interesting, the whole thing eventually began to drag and fizzle out. Author Anthony Horowitz drops the names of so many other famous authors into this narrative that I figure he must be friends with at least some of them, and I imagine this book gives them an opportunity to chuckle knowingly together over industry in-jokes. As this is a mystery, I wouldn't advise anyone to read beyond this paragraph to avoid even mild spoilers, but I do want to give a warning: There's some tricky business with the page numbering in this book, and when I flipped forward to see what was going on, I spoiled something for myself. My bottom line: Much like J. K. Rowling's (as Robert Galbraith) The Silkworm, this book succeeds more as a skewering of the publishing industry than it does as a straightforward mystery, and as with that book, your enjoyment here might be linked to how much you care about a wildly successful author's ironic take on said industry.
As a sort of prologue, Magpie Murders begins from the point-of-view of editor Susan Ryeland as she settles down to read the latest manuscript by her small publishing house's best-selling author, Alan Conway. After the book-within-the-book's title page, author bio, and page of praise blurbs for Conway (attributed to everyone from Ian Rankin to Daily Mail), the manuscript begins. When the narrative abruptly ends just at the point where Conway's detective, Atticus Pünd, is about to reveal the killer, we return to “reality”, where Susan must play sleuth herself in order to track down the missing chapters; in the process uncovering a dark and dangerous “real life” mystery.
The embedded manuscript is a worthy pastiche of the Agatha Christie cosy cottage mystery – complete with a brilliant and fastidious, foreign-born detective. Any time I found something overwritten (I didn't mark the examples, but something like, “Despite the summer's heat, her chilly demeanor brought down the temperature in the room”), I smiled when I reminded myself that this was Alan Conway's writing, not Anthony Horowitz's. Having set his series in 1950's Britain, Conway is able to get away with mimicking the tone of that time:
There is something about the village of Saxby-on-Avon that concerns me. I have spoken to you before of the nature of human wickedness, my friend. How it is the small lies and evasions which nobody sees or detects but which can come together and smother you like the fumes in a house fire. They are all around us. Already there have been two deaths: three if you include the child who died in the lake all those years ago. They are all connected. We must move quickly before there is a fourth.
So, it naturally becomes all wink-wink nudge-nudge when the narrative returns to “reality” and Susan becomes the detective:
In a whodunnit, when a detective hears that Sir Somebody Smith has been stabbed thirty-six times on a train or decapitated, they accept it as a quite natural occurrence. They pack their bags and head off to ask questions, collect clues, ultimately to make an arrest. But I wasn't a detective. I was an editor – and, until a week ago, not a single one of my acquaintances had managed to die in an unusual and violent manner.
There's a general implausibility to the second narrative: strangers are happy to invite Susan into their homes and account for their whereabouts; an impatient police detective refuses to hear there might have been foul play despite obvious clues; Susan understands that coincidences make for bad fiction, but hey, this is “real life” and coincidences do happen. And this implausibility all seems part of the point: this reads like a huge po-mo wink; the reader is always aware that this is a book; Conway's publisher even balked at the title “Magpie Murders” because it sounds too much like “Midsomer Murders” – a series created by Horowitz himself. We eventually learn that Conway hated writing genre fiction (he wanted to be a “real” writer like Salman Rushdie or Will Self, and an excerpt of his “real” writing is terrible), and Susan's boyfriend dismisses Conway's writing as “badly written trash”; belittling the genre as “eighty thousand words to prove the butler did it”. Much is said about authors being pigeon-holed, rights and adaptations – all that industry stuff – and it all gets in the way of the mystery.
I doubt that Horowitz was trying to say here that he feels trapped in the mystery genre, but neither the embedded pastiche or the larger framing device really worked for me; it all felt a bit pointless, and as it is essentially two separate two hundred and fifty page books in one, it definitely felt too long. Ultimately, it read like an in-joke that I wasn't in on.
