Sniffles, festivals and the great god Giller

So I made it back to Toronto last night from the Eden Mills Writers' Festival, and had a fantastic time despite being nearly debilitated by one of the worst chest cold of my life, a completely unrelated but no less horrendous case of dyspepsia, and a badly bruised wallet from spending so much money on books. Okay, that last bit's a touch hyperbolic - I bought exactly four books and received a fifth (advanced reading copy) for free. But the nightstand here at home now resembles a rather competitive game of 'Book Janga'; and my heartburn was so bad last night that I was actually hoping Jonathan Franzen's Freedom would tip over and kill me in my sleep.

The highlights of the festival included:

• Seeing Leon Rooke read from his newly released novella Pope and Her Lady, which is written in this bizarre strand of Glaswegian street slang. Rooke apologized in advance for his attempts at the Scottish patois, but as far as I could tell he nailed it.
• Popping by the Biblioasis table and talking to publisher Dan Wells about the various titles he's released this fall, including Light Lifting by Alexander MacLeod (which has, it was announced this morning, made the long list for this year's Giller) and A.J. Somerset's Combat Camera, this year's winner of the Metcalf-Rooke Award.
• Chatting up Kim Jernigan, editor at The New Quarterly, about the hidden messages embedded in the old vehicle featured on the cover of the new issue. (You'll have to visit your nearest news stand to see what I mean.)
• Seeing the ever-talented Kerry Clare read from her short story “You Can’t Run a Show on Stage Management Alone” as part of the Fringe show.
• Having a grasshopper land on my hand as RR and I lay in the long grass listening to Dionne Brand read from her poetry collection, Ossuaries, at The Mill. It was a rather fitting incident, actually: we marveled at the intricacies of the little critter's body as the intricacies of Brand's words filled the air around us. Also fitting: As soon as the poetry ended, the grasshopper jumped off my hand with surprising vigour and returned to the greenery from whence it came.

As mentioned above, the Giller long list was announced this morning. I was impressed to see good representation among the smaller and mid-sized presses; let's hope it follows through when the short list is released. You can check out the full long list here.

Okay, enough happy reminisces for now. Time to find my bottle of Pepto Bismol and go back to the couch.

Eden Mills Writers' Festival

It's been a wild-and-crazy week here in Toronto and now that Friday is finally here I find myself exhausted, aching in a variety of odd places and, most sadly, plagued with a minor head cold/fever. But it's been a good week - Wednesday was actually my birthday, and was thus full of joy and surprises - and the weekend is also shaping up to be excellent. RR and I are off to The Eden Mills Writers' Festival, and if you are in the area and have the time, I recommend you check it out. Here's the schedule of events.

We'll be overnighting in nearby Guelph, a city I lived in for about a year back in 2006/07. I'm looking forward to getting together for drinks with some friends there tomorrow night, and also popping by the glorious Bookshelf bookstore. (They still had copies of Off Book for sale the last time I was there.) All in all, it should be a wonderful couple of days.

Hoping it doesn't rain.
M.

Review: The Ballad of Peckham Rye, by Muriel Spark

Catholicism plays a big role in the majority of Muriel Spark’s fiction, and this is no more so the case than in her 1960 novel The Ballad of Peckham Rye. It tells the story of the “devilish” Dougal Douglas, his arrival in the small London neighbourhood of Peckham Rye and his nefarious influence on its benighted but good-hearted residents.

In his introduction to the Penguin edition, novelist William Boyd warns us not to read the book as a strict apology for the Catholic religion: “To see Dougal as a devil or devilish sprite leading the good but dull people of Peckham astray is a red herring.” I’m not sure there is any other way to read this novel, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Spark has created an engaging story about a small community corrupted and divided by one smooth-talking and deceptive huckster. The Ballad of Peckham Rye is both a Catholic and a catholic tale: told through a rare third-person omniscient narration, it explores the temptations of each of the key characters as they came in contact with Douglas, a shadowy figure hired on as an ‘arts man’ by a textile company to try to understand the rampant absenteeism among the employees and try to rectify it.

Douglas’ story is not simply about seduction. This novel explores a great deal about the post-war years in Britain, about industrial relations and the rise of the trade union class, and about the petty gossip that can often undo a small community. This is not a straight ‘the Devil comes to town’ story as you would expect to find in, say, The Master and Margarita or Needful Things. At no point does Douglas take on any supernatural or magic realist qualities. In his most literal form, he is just a brash young man exploiting a cushy employment opportunity to write a book about Peckham Rye on commission for a little old lady. But he is also the embodiment of corruption, destroying relationships in his wake and testing the moral fibre of virtually everyone around him.

Spark is able to channel her Catholic predispositions into an engrossing prose style and narrative arch that gets us invested in what’s happening in her tale. She challenges the reader to explore his or her own morality, and explores the very human conundrum of facing the seductive power of corruption dressed up as charm. Very much worth a read.

Review: The Pianoplayers, by Anthony Burgess

The Pianoplayers is the second Anthony Burgess novel I’ve read this year (you can read my review of Nothing Like the Sun here), which, if you know anything about my obsession with the man, is not surprising. While The Pianoplayers is in many ways a deeply flawed book (more on that later), it certainly verifies the preternatural versatility and mad genius of its author.

The novel, published in 1986, tells the story (in an impressive first-person narration) of Ellen Henshaw, a retired prostitute who reflects back on her troubled childhood, where she was raised by her musician father who was not appreciated in his own time. Most of the book details her father’s days playing in sleazy pubs and movie houses, often pulling 20-hour musical sessions while Ellen is left alone to discover her own sexuality and the path that would lead her to a life of selling her body to men. The novel has a thesis as it were: the connection between being able to play a musical instrument and to please a woman sexually, and this is a metaphor that Ellen carries with her for the duration of her story.

Despite the use of a female protagonist, this is one of Burgess’ most autobiographical novels: like Ellen, he too lost his mother and an older sibling to the Spanish Flu of 1918; and like Ellen’s dad, Burgess’ own father was a two-bit piano player working in pubs of dubious reputation in Manchester. After reading The Pianoplayers, I now have to wonder if Burgess wasn’t also sexually compromised as a young teenager by an older person, as this is the second of his protagonists that this has happened to. (The other instance I’m thinking of is with Kenneth Toomey, his homosexual lead character in Earthly Powers, who is seduced by an older man – oddly enough, on the same day in history that James Joyce’s Ulysses is set.)

There are some real flourishes of narrative brilliance in The Pianoplayers, but they’re ultimately undone by the book’s many structural flaws. Burgess sets up a frame for the novel – Ellen is actually telling her story to a wayward writer she meets in Paris, since she herself is not all that literary or articulate – but it’s a frame he never follows through on. Once the sections about Ellen’s dad have run their course, the novel inexplicably shifts gears and focuses on a second-hand tale about Ellen’s son, who is on a disastrous continental holiday with his wife and mother-in-law. The mother-in-law kicks it halfway through their road trip, and the story deteriorates from there into a kind of prototype for Weekend at Bernie’s. At no point is Burgess able to lace together this bizarre narrative tangent about Ellen’s son with the great storytelling about her dad from earlier in the book, and then the novel suddenly ends with no clear conclusion or sense of meaning. It’s almost like he had two short novels that he decided to mash into one.

Having said all that, The Pianoplayers exhibits the many hallmarks of Burgess’ best writing: the obsession with music, the obsession with both high and low culture, the endlessly twisting word play, and the theme that became the cornerstone of his life’s work – that connection between creative impulse and the impulse for violence/destruction.

The Pianoplayers is one of the weaker members of the Burgess canon but it was definitely a fun read. If you were coming to the man’s books cold and had no sense of what he was truly capable of (think Earthly Powers, think A Clockwork Orange, think Enderby’s End), then The Pianoplayers would be an adequate primer to the man’s literary capabilities and life-long fascinations.

The 85,000-word sweet spot

I have no grounds on which to base the following rant. Indeed, I have no facts, no statistics, no actual numbers or evidence of any kind to offer. All I have is an invisible line in the sand that I crossed yesterday sometime around 11:17 in the morning, and it has caused me no small amount of angst since. I have known this moment was coming for a long while; really, I’ve known it for two or three or five years now, depending on where you start counting from. I knew this line would be unavoidable, but I just wish I’d girded myself a little bit better before I crossed it.

I am of course speaking of the 85,000-word mark for the second draft (which is, really, the first readable draft) of my new novel. Eight-five thousand words – and I still have five chapters to go!

For me, 85,000 words is a significant milestone. Don’t ask me why – I have no idea where I’ve gleaned this arbitrary length. I know there are countless novels out there longer than 85,000 words. Brilliant novels. Breezy, ebullient, engrossing novels that get scarfed down in three days flat. But I feel (again, no evidence) that I have wandered into some scary frontier now where my book will be judged by potential publishers on a whole other plane. The long novel plane. The plane where editors say – What, it’s longer than 85,000 words? Well, it better be damn good, then. I’m in that phase where I’m really starting to doubt whether the book is anywhere near damn good, or good at all.

Now believe me when I tell you, a guy like me knows that length isn’t everything. And I know I’ve come a long way since finishing the first (and extremely rough) first draft of this book last November. I won’t even tell you what the final word count of that version was. Okay fine. It was 135,000 words. Yes, you read correctly. So in one sense, I’ve made tremendous headway, cutting like mad during this first key rewrite. Out went that whole section on Korean shamanism for which I spent weeks researching three years ago. Gone is the long, contrived coffee-shop discussion on the Iraq War. Whole chapters have been combined and scaled back. Characters have had their entire backgrounds expurgated. I’m talking a 20% purge across the board. And still this thing is going to be over 100K before I’m done with it.

This is, of course, not the first time I’ve crossed the 85,000-word threshold. Hell, I’ve published a novel longer than that. Off Book tipped the scales at 114,000 words, and my editor at Norwood Publishing assured me that he was comfortable with it at that length. But still. I look at other novels on my shelves and wonder if their authors have been able to show more restraint. Mind you it’s hard to tell with formatting – leading and kerning and all that – but the books I’m talking about seem to be 85,000 words (or shorter). Rawi Hage’s Cockroach, Lynn Coady’s Mean Boy, Dennis Bock’s The Ash Garden, Lisa Moore’s Alligator. These are books that I admire so much, books that I feel are at once concise and expansive, books that are rewarding without being daunting, books that wear their length well. I ascribe to their level, and yet part of me just feels so damn – long winded.

I guess what I want is for someone to tell me that I’m being paranoid. That it’s okay if the second draft of my new novel will most likely clock in at 106,000 words. That it’s no crime. Books need to be as long as they’re going to be. And if you tell your story well, if you make every word count, then it doesn’t matter how long it is. An editor won’t care about an extra 21,000 words if she’s engrossed in the world you’ve imagine. Make it riveting, and people won’t care how long it is.

Yes. That's exactly what I need to hear.

Okay. I’ll stop there. I promised myself not to make this post longer than 700 words. Back to work.

Review: Hotel du Lac, by Anita Brookner

It’s funny how some books land on a person’s radar. This novel, which won the 1984 Booker Prize, caught my attention after I read a recent essay about it by U.K. literary critic Mark Lawson. In his piece, Lawson discussed how he couldn’t stand Brookner’s work as a younger man (he found Hotel du Lac especially galling to read) but he has since ‘grown’ into her writing as he has gotten older. He had some pretty curt things to say about this novel, which, paradoxically enough, made me want to pick it up.

Lawson is bang on when he says that nothing much happens in Hotel du Lac. It tells the story of aging spinster romance writer Edith Hope and how she has fled London to a hotel on a lake in Geneva after abandoning both her groom-to-be at the alter and the married man with whom she’s been having a listless affair. Her time at the hotel is supposed to be a kind of ‘probation’ for her, but the mousy, self-absorbed, frayed cardigan-wearing Edith cannot help observing the other guests at the hotel and creating long, ruminative narratives for them in her head. These guests include the uber-materialistic Mrs. Pusey and her daughter Jennifer, as well as the mysteriously alluring Mr. Neville, with whom Edith strikes up a queerly anemic sort of romance. This is a quintessential ‘novel of manners’, with its narrative voice quietly analyzing and judging everyone’s words and actions. It’s slow-paced and dry, with most of the ‘action’ – though I hesitate to call it that – happening at an internal level.

For a book so short (just 184 pages) and so withered, there was a lot in Hotel du Lac to both impress and annoy this reader. There’s no doubt that Brookner can write beautifully and deeply about female psychology and the small, subtle undulations in a conversation between women who have their own agendas and biases. There is some great aphoristic writing in Hotel du Lac (“Good women always think it is their fault when someone else is being offensive. Bad women never take the blame for anything”) and some beautifully rendered descriptions of the lake and of the hotel. What’s more, for an author whose writing has been accused of excessive austerity, Brookner is capable of pulling off some subtly humourous bits. I’m thinking specifically of the scene in which Edith, prior to fleeing to Geneva, has lunch with her literary agent, Harold. In this passage, it’s almost as if Brookner is openly addressing those who would criticize her writing’s approach:

"Now you will notice, Harold, that in my books it is the mouse-like unassuming girl who gets the hero, while the scornful temptress with whom he has had a stormy affair retreats baffled from the fray, never to return. The tortoise wins every time. This is a lie, of course … In real life, of course, it is the hare who wins. Every time. Look around you. And in any case it is my contention that Aesop was writing for the tortoise market. Axiomatically,’ she cried, her voice rising with enthusiasm. ‘Hares have no time to read. They are too busy winning the game. The propaganda goes all the other way, but only because it is the tortoise who is in need of consolation."

I must have read this excerpt a half dozen times, chuckling a bit more forcefully with each pass. I think it’s the “axiomatically” that gets me, every time.

Still, Lawson is right to point out the numerous flaws in Brookner’s writing that are on display in Hotel du Lac. She has numerous clumsy sentences and a penchant for redundancy and repetition. I mean, how many times does she alert us to Mr. Neville’s ‘ambiguous smile’, or repeat some five-dollar word she’s plucked from the thesaurus? Worse, most of her characters come off as more of an embodiment of ideas and biases rather than real flesh-and-blood people. This is no more true than with Mr. Neville himself. He seems to exist for the sole purpose of challenging Edith’s perceptions of herself and the world; he seems to hold no other agenda. Perhaps Brookner wanted to raise him up as a paragon of low-grade misogyny, especially with quotes like this one, of him speaking to Edith:

“You are not the sort of woman of whom men are afraid, hysterics who behave as though they are the constant object of scandal or desire, who boast of their conquests and their performance, and who think they can do anything so long as they entertain their friends and keep a minimal bargain with their husbands.”

“Women too are afraid of that sort of woman,” murmured Edith.

“No,” he said. “Most women are that sort of woman.”

Alrighty then. If alluring Mr. Neville, with his ‘ambiguous smile’, actually feels this way about the entire female set, then why would I even bother to care whether dried-out old Edith ends up with him?

That, in a nutshell, is my biggest problem with this book, as it is with many so-called ‘novels of manners’. If each character is meant to ‘represent’ something – an idea, a stereotype, or some odious prejudice in the world – rather than be a full-blooded human with all of the concomitant complexities and contradictions, then why should I care about him or her? And if I don’t care, then it won’t matter what happens in the novel, or even if something happens at all, because it will ultimately feel as if nothing important is at stake. That is my biggest criticism of Hotel du Lac: if each character is a wind-up toy set in motion, do I really care what the outcomes will amount to?

Mind you, a book of manners can be done very well. I’m thinking most recently of Helen Simonson’s Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand (read my review here.) Oddly enough, this book was overlooked for this year’s Booker longlist. Ms. Brookner was infinitely luckier with her novel. I am of course too young to know whether Hotel du Lac caused any controversy when it won that prize 26 years ago. But I suspect that there were some critics out there (Lawson among them) who thought that if this the best writing that the Commonwealth could produce that year, then the Commonwealth needs to do better.

Review: Pandora, by Sylvia Fraser

Sylvia Fraser’s 1972 novel Pandora had been one of those old, dusty NCL paperbacks that I’d constantly seen kicking around used bookstores for years. I’d always passed it over, mostly because the novel, with its bland, colourless cover, looked rather dull – or worse, dated. But I finally picked it up earlier this summer, mindful of that tired adage about books and their covers.

And boy, was I glad I did. Pandora is a rich, compelling and oddly sublime read – a sturdy, well-crafted novel that captures so many of the tortures of being a young child adrift in an adult world.

The book’s titular protagonist is the improbably named Pandora Gothic, a girl born in 1937 in the fictional town of Mill City, loosely based on Hamilton, Ontario where Fraser herself grew up. Almost the entire of the novel’s narrative revolves around Pandora’s first two years in elementary school, where she observes the cruel and cryptic machinations of both adults and children. Fraser is clearly interested in blowing apart our perceptions of childhood as a peaceful epoch of purity and innocence. Pandora has a hard go of it almost from the minute she becomes fully sentient: she is ridiculed by her older twin sisters who resent her very existence; she is sexually molested by the neighbourhood breadman; she is treated with scorn by her mother and cruelty by her father, the town butcher. Indeed, from her fellow students at school to her community church, Pandora encounters random, almost Kakfaesque acts of viciousness wherever she goes.

The backdrop for all of this is, of course, the outbreak of World War II. With finely tuned satire, Fraser points to the inherent hypocrisy of adults who denounce the brutality of the Nazis and yet cannot refrain from exacting small, quotidian cruelties on each other. This involves a lot of intricate thematic lacing on Fraser’s part. Here’s a sample of how she does it, from early in the novel:

Pandora knows quite a lot about the Nazis.

If the NAZIS catch you they hang you, naked, on a hook, and they shave off your hair, and they whip you. If the JAPS catch you, they stick hot needles up your fingernails and they pull out your teeth for the Tooth Fairy. Pandora learned that at Sunday School from Amy Walker, who reads War Comics, inside her World Friends, while the other children nail Jesus to the cross and sing He Loves Me.

How audacious this satire is, to compare fascist atrocities to the Crucifixion of Christ in such a stylized (and yet childlike) way. But Pandora is chock-a-block with so many of these thematic braidings. They are what compel us through the story, waiting to see how and when Pandora will make the connections between the injustices of the macro world and the injustices in her own backyard.

It’s not all bleakness and torture, mind you. This novel is full of keenly observed detail that will make any reader reminisce about being a curious seven-year-old. Fraser does not give in to the temptation of making Pandora more precocious than she needs to be. But her mind, accessible to us through a brilliant display of indirect third-person narration, is one worth inhabiting for the duration of the book. There are wonderful moments of childhood naivety as well as sharp observations about the human condition.

So don’t be fooled by its dull cover: Pandora is a novel made of sturdy stuff and definitely worth reading.