By the Book Reviews

The Title: The Story of the First Division

2017-08-20T08:58:00.002-04:00

The Title: The Story of the First Division

Scott Murray (Bloomsbury 2017, Hardcover) 344 pages, illustrated and indexed, £16.99 cover price

As originally reviewed in The London Economic

For once in my life I am going to write a book review like a proper football match report and put the final score in the lead paragraph. Scott Murray's history of the Football League's First Division, The Title is as fine a book on English sport as will be published this year. If I were you, I'd hurry on down to Waterstone's or W.H. Smith (other bookstores are available), buy a copy, then hide it away somewhere before Christmas morning. There. You have Dad or Granddad's gift sorted. PS – they've always hated your taste in men's cologne.

Now I should mention that although I have never met Scott Murray, he and I have been exchanging lively correspondence for a good decade or so. Scott often does the football Minute-by-Minute reports for The Guardian and does similar Hole-by-Hole reports for all of golf's major events, the latter having earned him the well-deserved nickname of Doctor Golf. For my part, I'm one of those wiseacres who takes injury or commercial breaks as an opportunity to email or Tweet thoughts on the action with the considerable pleasure of often seeing them quoted in the MBM or HBH. Hey, you have your hobbies and I have mine. Don't be a judge.

What I've always enjoyed about Scott's work is that he is not afraid to show his fan's heart and his wit on the page, which is not only enjoyable, it is necessary. Even though in the world of newspapers the Sports desk isn't generally seen as the highest of literary callings (the American term is 'the toy department') that is entirely unfair. Sportswriting has an obstacle that the good people covering politics or science or even popular culture do not have to face. Until a journalist tells you what Theresa May's Brexit plan is, what life there might be on Mars, or what the movie opening this weekend is about, you don't know. The journalist in those fields is the first messenger. But with Sport? Anyone with a pair of eyeballs who cares knows that Liverpool drew with Watford 3-3 and the former better shore up its defence or this is going to be much too long a season.

To read the remainder of this review, please visit The London Economic

Room Little Darker by June Caldwell

2017-06-25T02:51:00.000-04:00

Room Little Darker

June Caldwell (New Island Books 2017, Trade Paperback) 215 pages, £9.99 cover price

(as originally published in The London Economic)

Eventually we learn at least three things over the course of a long and frequently lively life – our wit and charm is not enhanced by copious drinking no matter what we think at the time, the pain of a loss lasts longer than the thrill of a win, and don't get your hopes up. There are more of course (the two things in life everyone you know thinks they know how to do better than you know how to do are how to raise your children and how to train your dog) but let's stick with those three for now as in one way or another each applies to one of the finest reading experiences I have enjoyed in absolute ages, the Irish writer June Caldwell's first collection of brilliant, soul-ripping short stories Room Little Darker.

Let's deal with that expectation thingy first, shall we? When I first moved back to Ireland from the UK at the end of 2014 (I've since returned but really, I'm not on the lam) I plunged back in to reading new Irish writers with the same gusto with which a religious convert takes Communion. In that holy spirit I ordered for review an anthology titled A Long Gaze Back: An Anthology of Irish Women Writers. The book – and it is very well worth your time with a reward of pleasure – follows an historical timeline, so there near the end was a story by June Caldwell, 'SOMAT.' It is included in Room Little Darker having been nominated for several prizes which it really should have won. 'SOMAT' is written from the point of view of a foetus whose mother is de facto dead of a stroke, yet Ireland's strange and complicated relationship with death, dying, maternity and (three Hail Marys and five Our Fathers later) abortion does not allow the mother to rest in peace, her electrical cord to the world must be kept in its socket.

(to continue reading, please follow this link to The London Economic)

The Theoretical Foot by M.F.K. Fisher

2017-05-27T06:24:00.000-04:00

The Theoretical Foot

M.F.K. Fisher (Bloomsbury 2017, Trade Paperback Edition) 250 pages with afterword. £8.99 cover price

(As first published in The London Economic)

I suppose there really is a first time for everything. One starts to firmly believe that there is nothing – nothing! – new to be found between the covers of a book. After all, Aristotle nailed down the six elements of plot twenty-four hundred years ago and even the most experimental, supposedly plotless modern fiction has within it a structure just as finely tuned and balanced as the honeycomb of a bee hive. Well, if it’s any good anyway.
After having reviewed seven hundred or so books over the years (no, I don’t get out much but by God when I do I am the Zen Master of cocktail chat) I really thought I’d seen it all. Dinosaurs firing laser cannons? Naturally. Lonely men leading lonely lives on lonely islands with only the nameless occupants of a small Greek café for conversationless company? All too often. Tragedy-stricken women staring out the windows of their abandoned homes on the bleakest of nights, while the streaks of rain dripping down the glass form tears upon their reflected visage? Oh not that again!

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And yet here I am and here you are, so here’s an original sentence to occupy our thoughts. The Theoretical Foot is a fascinating debut novel written sixty-nine years ago by a vastly successful author who died in 1992. Now you just don’t run across that every day.
Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher was primarily known as a food writer, with twenty-seven books and a wealth of articles in The New Yorker when the latter really meant something. You see my children, before there were celebrity chefs there were celebrity gastronomes who were as adept with a typewriter as they were with tongs and snail forks. If the flaw of televised cooking shows – all those damn panna cottas wobbling like breasts on a roller coaster – is that the viewer cannot actually taste the food, then just imagine what skills it must take to describe a meal without even a photograph. The New Yorker never ran a photograph of anything (except of course for the ads) until the 1990s when Tina Brown was the editor; a disastrous one in my opinion, but let’s not go off on that tangent. The magazine was loaded with pictures, but they were word pictures.

(to continue reading at The London Economic, please click here)

The Walworth Beauty by Michele Roberts

2017-05-08T11:56:00.000-04:00

The Walworth Beauty

Michele Roberts (Bloomsbury 2017, Hardcover) 389 pages, £16.99 cover price

(as originally published in The London Economic)

I don't know about you, but as for me if I never hear or read the word meta again it'll be too soon, unless of course it's someone singing 'I Met a Girl' from that fine old musical Bells Are Ringing. It is not that I have any prejudice whatsoever against self-referential elements within a specific piece of media (at the most basic level we would lose the Christmas Panto for one thing) rather it is the over-use of the term itself. Meta has become what bourgeois was to 1960s politics or deconstruction was to 1980s university essays, a catch-all term applied all too frequently and all too loosely so that the term itself has its meaning evaporate. It is rather like being asked to describe someone to a third party and coming back with the lone adjective of pleasant, a term so dull one wonders whether it is intended as a compliment or an insult.

That is quite a shame as when used carefully, with craft and guile, meta commentary within a novel can open up layers of thinking. Within the context of Michele Roberts' new novel The Walworth Beauty there are at least four layers of reflecting connectivity which in combination lift its story beyond what Graham Greene used to call an entertainment and into a space that is much more cunningly literary. It is a tricky business to describe this to you without giving the game of Roberts' plot away, however I do believe that even if the following is somewhat sketchy in the detail department you should still be able to appreciate this novel's true value.

(To continue reading, please go to The London Economic)

Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me

2017-05-02T06:08:00.003-04:00

Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me

Bill Hayes (Bloomsbury 2017, Hardcover) 289 pages, b/w photos, £16.99 cover price

(as published in The London Economic)

On a personal note, a stored image returns to the forefront of my thoughts as summoned by the reading of Bill Hayes' achingly beautiful memoir Insomniac City. It is a February night in 2010, a Toronto winter considering an early spring, a night four hours' distant from consideration of a whispering dawn. I am stood outside an all-hours McDonald's smoking the fifth cigarette of the first pack after I had given up quitting. My eyes followed the mix of smoke and steam as they rose to frame the hospital one block away, the hospital where my lover's brain was struggling to re-assemble itself after an aneurysm had scattered her brain segments like cardboard jigsaw pieces stirred in hot water. And right then, in that moment, three bicycle riders rode past in a line down Dundas Street, each one in black swallowtail coats and black top hats, each bicycle with a lantern attached to the handlebars, each lantern covered with a thin gold shade whose tassels formed speed lines as the bicycles rode past. When I choose to remember that night (I rarely do), I remember the bicycles of Dundas Street; they carry me back.

There is always the risk of exaggerating the value of a book read for review; to suggest the merely good is classic, the mundane a disaster. That is because we reviewers are mentally composing and editing while we read. We find highs and lows, allusions to other works, and interesting things to write about interesting writing. I certainly can't speak for all of us, however every now and then some of us lose our objectivity, put aside our search for amusing summary, and just let the book wash. This is one of those. Insomniac City isn't so much a book to read, it is a book to love.

Bill Hayes, a novelist, journalist and photographer brings all three of those skills equally and at their peak to this series of reminiscences. Some are presented as perfect short stories, although all are factual. There are short journal entries and also a series of black-and-white photos of random people, objects, places, and Hayes' deceased lover Dr Oliver Sacks.

Yes, that Oliver Sacks, the same one that Robin Williams played in the marvelous film Awakenings; the same one that wrote fourteen books published during his lifetime, mostly on his career as a neurologist. To say the very least, he was a brilliant doctor, well-known for the intense personal care he gave his patients. The latter may have well have been a result of Sacks himself carrying at least two physical afflictions throughout his life. He was both a migraine sufferer, albeit one who rather enjoyed the explosions of colour that emerge and radiate during an episode. In addition, both Sacks and his brother had prosopagnosia aka 'face blindness.' He could not remember for identification purposes someone else's face; or for that matter, not even his own when he would see it reflected in a mirror or a window.

(to continue reading please go to The London Economic)

Young and Damned and Fair: The Life of Catherine Howard, Fifth Wife of King Henry VIII

2017-04-17T13:15:00.000-04:00

Young and Damned and Fair:

The Life of Catherine Howard, Fifth Wife of King Henry VIII

Gareth Russell (Simon & Schuster 2017, Hardcover) 436 pages, indexed and colour illustrated

(as first published in The London Economic)

There are few dimmer endorsements to be made of the human psyche when we consider the historical figures chosen for repeated examination and thus de facto celebration in biographies, novels, films, plays, and multi-part BBC series. By and large we are drawn to the Bad Guys. Send armies into battle for slaughter, execute the enemies, live in appalling decadence, and abuse women; do any of those in combination with one or two others and your name will live forever. Hitler alone scarcely goes a week without someone or another releasing a new book starring the Nazi. Those black-on-white swastikas do stand out nicely on the shelves; such a shame that their designer, the dentist Dr Freidrich Krohn hadn't put a copyright on it for his heirs would be swimming in money today.

Of course, every time I make this point that we as a civilisation are as drawn to villainy as vultures to a dead ibex, someone or other always says 'Wait. What about Jesus?' After making a mental note as to who not to invite to future cocktail parties my response usually runs along the lines that yes, starting a religion is also good business. After all, churches developed and refined the dubious arts of branding across multi-media and targeting the susceptible centuries, millennia even, before Don Draper and the good folks at Sterling Cooper swizzled their first swizzle stick in crisp, cold martinis.

(To read more, please go click here)

The Perfect Stranger by Megan Miranda

2017-04-08T11:13:00.000-04:00

The Perfect Stranger

Megan Miranda (Simon & Schuster 2017, Hardcover)

336 pages, $25 cover price

What a perfectly delicious framework for a novel. Let me ask you, how well do you know your best friend? It's not as odd a question or as obvious an answer as it may seem. After all, we discover hidden truths about ourselves all the time, things we never knew we were capable of doing, so just imagine how little you might know about someone else. And reciprocity is scarcely guaranteed; just because you've slurred out your deeply darkened secrets to someone else over that suddenly necessary fifth glass of wine, well, they may have been listening but it doesn't mean they've talking now does it? Or can't you remember?

If all of the above has made you slightly uncomfortable, perhaps even having reflexively scratched those places in your back where the knives have been stuck, then you're in just the right mood to really dive into Megan Miranda's psychological thriller The Perfect Stranger. This may sound paradoxical, but the plot becomes complex enough that I have no fear whatsoever that a summary can possibly give the game away.

Leah Stevens has recently moved to western Pennsylvania from Boston with her old post-college roommate Emmy. Leah has switched careers from journalism to teaching whereas Emmy just wants to give her own life a jump start. The high school basketball coach, one Davis Cobb, has been stalking Leah, showing up at the door late at night with booze on the breath and lust in his heart. Davis becomes a suspect in the coma-inducing assault on another young woman who resembles Leah, just at the time that Leah realizes that she hasn't seen her housemate for three days. Complications arise.

What is excellent, even template-worthy about The Perfect Stranger is its pace of information. With increasing conviction verging on complete catechism, what I continue to observe is that how and when the details of characters are revealed is the quality that separates the forgettable (or memorable in a bad way) page-turner and time-killer from, you know, novels. In this case, the vanished Emmy is kept quite invisible to we readers for quite a long time. The ominous Davis Cobb does not actually make a 'present day' appearance until halfway through the story and Leah's reasons for leaving journalism are delivered with delicious deviltry. As soon as one thinks one knows all the story ... there is more story. A hack would just vomit all the information out in the first forty pages and fill the rest with car chases or people being clunked over the head with pokers; Megan Miranda is no hack, she is a novelist.

Leah herself is a compelling, sympathetic character even though she is deeply introspective and more than a little bit suspicious of others' motives. Then again, if you've been stalked and your friend from the next bedroom has just left without a trace, I think you might be a wee bit careful and questioning too. And as for Emmy, she reminds me of the title character in that grand old Gene Tierney mystery Laura – the reader is like Dana Andrews' detective, utterly intrigued by her without her even being there.

At the heart of this splendidly written story though is the question of trust and friendship and how each is implied in the other. Is it ever safe to place your life within the reach of hands of someone else, and if you have, how much will you give in return? That theme is stated in the form of a parlour game question as follows. Emmy is the speaker, after she has postulated that there are only three kinds of relationships:

She'd looked back to the ceiling. 'Okay, here's the hypothetical. Take anyone you know. Anyone. Let's say you know they've killed someone. They call you and they confess. Do you either, A, call the police.' She held up her thumb. 'B, do nothing.' Her pointer finger.'Or C, help them bury the body.' Her third finger went up, and she held them over her face, waiting.

I laughed, realizing that she was serious. 'That's it?'

'That's it,' she said. 'That's how you know.'

Well? As the old game show used to ask, Who do you trust?

Be seeing you.

Wake Up & Live!: The Life of Bob Marley

2017-04-08T05:45:00.000-04:00

Wake Up & Live!: The Life of Bob Marley

Jim McCarthy & Benito Gallego (Omnibus Press 2017, Graphic Novel) unnumbered, £16.99 cover price

Graphic novels, or in this case graphic biographies, are a new world to me. I've always looked at the arts rather like a primary school gym teacher: words over here, pictures over there, no talking in lines! PWEET! But then again as we all know or should know, being a true lover of the arts means that we should be prepared to roll with it, accept changes or combinations, embrace the new before we're dragged into the grave by the cold skeleton hands of the old. So! Bring on the graphic biography and let's see what you have.

Well, I have to tell you and indeed I want to tell you that the result was equally compelling and enjoyable. A biography – any biography of anyone by anyone in any format – has three duties. What are the important facts of someone's life, why should we give a shit about the subject, and who was this person anyway? Wake Up & Live performs the first duty well, the second duty allusively and the third effectively. Thus and overall the book wins.

Bob Marley, for the three of you who have read this far and don't already know, was along with Peter Tosh and Jimmy Cliff one-third and the most famous of the great triumvirate that brought reggae music into the Top 40 mainstream of music in the 1970s. Lyrically, reggae was the music of peaceful protest, aggressive without throwing bombs unlike its contemporaries in The Clash or The Sex Pistols; the sound of a peaceful, dancing protest. Musically, reggae's beat was born of bad radio reception in Jamaica, resulting in an emphasis on the rhythm section as the narrative driver rather than the relatively thin-sounding lead guitar which dominated US or UK sounds. As a point of trivia, Adam Copeland the drummer for The Police has long been acknowledged as the only non-Jamaican who truly 'got' reggae.

Besides its musical and political themes there was also a religious aspect to reggae found in Rastafarianism. Rasta, as it is known in short form, is an utterly fascinating sect, a combination of several seemingly distinct or even incompatible elements: Christianity, the Back to Africa movement of Marcus Garvey, the coronation of Haile Selassie as Emperor of Ethiopia, and absolute bushels of cannabis. Put that all together and God is re-named as Jah, a spirit that lives within us all, Selassie was the second coming of Jesus, and Ethiopia itself was Zion, the land to which the followers of Rasta would return (either physically or psychically) to find peace. I will note that if any of this makes you smirk do take a look at some of the fables or indeed fabliaux of any religion and learn some humility. It's not that great a leap from burning bush to burning spliff.

But I digress. Getting back to Bob Marley, much like Kurt Cobain or Keith Moon, both previous subjects of Jim McCarthy's work, the great Jamaican has the biographical advantage of having lived a relatively short life that can be summarized in a dynamic way with a tragic end. Dying of old age, as Chuck Berry did recently, requires an author to choose an end point for the story; pass away from cancer as Marley did at age 36 and the end is written for you.

So how's the execution of Wake Up and Live!? Excellent actually. I don't really want to haul out the cliché of 'a picture tells a thousand words' however clichés exist for a reason and that is they are accurate. The visual pleasure of Benito Gallego's artwork provides the same evidential verité of a documentary film with the added advantage that unlike a film, here the frames don't move; one can stop, consider, examine and contemplate. As for Jim McCarthy's words and narrative, not only are all the high points and background of Marley's youth, discovery by and rise within the music industry, and eventual death covered, there is an additional educational element in how the distinctive Jamaican patois is handled. McCarthy does not 'anglicize' the speech of the Caribbean; it is presented as it is. There are running translations throughout though, within the graphic frames.

I know many a Bob Marley devotee and there is not a one of them that will not thoroughly enjoy Wake Up & Live! For those fans who wish to pass along their devotion to a new generation, I might well suggest the gift of this book along with a copy (choose your favourite format) of Marley's 1975 Live! Album as a perfect starter kit. The recipients can find their own papers or pipe.

Be seeing you.

The Moment of Truth by Damian McNicholl

2017-03-28T18:53:00.000-04:00

The Moment of Truth

Damian McNicholl (Pegasus Books, Hardcover) 336 pages, $25.95 cover price. Release Date June 6, 2017

Because so many of the truths in our lives are hidden, denied or twisted in disguise it's nice to have the occasion to state one that is unanimously agreed upon. If you dislike the central concept of a book, it is darn difficult to like the book. Don't waste your time or risk eyestrain reading The Martian Chronicles or Stranger in a Strange Land if you are firmly convinced that there is no possibility of intelligent life on other worlds. Despise books about war? Then skip over All's Quiet on the Western Front. And as for bullfighting, well here we are. The Moment of Truth is a novel about bullfighting. Proceed with caution.

Damian McNicholl plot, set in the early 1950s of Texas and Mexico, does contain scenes where the morality of bullfighting is discussed, but it does so in only the expected ways. I think it's abhorrent/but you eat meat. It is cruel to kill/the bull leads a glorious life for his four plus years of it. And so forth. The central character, a novice American bullfighter named Kathleen bats away the arguments like Roger Federer dealing with a poorly struck lob in another, tidier sport.

The argument that goes missing though is one that would have lifted The Moment of Truth into a whole different plane and one that would have been fascinating to resolve. Let me challenge you with it. Imagine a bullfight, develop a picture of it in your mind. You have it? Good. I'll wager that the image you have conjured is that of a man and a bull, standing on sand, a cape being twirled, a sword at the ready. Now, what is missing from that picture? The audience.

It's not so much the killing of the bull that is morally troubling, it's the enjoyment of it. Death itself may be the inevitable price of survival; if none of us died we would run out of room. Death is the path to food. For we mear eaters that is obvious, yet even vegans have to kill plants in order to gain nourishment. No one buys a ticket to watch the killing floor of an abattoir; that seems abhorrent. Yet what is a bullfight but a hyper-ritualized abattoir? So why do so many people enjoy it? What does that say about humanity? Those are far, far more interesting questions. One can understand the matadors; like Formula one drivers they have a need for the heightened sensory experience of dangerous public acts, and furthermore I do believe them when they say that they feel theirs is an honourable profession and not one of cruelty. But what about the audience? Why does it enjoy watching, let's call it what it is, torture ending in death?

McNicholl never gets into that issue, preferring instead to make a rather simplified feminism the morality play running just under the plot's surface. Men are beasts who cheat on and beat their long-suffering, acquiescent wives. Women have to try twice as hard to gain even a hint of equality and even then Kathleen is recognized and admired as much for her auburn locks as for her skills with the cape and sword. It's not that McNicholl is wrong about any of this, it's just presented as so much paint-by-numbers business. If you've seen one CW network series, trust me, you're right up to speed.

There are good points about The Moment of Truth, however I think I'll leave those for the end, as it's nice to leave a piece of reading with a positive echo. Until then, there are a couple of writing choices that were made that I find truly perplexing.

For one, most of the novel is written from Kathleen's point-of-view, first person narration. And then, for no reason I can discern, the voice flips into third person for a chapter and then returns to the first person. I don't have any problem whatsoever with multiple narrative voices in a novel; dear Lord that one's been with us at least since Wuthering Heights. Yet, there should be some purpose for flipping the voice. I wondered if McNicholl had brought in the third person/all-knowing narrator so that we might dig around in the thoughts of Fermin, the former matador who becomes Kathleen's tough love trainer and (inevitably) substitute father figure. That would be a purpose, but there's nothing there really. It's not like the anger and embarrassment he feels in a scene can't be conveyed by first person observation. Well, I just chalk that one up to an odd choice made.

The other odd choice fairly ripped at my inner ear. Much of the dialogue, particularly that of the Texans, has all the subtlety and nuance of an improv sketch based on an imitation of old John Wayne movies. It shows up jarringly in the first person narration where Kathleen says several times she was – and I quote – fixin' to do this or that. People may drop their g's in speech but they don't when they're quoting their own thoughts. McNicholl being from Northern Ireland may have thought he was being clever and accurate in doing this; his editor should have kept adding in the letter g until the author eventually gave up the protest.

Now all that said, the actual bullfight scenes, the training scenes, a truly morbid scene where Kathleen kills her first bull in an abattoir, all those are written extremely well. As an old sage once said, if this is the sort of thing you like then you'll like this sort of thing. The Moment of Truth is an enjoyable read if you can stomach bullfighting. I managed to get through it with no major psychic damage being inflicted so, er, bully for that.

Be seeing you.

Dreamlives of Debris by Lance Olsen

2017-03-13T05:09:00.000-04:00

Dreamlives of Debris

Lance Olsen (Dzanc Books 2017, Trade Paperback) 296 pages, $22.95 cover price

Here is the problem and it is such a large one in that I am not at all sure I can overcome it. I'm not at all sure that I can review, summarize, analyze or otherwise tantalize you in words and sentences composed around the subject of Dreamlives of Debris without your wrongly inferring that it is an intimidating highbrow piece of niche literature that requires you to pack a library in your backpack and hire a deconstructionist both long-winded and wise as your guide before opening this sort-of novel/sort-of meditation to page one. Damn. So instead let's start with something rather less intimidating:

Dreamlives of Debris by Lance Olsen is great fun.

And I mean that most sincerely.

Bearing that sort of reverse caveat in mind, let's get down to business here. Dreamlives of Debris takes the legend of the Minotaur and the Labyrinth as a narrative navigational aid; something the reader knows (or has a general awareness of anyway) and can latch onto while Olsen opens doorways into alleyways of intriguing ideas. The Minotaur himself or itself is given the name Debris, although trivia fans will be delighted to learn that debris did not enter the English language until 1701, when it was used to describe the state of Prince Rupert's shattered army in retreat from the forces of Oliver Cromwell. Oh, and its origin is French, not Greek. Are you with me so far? Good.

You see, that's the great joy I find in any of Lance Olsen's books. Either bless him for it or damn him, he makes an already curious mind even more curious just put putting ideas or concepts, snatches of letters or memoirs, or a name like Debris out there on the page like bits of cheese left out at night that get snatched up by a shy mouse. No traps however, just the cheese.

And what I like about this is that Olsen neither force-feeds the mice (that would be us, if you hadn't guessed that already) nor does he insist on one kind of cheese, one specific idea. Rather, we're left to pick and choose, re-cast the meanings, themes and importance of his stories however our individual consciousnesses choose to apportion them. 'Now how in hell does anyone do that?' you ask. Ah. That's what I'm here for, to hopefully explain such things.

I noticed in the Acknowledgements of Dreamlives of Debris that Lance Olsen thanks an instructor for teaching him how to use the InDesign application. In case you don't know, InDesign is an industry standard tool used to arrange the layout of words and images on a printed or multi-media page, replacing the formerly dominant Quark Xpress in the process. Now that's not trivia, as the layout of a book like Dreamlives of Debris is in many ways just as important as the words within it. This latest work by Lance Olsen is 296 pages, but if you squashed it all together with the more traditional use of whitespace like in whatever mystery or western you last read it would probably come in at 120 or 140 or so. The first-person statements of Debris and the snippets of quotations, both harvested and invented, by the other real-life or invented characters are presented in isolation, one per page, often very short.

But ain't that just like life itself? Now we're really digging into our subject. It's an idea far older than the works of Marshall McLuhan, although to my knowledge he was the first to attempt to format it, that we are bombarded by media from which we pick and choose, sort and arrange, like pieces from a variety of five hundred jigsaw puzzles tossed into the same basket from which we construct our own personal picture. That's the general theory behind Olsen's method, at least as I see it.

In practical terms, what do you do if you run across something like the following page in Dreamlives of Debris?:

:::: MICHEL FOUCAULT SONG

And with that the Minotaur returns: the mythical expression of the very near and the very far. Of the very identity of words — by which I mean this simple, fundamental fact about language: there are fewer terms of designation than there are things to designate. The Minotaur epitomizes words as the unexpected meeting place of the most distant figures of reality where distance itself is abolished. For language is a proliferation of distance, an extension of corridors that seem familiar and yet are always foreign.

If that is an idea you want to explore, then explore that passageway within the inescapable labyrinth. If not, then bash on, perhaps returning to something a few pages earlier you ran across that better peaked your personal interest:

:::: DEBRIS

Unless I am still asleep, or — listen:

:::: STUXNET SONG

We are Stuxnet, the first computer worm designed specifically to cause material damage by forcing a large number of —

:::: DEBRIS

How can these voices that aren’t mine always have been mine?

Oh I spent a good deal of time on that one, as the notion of how a legend created 3500 years ago, give or take, exists for re-invention in the computer age is a notion well worth mulling. And there too, it is equally implied just in that page, those seven lines, the whole great quantum goo whereby the observer affects the observed.

Time and life and the whole damn thing truly is a labyrinth and thus Lance Olsen could not have found a better metaphor. A labyrinth is a physical puzzle into which one enters then can never leave. Wait, wasn't there a door here a moment ago? For what are we but a little blob of cells that become a bigger blob that has this remarkable thing called consciousness breathed into it from ... how ... why ... who ... where? Wait, wasn't there a door here a moment ago? Don't waste your time looking for the door as you won't find it anyway. After all, life is rather like a play and we are the actors. No one cares about our entrances and exits it's what we do on the stage that forms the art.

Don't let the idea of a book like Dreamlives of Debris intimidate you. I repeat what I said at the outset – it's great fun. Deliciously written, carefully arranged, friendly as the family dog, just trust me when I say this book won't hurt a bit.

Be seeing you.

The Chosen Maiden by Eva Stachniak

2017-02-28T18:43:00.001-05:00

The Chosen Maiden

Eva Stachniak (Doubleday Canada 2017, Trade Paperback) 412 pages, $18 cover price

There's a thought with which I have amused myself while choosing how to compose this review. Virtually every novel you've ever read is an historical novel. The only exceptions I can think of are speculative or future-set science fiction, or romping through the woods and fields with anthropomorphic animals (and even then, there's Animal Farm). Dickens and Defoe, Melville and Marquez, Jameses prefaced or suffixed with Henry or James, all are historical writers regardless of whether or not they intended it at the time.

It's all about the reader's perspective and not the writer's. Even if the author was faithfully recording the scene outside his window, describing in aching detail the lunch menu of that little café just down the street – you know, the one with the Campari umbrellas – that scene and everyone in it is either long since or soon to be dead and that café was re-developed into office space years and years ago. Squint all you like, feel the cobblestones through thin-soled shoes, I don't care what you do, but you are just not going to experience David Copperfield's London in 2017; horse carriages were not outfitted with car horns and the only things to be found Underground were graves and wine cellars, not Tube stations.

The skills of a crack novelist must be many – dialogue, character, plot, you know the drill – however the one we're most concerned with here and now is that of the atmosphere, the mise en scène, the place and time of a work of fiction. How well does the writer accomplish the task of creating a vivid word picture that can form itself into a mindscape that the reader's imagination can wander around in? Frankly any fool can create a great character, all it takes are wit, physicality and a secret. Creating a world for that character to live in though, ah now there's a tricky business. After all, it took God himself nearly a week to pull that one off.

Even though by this definition all novels set within a time previous to the reader's own are historical novels there is no point in making mock-naive protest against the truth that there are intentionally written historical novels and there's lots of them. The writer looks back in time, finds or creates from whole cloth an encompassing story, does the research and gets to work pounding on the keyboard. At their best, historical novels emerge resembling E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime, in my view the peak of the genre. While it is not absolutely necessary to have famous people wandering around the pages, let's face it that's a great part of the fun; like sitting in a bar and spotting Nicole Kidman across the room, making an ordinary evening into a relishable anecdote.

The art of the matter is a delicate balance. Can the author fit the 'famous names in famous places' into a story without the former overwhelming the latter? Doctorow managed to keep Coalhouse Walker in the leading position even while Harry Houdini, Henry Ford and Emma Goldman are popping up like alligators on a golf course.

This leads us to Eva Stachniak's recently published fifth book, The Chosen Maiden. Save for her first novel, 2000's Necessary Lies, the rest have been historical novels. I came onboard as a Stachniak appreciator with The Winter Palace and then Empress of the Night, her two volumes on the life of Catherine the Great. The Chosen Maiden takes us back to the Russian court, but only tangentially. For this is the story, told in the first person, of Bronislava (Bronia) Nijinska.

Who dat, you say? Perhaps you may have heard of the more famous Nijinsky, the ballet dancer and not the race horse. Vaslav Nijinsky is still the dancer to whom the more modern Rudolf Nureyev or Mikhail Baryshnikov are compared, even though Nijinsky's career was depressingly short, barely a decade, before he spent the last thirty years of life in various stages of schizophrenia. Don't bother looking him up on YouTube as you won't find anything. The impresario Sergei Diaghilev for whom Nijinsky created and danced his greatest choreography, never allowed any of those ballets to be filmed. Diaghilev felt that the film cameras of the period wrapped around the First World War were insufficient to capture the scope and art of the Ballet Russes and frankly he wasn't wrong.

Of course I have just imitated exactly what the life of Bronia was. As Vaslav's sister she was his confidante (until his rather unfortunate marriage), dance partner, and a formidable dancer, teacher and long-time choreographer in her own right. But when you're Nijinsky's sister, that is always going to be the first thing anyone says about you.

Mind you, as Stachniak makes clear, Bronia was not the Salieri to her brother's Mozart. Particularly after the loss of their elder brother Stanislav (who also descended into madness following a childhood brain injury) and their dancer father leaving their mother/Mamusia, the remaining two siblings and their mother were properly loving and supportive, bound by blood and Polish-Russian heritage as much as they were bound by barre and ballet. Bronia is dazzled by her brother, worried by her brother, sometimes frustrated by her brother, gains entry into the Ballet Russes thanks to her brother, yet the relationship never descends into the melodramatic griping of jealousy.

From what I have read about Bronia Nijinska beyond The Chosen Maiden – rare occasion for me, I actually did some independent research before writing this review – Eva Stachniak presents an historically accurate depiction of her her lead character. That would have made for a difficult assignment for Bronia was one tough woman. She was not given to wild partying, multiple affairs or plotting against rivals, any or all of which make a person a juicy subject for fictional biography. Rather, she is something less purely dramatic yet ever so much more interesting, a true professional woman completely dedicated to her artistic vision.

Life in the arts is a hard and rocky field to sow. Life in a classical art such as ballet I would argue is even harder as the niche of potential audience is smaller than say musical comedy, as well as being by nature conservative in its taste for experimental works. Even Diaghilev had to dig out the Greatest Hits package regularly in order to pay the bills. In particular though, life in a classic art for a woman with a specific vision, that field is hard as pavement. And yet, Bronia survives and succeeds despite changes of taste, the Revolution that destroys reputations, wars, financial setbacks, death of a child, and the winds of horror leading into the Second World War. As a fondly remembered old English professor of mine once said about The Wife of Bath, 'Wow, what a woman!'

The same exuberance can be applied to The Chosen Maiden's author. I thoroughly enjoyed Eva Stachniak's two novels on Catherine the Great. This one surpasses those. This is a writer in full and complete control of her material, knowing just how much of a ballet to describe in just enough detail and which ballets are worthy of description. Perhaps writing in the voice of an emotionally reserved character such as Bronia helped; regardless, I was appreciative of the result.

Stachniak never lets Vaslav or Diaghilev, Pavlova or Stravinsky shove her lead off the stage. They all and others are presented as no more and no less crucial than Mamusia, or Bronia's children, or her students or husbands. The Chosen Maiden is in perfect balance, rather fitting giving its subject.

There is one other subtle element to The Chosen Maiden that I point out here because I love it when a writer implies a message in the background instead of slugging the reader in the face. That element is the linking narration between the novel's sections, all of which are spoken by Bronia during a voyage to New York just as World War Two is beginning. Do you see why that is so perfect? No? Well, that's what they pay me for, to explain stuff to readers. What is a great ship on an ocean but a pause between realities, a stateless place between nations of violence and a desired port of peace? What is our ability to survive those Shakespearean slings and arrows of outrageous fortune based upon but finding our ships, taking stock, pressing on, in life's journey that always changes, never stops, never telling us what the next music will be. But whatever that music is, we shall create our own dance that will suit it well.

Be seeing you.

Brussels Noir

2017-02-06T13:20:00.000-05:00

Brussels Noir

Various Authors (Akashic Books 2016, Trade Paperback) 284 pages, $15.95 cover price

I actually had what is for me an original thought, although perhaps it is old news to the rest of you. It occurs to me that the great nations of the world, the ones whose internal or external intrigues are guaranteed global headlines, all seem to have a neighbour that serves the role of awkward younger sibling. I've lived in two of them. Believe me, I get tired of two questions: people over here in Ireland thinking that my stubbornly persisting Canadian accent is American, and friends back in Canada asking if I get over to London much these days. (Mind you, I've done the same sort of thing as I've been fond of describing Dublin as a pocket-sized London.) Russia has Ukraine, although that is an absolutely tragic family feud and Germany has Austria in a role reversal from their places in the eighteenth century. And then of course there is France and Belgium, the latter of which is the focus of this incredible book of short stories Brussels Noir.

There is a lot more to Belgium and its capital Brussels than Hercule Poirot and stacks of EU bureaucracy, producer of the majority of best-selling beer brands and French Fries haughty original les pommes frites. It is also a country and city home to two indigenous languages and cultures plus a large African population as a reminder of a colonial past that should be a shaming mark of all too many nations that desired the trappings of a great power.

Not that I was anyone's idea of an expert on Belgium. In fact, most of what I knew was in that previous paragraph. But I'm learning, through books and lately from getting to know more of those books' authors. The most appreciated lesson has been what an incredibly subtle and nuanced literature there is in Belgium.

One should always hesitate and reconsider the position before making any general pronouncement about any nation or people's general characteristics; after all, most of our worst wars began that way and seem about to begin again. However, just as the combination of centuries of servitude and millennia of rainy weather birthed Irish ironic wit and melancholy, so too do the stories of Belgian writers carry their national history within their sub-conscious, within their geist.

How so, you ask and I'm glad you did as otherwise there is nothing so uncomfortable as answering an unasked question. If I had to label it all with just one short phrase that phrase would be reflective connectivity. When old conflicts cause the demarcation of – to be honest about it – arbitrary borders to be placed around nation-states, particularly when those nation-states contain multiple cultural solitudes that yet still must mingle and interplay for commerce and governance, a creative citizen of one culture cannot help but see another neighbourhood's life through the experience of their own, while equally ruminating as to how their own is appreciated (or not) by the other. The writer and the writer's work so becomes a sort of commuter train that goes through the different landscapes every day. The writer gazes out the window, sees the differences until the sights are so common that the differences start to vanish from the conscious until such a time when that writer seeks to describe these places to readers from other lands.

Such is the viewpoint of an excellent short story such as The Other Half of a Life by Ayerdhal. It quite literally takes the reader on exactly such a commuter trip. The story itself is set in the near future, the coming dystopia, a Brexiteer's worst nightmare come true of a bureaucracy gone mad ethnic cleansing entire districts to the point where a worker's greatest desire is only to be allowed to work from home. Avoid the commute, avoid the danger.

There too, as an international city, Brussels finds as all the Londons, Parises, New Yorks and Romes of the world do, that their most shameful aspects – the ones that are not, shall we say, postcard worthy – are the same ones that titillate the visiting tourist. They want to head off piste and do it half pissed. Patrick Delperdance perfectly nails this in his story Only Muddy Streams Flow in the Darkness. This is a superb example of pitch black humour as a horny tourist guide tries to track down a lost sheep from his group who has abandoned his fiancée for the joys of a bit of whoring on the Rue d'Aerschot.

Still, that is just geography. This reflective connectivity also operates within the structural choices made within a given story's structure. Words, metaphors, turns of phrase; all of these are also landscapes seen on the repetitive commute. I refer you to a writer I much admire, Bob Van Laerhoven and his story Paint it Black. Beyond the overt fabric of two Belgian male protagonists – one a dissolute white art forger, the other a slightly insane African art forger – there are delicate patterns within the weave. A lethal car accident is described early on in this thirty page narrative and so when a second car trip happens, when the white forger describes dangerous speeds and compares himself to Stirling Moss, well of course death is about to occur ... except it doesn't, or at least not quite yet. And there too forgery itself is a perfect metaphor for the cultural mosaic; we say we are the one thing when in fact we both are and aren't that thing. A Mondrian forgery is four things all at once. It is a vision of the original artist, an exercise is craft by the forger, a commodity for the criminal commissioner, and a conversation piece for the eventual buyer. After all, who enjoys a writer's bottle of wine the most? Is it the farmer who tends the grapes, the estate that bottles it with care, the vintner who sells it on, the writer who draws from it some inspiration, or the reader? Reflective connectivity; quite a concept is it not?

Of course to do this sort of writing, creating vintages from vine berries, one requires a lot of patience; the same sort of patience that smaller countries must also have as part of their character for they cannot just demand their way to their desires. That leads me to what is, in my mind, the little masterpiece within Brussels Noir, a story called In the Shadow of the Tower by Émilie De Béco. The story itself is a revenge plot, but oh what a great plot it is as a young woman takes some dozen years or more to avenge the suicide of her father who had been hounded to death by a sensationalist media. Here the commuter trip is one of time as well as space. Lydie, the avenging daughter, must follow the career steps of her target, bit by bit, course by course, interview by interview, assignment by assignment, until she is at a time and place where her goal can be achieved in superb and justifiably vicious detail. Émilie De Béco is, as they say, one to look for and I intend to look for other works by her as soon as I finish writing this review.

Which, I think, comes about now. Brussels Noir is a volume of excellence, made for submerging into contemplative depth. These stories aren't page turners, they're thought provokers. Enjoy.

Be seeing you.

Saratoga Payback by Stephen Dobyns

2017-01-31T23:57:00.003-05:00

Saratoga Payback

Stephen Dobyns (Blue Rider Press 2017, Hard Cover) 368 pages, $27 cover price

The feeling was much like supposedly meeting someone for the first time and then soon realizing that actually you'd gone to high school with them. Was it physics or phys ed? Did we get along or were there Unfortunate Incidents at the Lockers?

As I've mentioned before, as a reviewer I've always depended on the kindness of publicists. Thus, it was suggested to me as we were making arrangements to review Dark Mercy that Blue Rider Press could, if it wasn't an imposition, add Stephen Dobyns' Saratoga Payback to the envelope. Evidently I agreed, as here we are with your reading a review of the latter. In fact, I believe my exact words were, 'Sure, who doesn't love a good mystery?'

After I'd read perhaps five pages it dawned on me that I had indeed read one of Dobyns' Charlie Bradshaw Mysteries absolute eons ago. My memory of that book – whatever its title was – is dim yet pleasant. Bradshaw was a retired policeman who had turned private eye and lived in a cabin on a lake outside Saratoga, New York where the horses run races in the spring sun and the characters around them are shady. Since then, Bradshaw has retired once more, from private detective work, has got married, moved into town and has a step-daughter. He is now sixty-seven years old and is attempting to learn home repair techniques. Wherever did the time go!?

As you're a bright-eyed reader of charmingly glib book reviews you'll have guessed that there's more to Saratoga Springs than the choice of what screws to use when hanging a potted fern mixed with tips on avoiding prostate cancer. And you'd be right! For indeed a local bad 'un named Mickey Martin, memorable for particularly toxic bad breath, shows up dead on the sidewalk outside Charlie's house. Well now, there's an inconvenience for you.

What I enjoy about Dobyns' writing are two things. One, I quite like the slow pace of his storytelling. Mystery or detective fiction can often be so wearying to read, what with people forever being bludgeoned unconscious, or cars blowing up outside banks, or guns being waved about like giant foam hands at a college football game. None of that here. The murders (Spoiler alert: there is more than one) are all shown ex post facto; here's the body, but we leave it to you to imagine the details of how it got that way. Also, in a genre filled with races against the clock, the action of Saratoga Payback takes its sweet time, rolling through some six months of determining the killer's identity.

The second aspect, frankly much more vital, is that Dobyns does not write in 'detective-ese.' His prose is elegant, his descriptions original, and I dare say he uses about a thousand different words in one book than Mickey Spillane knew in his life. That nay well be a result of Dobyns also being an authority on poetry in his other writing life, but regardless of origin he is quite pleasant to read. For instance, where some writers might brush off a character (or President) with a bizarre hairstyle in a quick jab of description, Dobyns gives it a full and relaxing scalp massage:

Eddie hadn't simply had hair; he had a glossy pompadour of black locks running above his scalp like Godzilla over Manhattan. But that, figuratively speaking, was yesterday. Now Eddie had to borrow, and each day he was obliged to borrow a little more, with the result that the hair on the sides and back of his head, if left to its own devices, would dangle past his neck, while the top of his head would shine like a fortune teller's crystal ball.

There's more to it than that, but I think you get my point.

Because I am such a damned pedant, there was one aspect of Saratoga Payback that absolutely itched at me. As the plot rolls along, there are three suspected future victims, of whom Charlie is one. The other two get round-the-clock police protection while Charlie does not. We can infer that the reason is the local constabulary either doesn't much like Charlie or assumes he can take care of himself and his family, yet without an explanation it feels like a plot hole.

Ultimately Saratoga Payback is a completely pleasant read and definitely one well above the norm of its genre. There is a genuine warmth, a real friendliness to Stephen Dobyns' characters that gives rise to a feeling that these are old friends, perhaps even fondly remembered former classmates from high school. Good times.

Be seeing you.

Cruel Mercy by David Mark

2017-01-22T11:54:00.001-05:00

Cruel Mercy

David Mark (blue rider press 2017, Trade Paperback) 368 pages, $27 cover price

The murder mystery and its downtown cousin the crime novel are very much the Italian restaurants of the literary world. Those dining establishments with their checkered tablecloths and Chianti bottles turned to candlesticks are the most popular regional cuisine restaurants in the world. (Please don't call a McDonald's a 'restaurant.' We don't tolerate that sort of crude language in these parts.) Statistics for literary genres are difficult to find – you'll find the nuclear codes tucked inside a fortune cookie before a publisher will readily cough up its numbers – yet the consensus opinion ( see: http://ebookfriendly.com/most-popular-book-genres-infographic/ ) places mysteries at roughly 11% of all books sold. That may lag behind Classic Fiction and Modern Literary Fiction at 13% and 16% respectively, however The Mystery of Edwin Drood and Crime and Punishment crash the first party and if I had a dollar for every Literary Novel I've reviewed that featured a discovered corpse, well I'd have more dollars than you've had hot dinners, preferably Italian.

Pasta palaces and police procedurals bear more in common than one might think at first blush. The menus bear familiar items, there is ample room for the chef or author to display a little or a lot of flare, and both bolognese and blood come in a rich and engaging shade of red. Sorry if that put you off the red sauce, do try the primavera or alfredo next time.

And yet, of course there is variety within the covers and walls of mysteries and restaurants. While it is true that virtually all Italian restaurants offer saghettinmeatball (true northern Italian restaurants don't; my maternal grandfather was born outside Venice and in ninety-six years of life he never once tucked into noodles) for the nervously conservative diner, lamb, poultry and some fantastic fish recipes are just as Roman as Audrey Hepburn's holiday with Gregory Peck. As for mysteries, there are the aforementioned police procedurals, amateur sleuths, psychological examinations, locked rooms and the trench-coated private dick. The background music and machine guns may emerge from violin cases, however the lyrics and plots will vary.

Mystery novels have been much on my mind lately as I am in the midst of a run of their reading for review. Following Louise Phillips' Red Ribbons and before I get to Stephen Dobyns' Saratoga Payback we have this week Cruel Mercy by Yorkshire's David Mark. (By the way, titles much be shrinking in size along with audiences' attention spans.) Cruel Mercy, its cover tells me, is the fifth of Marks' Detective Sergeant McAvoy series, the first in the series to be set in the US and also the first in the series I have had the pleasure to have read. On the assumption that you're as new to the series as I am, let's discover McAvoy together; well, I'll be leading but you know what I mean.

Aector McAvoy is a Scottish detective based now in Hull, Yorkshire. Dare I say he seems to have a bit of a crush on his police captain Trish Pharaoh although McAvoy is quite madly in love with his Irish traveler (which you might know as a gypsy or Romani) wife Roisin. McAvoy is large, ginger haired, has many scars, breaks out in flop sweat rather uncomfortably during intense moments and also views himself as a plodder, requiring frequent encouragement from Captain Pharaoh. So that's our boy.

Funny thing is, I didn't realize McAvoy was the lead in Cruel Mercy until I was well into the book. I never, or almost never, read the publicity material or a book's flyleaf first, preferring instead to read books the way authors intend – start at page one and straight on to page (in this case) three hundred and sixty-eight. And so in Chapter One, Marks introduces us to Detective Ron Alto serving in the Seventh Precinct of Hell's Kitchen, New York. Is it wrong of me to say that I found Alto a more compelling and charismatic character than the nominal hero, McAvoy? Alto is given a fairly fleshed-out backstory, complete with Mob acquaintances, amber-lensed aviator sunglasses, a desire to avoid junk food and a bonzai garden on his desk. In fact, if I know my authors (and darling we all have our crosses to bear and this one's mine) I'm willing to wager that Marks is giving Alto a test run before spinning off his own series. That would be a shrewd career move on Marks' part. In my experience as a Literary Agent I've found certain American publishers reluctant to publish mysteries lacking in American characters and/or settings. And yet we wonder why Trump won.

Back to Cruel Mercy. It begins with a series of picaresque jump cuts, moving from chapter to chapter among settings of Alto's detective squad, McAvoy's room at a Comfort Inn, a botched hit on two Irishmen, and a vividly creepy creep who lets young girls starve to death in his basement. These various pieces slowly start to click and clack together like the numbers on a combination lock. McAvoy is there in New York to find out what happened to his wife's brother, a boxer who vanished on the night of the botched hit. Alto is to assist this unofficial investigation and as you might guess, complications arise.

David Mark is a rock-solid writer who writes well about rock-solid men. Save for a cameo by an undercover agent women are absent from the scene save for Trish Pharaoh forever combing her fingers through her luxuriant black hair on Skype calls with McAvoy and the completely faceless Roisin who just gets phone calls, no Skype. Personally I think they'll be in for rocky times in their marriage, but what the hell do I know?

Mysteries must always – always! – follow an absolutely firm line of logic, even more than any other literary genre, as readers otherwise will complain as loudly as Scrabble players faced with an opponent trying to get away with a proper noun. The art of a mystery novel is found in how a conclusion which makes complete sense can yet be surprising when it is revealed. Marks is excellent in respecting this dictate although I must admit that there were three occasions in the book where McAvoy or associates were in confrontation with certain criminal elements where I wondered why the latter didn't just blow the brains out of the former. That's the only aspect of Cruel Mercy that might have been sailing a bit close to the edge of the world, but it never plunges over the side to the abyss of implausibility.

The final test of a mystery novel, like those Italian restaurants mentioned at the start, is the answer to the question – Would you come back here? And yes, I would dine out on a Marks novel again. Cruel Mercy left me feeling satisfied, well-filled, and desirous of a good cigar and a decent brandy. Check please!

Be seeing you.

Red Ribbons by Louise Phillips

2017-01-16T10:38:00.001-05:00

Red Ribbons

Louise Phillips (Polis Books 2016, Trade Paperback) 360 pages, $16 cover price

It absolutely delights me that Polis Books has released the first US edition of Louise Phillips' Red Ribbons. Phillips is Ireland's finest mystery writer and Red Ribbons marked the first appearance of her criminal psychologist Kate Pearson, however my enjoyment of the occasion is not so much for the writer or for that matter our moss-covered island as it is for entirely selfish reasons.

You see, the one downside of a career as a regular book reviewer is that one never gets to read the back catalogue of anyone. Friends and readers alike (they occasionally overlap too) are forever suggesting books that I would simply love; books that were published in 2006, 1953 or 1832. So sorry darling, I simply don't have the time. You may as well ask me to taste the Waldorf Salad you ate three years ago. A first international edition though, well that gives me a good enough excuse to move forward into the past. Anyway, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

I'd read and reviewed Phillips' two most recent releases in the Kate Pearson series – Last Kiss and The Game Changer – with complete enjoyment. Having been a fan of the mystery genre ever since my mother started handing off her Agatha Christie, Nero Wolfe and Ellery Queen paperbacks to me as soon as she finished reading them (and she was a voluminous reader) there were few things that could content me more in a literary way than finding a new Favourite Mystery Author. I really hadn't had one since Colin Dexter retired from writing the Inspector Morse series¹. Although the Pearson novels I had read previously are perfectly self-contained I had wondered how all this had started. At last I had the opportunity. Hurrah!

In a sort of archaeological way it's a most fascinating exercise looking back at an author's earliest work; literary Darwinism would be another way of phrasing it. We get to see what was there in a context of what it would become. In that sense, it is absolutely no wonder that Louise Phillips has had a remarkably successful career right from the get-go for every hallmark that exists in the later novels is present in Red Ribbons.

Phillips' greatest talent, developed through what must have been thousands of hours of dedicated craft, is her ability to write in different voices with each as individual and believable as the others. If you think that's easy, try writing just two pages of dialogue with three distinct characters. Not so easy, now is it? I mention this aspect of Phillips' work first because it is the true difference between the artist and the hack. Any fool (and brother there's lots of them) can slap a stereotype onto a page (the square-jawed cop, the curvaceous secretary, the weeping wife, the drink-addled parent) and we tend to barely notice the hack-work because there's just so much of it that we accept it as what is. We shouldn't accept mediocrity, ever, as it gets in the way of the good stuff that's out there.

And here too, distinctiveness and individuality does not have to be made in big, slappy-happy brushstrokes . Not all villains have to wear monocles or stroke white cats. Subtlety is much more interesting as our inner minds record much more than our surface minds are aware of. For instance, in Red Ribbons as in her other novels Louise Phillips shares around the narration in first and third person voices as fits the alternating scenes. The Chris Chibnall scripted television series Broadchurch is a visual example of the technique and I mention it here as in terms of personal drama and motivations derived from past horrors if you like the one you'll love the other. But I digress. Red Ribbons' bad 'un has a distinctive verbal tic you might well not notice, not overtly anyway, and that is he uses characters' first names a lot. He is forever referring to 'Kate' or 'Caroline' or 'Amelia', the latter two his child murder victims. 'Well what's so odd about that?' you may be thinking. It's a means of possession you see, like that old phrase of 'use a word three times and its yours.'

Similarly, another narrator in Red Ribbons is Ellie who has been in a psychological clinic – we used to call them asylums – for fifteen years ever since burning a summer rental caravan/RV to the ground with her daughter in it. If that horrifies you, do remember that we're talking about a mystery novel here. What did you expect, family picnics? Anyway, rather than have Ellie's internal voice sounded as the hack's drool and gibber, instead she is just borderline brittle, all the wrath and waves of anger having completed their erosion of the mental landscape. And this too is a wise, wise choice for as a theatre Director once said to me over post-rehearsal beers one night, nothing turns off an audience more than an actor screaming on stage. It is important that we pay attention to Ellie and care about what she says, not just to keep the pages turning, but because other characters in the novel will have to pay attention to Ellie and care about what she says. It all comes down to believability.

Believability is also vital for the Kate Pearson character herself. Not many mystery protagonists have fully-developed home lives. Poirot, Wolfe, Queen, Holmes, Morse, Marple, Marlowe, Jane Tennison – all of them unlucky or at best disinterested in love and family. I'm quite sure there's a pretty good dissertation to be found in analyzing the reasons why, however I'll leave that with you as a gift. Kate Pearson has a husband and a four year old son Charlie and their family dynamic rings real. Of course Kate's husband Declan is frustrated by his wife being called away to the phone, with the added subtlety – thankfully not explaind to its last breath – of a man's discomfort when his wife's job is more interesting than his own.

I haven't told you much about the plot of Red Ribbons at all. Good. That means we all win. All I'll tell you is that two girls' bodies are found and complications arise. The rest is your joy to discover. I love the Kate Pearson novels as will you.

Be seeing you.

1Incidentally, if you loved the Morse television series, or the later Lewis or Endeavour episodes, do read the original books by Dexter. They are marvelous.

Dumbass Too: Forty Years of Quotes From Donald J Trump: The World’s Most Dangerous Mouth

2017-01-07T10:26:00.001-05:00

Dumbass Too:

Forty Years of Quotes From Donald J Trump:

The World’s Most Dangerous Mouth

Jules Carlysle (Ampersand Ink 2017, Trade Paperback and ebook) 407 pages

Jesus. Four hundred and seven pages of Donald Trump quotes. This is a terrible book to bring out so soon after New Year's as anyone who has resolved to lose weight, quit smoking, ease back on the booze or do anything else possibly life-lengthening will, after reading all this word spew burn down their nearest gym, tear the filters off a pack of Marlies, chug down a quart of Wild Turkey and seriously consider that what Keith Richards knows about heroin may well be a lesson worth learning. Look at it this way – if all that doesn't kill you it may at least put you in a coma for the next four or God help us all eight years.

You may assume from that paragraph that I'm Not a Fan and you'd be right. Well, just to define that a bit further, I'm not a fan of the orange-dyed psychopath soon to be inaugurated as the 45^th (possibly the last?) President of the Excited States of America. I am however a fan of the Canadian humorist Jules Carlysle whose first book, Dumbass was a similar compilation of the wit(less) and (dubious) wisdom of George W. Bush. It is borderline depressing to realize that in comparison to Trump, Bush's mangling of the English language – remember how 'nuclear' became a three-syllable word? - seems positively quaint and endearing, calming and gentle like the words of a rustic drawn from the pages of Mark Twain or Jean Shepherd. Trump? Trump is a creature from a crumpled and tossed Kafka story that Franz rejected as unbelievable.

Carlysle herself is no fan of her subject. From the Introduction of Dumbass Too:

The original DUMBASS was published in 2006, at the height of Dick Cheney’s reign…err…I mean, George W. Bush’s second term. I was angry back then…well, insulted mostly…because the President of the United States was barely able to string together two coherent words. To me, the election of George W Bush was the death knell of the American democratic system….a symbol of everything that was broken or corrupted by a system run amok. But, DUMBASS was funny. Bushisms can be hilarious. It was a fun book, despite what I felt it represented.

But, DUMBASS TOO is not delivering much in the yucks department. Donald Trump’s words are angry, often lies and without his two-bit Bronx accent, his quotes are not as much fun as Bush’s. Trump doesn’t trip over his words very often, only his ego. Even my quips, lean more towards the sarcastic than the funny….and so I only made them when I just couldn’t help myself. Mostly, my comments are to give context when needed.

Arranged by subject into chapters with titles such as Family Man, Tweeter-in-Chief, and the horrific Pervert-in-Chief, Dumbass Too serves a purpose well beyond scaring the bejeezus out of anyone or anything with a functioning brain and opposable thumbs. When seen in sequence, the thousands of quotes add up to a virtual peek inside a psychologist's notebook. For after the ersatz glamour of his television career is stripped away, after the brothel-deluxe fashion of his moneyed surroundings are stripped away, after the reflexively bestowed respect of a President is stripped away, what one is left with is evidence of a personality teetering on the border between Nazi and Fool.

You definitely will want to buy Dumbass Too and then, after reading it, seal it in a thick concrete box and bury it deep in the ground. A few thousand years from now, when our descendants dare to peek out from their mine shafts after the radioactivity has half-lived itself down to tolerable levels ... they'll want to know What the Hell Happened?

Be seeing you.

In Their Lives: Great Writers on Great Beatles Songs

2016-12-16T00:22:00.001-05:00

In Their Lives: Great Writers on Great Beatles Songs

Andrew Blauner, editor (Blue Cider Press May 2017, Hardcover) 320 pages, $23 cover price

Maria Popova perfectly nails the challenge of a book like this – where a series of writers share their personal opinion as to how, where and why a particular Beatles song – when she notes in her own essay on Yellow Submarine that, 'Interpretation of course always reveals far more about the interpreter than it does about the interpreted.' Well, exactly! Rorschach caught on to that one years ago as did I suppose the ancient Greeks who looked at the stars and saw warriors, scorpions and entangled fish where you might see a ducky and a horsey. Or was that Charlie Brown and some clouds? I do get you two confused sometimes.

Interpretation is one of the basic, occasionally annoying, habits of humankind. You wake up and it's raining cats and dogs, splattering their paw-like drops against the windows. Your first thought after that observation is an interpretive, 'What does that mean for my day?' And from there you can optimistically take the weather as an opportunity to drag the trenchcoat out of the closet and pretend you're Humphrey Bogart on your way to work, or instead mutter dark and fitful prayers because good Lord you only just bedded those tomato plants last weekend and now they're going to drown.

This is all well and good and as I say it's instinctual so there's no point in being concerned about the need to interpret our surroundings. It only becomes a problem when we expect someone else to give a good goddam about our personal interpretation. Your tomatoes are lost? Tough luck, but excuse me I'm busy right and now with a black-and-white fantasy about the sultry gaze of Lauren Bacall. Stop mucking around with the movie playing within my mind.

Which leads us to In Their Lives. I found myself engaging with this book in the grumpiest of moods as it was the equivalent of looking at the photos of someone else's summer vacation, someone who is blithely ignorant to the fact that you were stuck in the office on the hottest two weeks in July while this selfish bastard was basting himself in coconut oil on a distant beach. Show me the picture where the crab bit you in the balls – that picture I'd love to see!

Let's take Eleanor Rigby for an example. To me, that song will always remind me of our parish priest who had grown up with my mother and her brothers. He used to come over to our house every Sunday evening, after work in priest-speak, where he'd sit and watch Murder, She Wrote with Mm and then leave right afterwards. I'd look at the two of them (Mom was long, long since divorced) at think, 'Bloody hell, why didn't you two get married back when you had the chance?' And I'd start silently hearing the string octet playing those famous bars and always preceding the chorus: 'Ah, look at all the lonely people.' Now that was and still is my version of Eleanor Rigby. If yours, as with Rebecca Mead, is a version that's all about the divorce of the couple next door that mucked up your childhood playmate's life, well that's your life and not mine. Your visceral reaction is not the same as mine and on the whole I like mine better because I've had it longer. Or to put it another way, I'm not looking to replace any of my emotions, so stop trying damn it.

All of this would be forgivable – or at least an attempt at forgiveness would be made – if the writing within In Their Lives was all top quality. Well, sorry to disappoint you but after all I got there first, the writing is as uneven as a teeter-totter with a fat kid on one seat. Where it's good, as with the aforementioned Maria Popova essay or the one by Pico Iyer on Yesterday, the writing is memorable and informative as there the essays take the individual songs into places that have some educational or philosophical value. Popova's essay spawned my thoughts on interpretation that you're reading here (you can either thank her or curse her for that), while Iyer takes Yesterday as a diving board from which to dive into some quite incisive commentary on Paul Simon, Leonard Cohen ('Leonard turns over the self-betraying cruelties of the heart with a density and grave sophistication that owe as much to Dionne and the Metaphysicals as to the Hank Williams he celebrates.'), Van Morrison and others.

On the other hand, specifically the hand that keeps reaching around your throat in attempted strangulation, there is utter self-indulgent claptrap like Gerald Early's essay on (thank you Irony Gods!) I'm a Loser. Early takes a deep breath and basically mentions every record he ever heard on every radio station during the decade of the Sixties. The effort must have taken him at least twenty minutes and not a moment less. Believe me, his is not the only one that reads like it was dashed off on toilet roll during a bathroom break. Then again there is the meta level of doing just that. When Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention recorded their grand piss-taking at The Beatles' expense, they named the record We're Only In It For the Money. Exactly.

Be seeing you.

Wolf Boys by Dan Slater

2016-12-09T21:01:00.000-05:00

Wolf Boys

Dan Slater (Simon & Schuster 2016, Hard Cover) 342 pages, $26.95 cover price

So how are you doing with your drug habit these days? Are you winning the battle for control or is it? Well, that's a silly question to ask. Of course it's winning because it always does. Oh what's that you say? You claim you do not have a drug habit? Haha, that's just what I meant – it controls you to the point that brother, you don't even know it's there because it's just part of you who you are, or so you think. That high ball steadier after work, the smoke out the back of the office before the big presentation, that joint with the wife after the kids have gone to bed, a couple of lines of coke at the New Year's Eve bash, money, fame, random sex, and give me that old time religion, drugs, drugs and more drugs. You'll pick a few off the buffet and put them into your body and your mind for the false satisfaction for a while that you are anybody other than who your are because that other guy you turn into – drunk guy, stoned guy, success guy, servant of God guy – any of those guys are way better than you guy the loser guy.

I decided to metaphorically punch you in the mouth with that first paragraph because that's what Dan Slater's excellent piece of investigative journalism, Wolf Boys does for page after page, three hundred and forty-two of them in total. On one level, and a highly interesting level it is, Wolf Boys is about the young men, kids really, in Laredo Texas who find themselves soldiers of the competing Mexican drug cartels; how do they get involved in the drug trade, how is violence taught, what do they do, how does law enforcement capture them? Those are all valid questions and Slater's book answers them completely and onjectively.

There is a second level, an urtext if you will that is even more fascinating than the step-by-step procedures of how a hit is ordered and played out. And that is this: If you truly want to understand someone, knowing what they do is a lot of their story, but knowing why they do what they do is their story. Slater actually comes quite close to getting into the minds of the two currently incarcerated Mexican-Americans who began their drug careers as teenagers, Gabriel and Bart. I only say 'quite close' because each of them would have had a personal objective in agreeing to interviews with Slater over months and that objective – shortened sentence? More fame? – would tend to lead a man away from revealing the absolute truth of his soul. Or, maybe I'm wrong. What can I tell you? I'm a suspicious guy.

As to that question of why, the answer was different yet the same for each of the principal subjects. Both Gabriel and Bart are addicts. Not drug addicts, not traditional drug addicts, although Gabriel swallowed roches (an exhilarating sedative) by the dozen to keep his mind level and focused while on a killing mission. No, Gabriel was more an addict to status, being seen as a dangerous and important player, thus buying two thousand dollars worth of designer clothing at a time that he barely wore, or making brazen confessions during arrests that he knew wouldn't harm him because the crimes he admitted to his American interrogator (Detective Robert Garcia, the most admirable figure in the book) all happened across the river in Mexico. As for Bart? His addiction is simpler. He became addicted to killing. Just like a video game addiction, but the blood and the guts are real.

It's a rare thing to enjoy a book filled with rotten human beings. Just imagine, if you were a fan of the show, if Breaking Bad had been focused not on Walter White but on the half-crazed Mexican meth dealer Tuco ('Tight! Tight! Tight!'). Would you have watched that show? In Wolf Boys, Miguel Trevino of the Gulf Cartel is very much a Tuco; a Tuco who literally feeds his enemies to white tigers. Yeah, you read that right.

But it's not just Trevino who is a horrible person. It's also most of the corrupt Mexican legal and journalistic establishment, the competing drug agencies in the US, throw in some governmental incompetence, and oh by the way the United States of America is not above reducing a sentence in return for a $60 million bribe. Well, it was to cover the legal fees of course; so not a bribe, we'll call it a subsidy.

Wolf Boys is not a book for a beach blanket on a sunny day, although the irony would be perfectly lovely if that beach was in Cancun or Acapulco. This is however a truly powerful, exceptionally well-written examination of what makes the hearts of darkness beat.

Be seeing you.

Books of the Year Pt. 3 - Odds n' Sods and The Dorothy Parker Award

2016-12-04T06:17:00.001-05:00

Odds n' Sods – Short Stories, Collections, and All the Rest of It

Trouble is Our Business: New Stories by Irish Crime Writers

This is an absolutely splendid collection of twenty-four stories by the cream of Ireland's writers. With my immigrant's pride, it never ceases to amaze me how this small island with a population roughly that of metropolitan Toronto continues to produce excellent storytellers by the dozen every single year.

Not that it should matter, but just so you know, do not assume that all these stories take place in a Theme Pub where one drunk smashes another drunk over the head with a shillelagh then makes his getaway in a donkey cart while being pursued by a a squadron of Garda disguised as sheep. (thinking) (note to self: write that one up) The writers are Irish, however Ireland has emerged from its insular, navel-gazing self and these stories reflect that. Some touch on the supernatural, most are concerned with the psychological, all will hold your attention. I heartily suggest that if these writers are new to you, you will find favourites among them and thus you will find fresh novelists to seek out. So look at Trouble is Our Business as something like a big box of Quality Street ... filled with poisoned chocolates. Muahahaha!

The Return of the Theorists: Dialogues with Great Thinkers in International Relations

This is a splendid book of academic imagination that shows you what professors of philosophy can do when they are allowed the freedom of the page. Everyone from Aristotle, Plato, Kant, Descartes, Machiavelli and all those other names that kept you up late at night during university while cramming for final exams are presented here in imagined dialogues. They explain their theories, often in conversation with one another, and even more seductively we are presented with the authors' best guesses as to what these brilliant thinkers would have made of our present circumstances. For whom amongst us would not emerge the wiser after considering Hobbes on the EU or Adam Smith on globalization? Every page presents a fresh insight and – oh by the way – academics can write!

The Roar of the Lionesses: Women's Football in England (Carrie Dunn)

As I have said many times in many different places, in my heart of hearts I have always been a sportswriter. Sport presents us with all the good and bad complexity of human existence on a field of play within a defined time limit. Besides, games are fun. That's why we enjoy them.

The British sportswriter Carrie Dunn spent a year traveling, observing and interviewing English women's football players (you may call it soccer but I won't hold it against you). What emerges is a case study of the financial and sociological barriers women face even though they train as hard at the same game with the same rules with the same skills as their elite male counterparts. You will not be able to read this book without coming away with a reminder of how at the root of it all what drives the elite athlete forwards is a love of the game and the camaraderie a shared love creates. This is top-notch sportswriting.

Dorothy Parker Award:

Writing Experience of the Year

D. Harlan Wilson

This is my top award that goes to the writer who gave me my top writing experience(s) of the year. That can be for a story, a play, a novel, poetry, any form whatsoever. Mrs Parker herself wrote in practically every genre available and excelled in all of them, so who better to name an award for?

D. Harlan Wilson presented me with two spectacular and completely subversive reading experiences this year: Three Plays and Battle Without Honor or Humanity: Volume 2. There is an incredibly lazy cliché in reviewing that I have probably used about a dozen times in this year end review (sorry) that goes: 'This book will make you change the way you think about ...' fish cakes, deep sea diving, suburban sexual relations, fill in your favourite subject. Clichés you know are actually defendable; they are clichés precisely because they actually do describe truths. They are however annoying as mice in the house when they pop up in creative writing because they make it seem that the author isn't trying hard enough. 'Come come old man! You're supposed to sweat so we can be entertained!' Readers are plantation owners; writers sing gospel songs while under the lash.

Taking that metaphor above forward, D. Harlan Wilson is the writer-slave broken free of his chains. In a very real sense, he writes in clichés, those tropes that elicit Pavolvian responses in us when we see them on a page or stage. They can be anything from noble Presidents fighting to save the nation from apocalypse, to dodgy criminals entering a diner, to academics bemoaning the greyness of their lives; you know les types and you know how to respond to them. But – and this is a very important but – Wilson collides them with one another, makes them self-aware, has them do the opposite of what is expected, makes the trope real by placing it in alternate reality.

I would not for one second recommend D. Harlan Wilson's work to everyone; I was equal parts delighted and astonished when I read that one of the Three Plays has actually been staged as (and I'm an old theatre hand myself) I would have thought them unstageable. It's good to be wrong sometimes. However just as a certain small percentage of opera lovers will find something to love in the songs of Kanye West or vice versa, so too might you the diligent fan of John Grisham or any of the other squarely-written, MFA-approved authors that clog the arteries of bestseller lists might just find Wilson's skydiving while carrying a live grenade style of experimental writing just as compelling, gripping and tantalizingly challenging as I do. Enjoy.

And that's another year done. Are there or were there dozens more books that could have been added to these year-end lists? Of course, and there are hundreds beyond that I never had time to read or write about. So challenge yourself. Take a book by a writer you've never heard of and give it a try. After all, all our best friends began as strangers.

Be seeing you.

Books of the Year Pt. Two - Fiction (Novels)

2016-12-01T14:11:00.000-05:00

Fiction (Novels)

The Parcel (Anosh Irani)

Anyone can write a book that perfectly captures the reader's immediate physical and cultural milieu, filling it with personal insight and occasionally brilliant turns of phrase. Those books are called diaries and perhaps you're writing your own. Novels however need to justify their existence not as mere ledgers of everyday toil, but as something wonderfully strange that so captivate their readers that they are lured or forced into living a life they have either not considered previously or indeed refused as horrific.

Anosh Irani's The Parcel is not an easy read. Good. The prose and deeply understood characters are such that they compel us onwards deeper and deeper into this tragedy of transsexual prostitution in India. Through it all there is a noble thread of a life chosen in the face of familial rejection for if our own family rejects us we can go on and form our own family. The chosen family too can place demands upon us that we as individuals may choose to refuse. So ultimately, is a family a good thing or a bad thing?

The Ecliptic (Benjamin Wood)

What a seductive world it is that Benjamin Wood lures his characters into in The Ecliptic. For those of you who are artists, the mere thought of a retreat where you could live permanently, with all your basic needs cared for, leaving you all the time required to complete the masterpiece that has frustrated you in the hectic, noise-filled, gratingly commercial outside world; well, who could ask for anything more? But then again there's that old Chinese curse whereby be careful what you wish for because you might get it. No novel I have ever read has better opened the layers of the need, the inspiration and even the techniques of artistry than The Ecliptic.

Cruel Beautiful World (Caroline Leavitt)

Anton Chekhov Award Winner for Best Novel

I chose to name the Award for Best Novel for Anton Chekhov because in my opinion all great stories are founded on great characters, where villainy and heroism alike are outcomes of behaviour and not anything innate. That was Chekhov's achievement, whereby you don't completely hate or completely admire anyone in his plays or stories; rather, you understand and consider yourself in their shoes.

Cruel Beautiful World is equal to Chekhov in presenting a story about family secrets and seduction purely, logically and without pre-judgement. 'Oh ho!' you may say, as at least one prominent critic did (I paraphrase) 'The schoolteacher in the book who seduces the sixteen year old girl so she runs away from home, he must be a villain and must be declared so!' Well yes I suppose that largely would be so and in most circumstances there's justice in that view. However, I look at Caroline Leavitt's decision to not dress her schoolteacher in the black cape of melodrama a strength of her novel and not in any way a shirking of responsibility. Look to your own distant family histories my darlings. My grandfather was thirty and my grandmother was fifteen when they met and they were happily married for forty years. Was he a sexual predator?

Beyond that issue, what I loved about Cruel Beautiful World is that the book I thought I was going to be reading after its introductory scene and plot-setting was not the book I read. Instead, Leavitt surprises, shifts focus, returns to the main and ultimately makes us care about every person and every voice in her novel's 367 pages. This is what great writing is all about.

Tomorrow: Part Three - Odds n' Sods and The Dorothy Parker Award

Books of the Year Pt. One: Non-Fiction

2016-11-30T17:40:00.002-05:00

Books of the Year – 2016

Well thank God we all survived that although I do have to note that at the time of writing there is still one month, one-twelfth, 12.5% of 2016 left to go and so who the hell knows what might happen next, emphasis on the hell? However, let's assume that you aren't reading this on an iPad with dwindling battery life at the bottom of a coal mine while you and your descendants wait out the radioactive after-life that turned the surface of the Earth into a lifeless, soundless glass-scape. Always look on the bright side of life! Besides, even if worse comes to worst (and who amongst us would bet against it?) even when that battery does die, that tablet will make a fine serving tray/cutting board and with any luck along with a bit of foresight you threw a few books into a backpack before diving into the mine. Following are a few suggestions for books that will last until the all-clear warning is given:

Non-fiction

Masculinity, Media, and the American Presidency (Meredith Conroy)

Let's just dive right into it: Would H. Clinton have defeated Donald Trump if that H. had stood for Hilary (m.) instead of Hillary (f.)? Given the slimness of the margins across several swing states I dare say you would have to be a fool to argue against that proposition. There are of course many factors of varying weight that weigh upon a voting decision made by some 120 million individuals, however it requires but the simplest logic to determine that a complete reversal of any one of those factors will re-balance the result.

Digging a bit deeper, how does the gender of a candidate translate into voter opinion when transmitted through the coding and emphases placed on gender traits by media and cultural norms? That question is at the core of Meredith Conroy's academic yet eminently readable Masculinity, Media and the American Presidency. While published just before the American ~~debacle~~ election, Conroy's book is a vital study which, if read properly, will lead to a refreshing perspective on how politics is reported and received.

The Future of Human Space Exploration (Giovanni Bignami and Andrea Sommarvia)

We all need something to be optimistic about and if we've made a complete hash of this planet, well let's try and do better on the next one, hey? The Future of Human Space Exploration gave me a refreshing boost of likelihood where I rather expected a wooly utopia. Exploring, utilizing and ultimately colonizing the moon, Mars and – yes! – beyond is not only feasible it is actually fiscally responsible. The net cost comes in at a profit after the initial stages are paid for. As far as investments go, this is a slam dunk and there is an even more encouraging bonus. Given that the initial outlay of financial and scientific investment is beyond any single nation's budget, space exploration could and should achieve the kind of international co-operation envisioned by Gene Roddenberry. Authors Bignami and Sommarvia do a brilliant job of stating the scientific, economic and sociological arguments and advances needed to take us beyond the little blue dot in an unimportant solar system on the fringe of a modest galaxy.

Award Winner: The Pradip M. Sarbadhikari Award

A Life in Questions (Jeremy Paxman)

Of course the books one loves the most are the books that touch one personally. As the son of two journalists, bothy now sadly deceased, I could not help but consider how greatly both would have appreciated a gift of Jeremy Paxman's memoir of his forty years as a top journalist for the BBC. Using the same intelligent, probing, provocative and devastatingly witty tone that have made Paxman one of the very few people truly deserving of the over-used title of 'living legend' A Life in Questions is simply one of the finest books about journalism I have ever read. It will rest comfortably and properly next to The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens on my shelves for the rest of my life.

Tomorrow: Fiction (Novels)

Battle Without Honor or Humanity: Volume 2

2016-11-24T13:49:00.001-05:00

Battle Without Honor or Humanity: Volume 2

D. Harlan Wilson (Raw Dog Screaming Press 2016, Trade Paperback) 121 pages, $12.95 cover price

I actually went and looked this up on Google which at least shows you that research might not be my life, but it is occasionally my obligation. I was curious as to how many random thoughts a person has per minute and the answer was 50,000 a day. Off to the calculator I went and that number broke down to 2083 per hour or 35 per minute. (Yes I rounded the numbers off, no I don't care if that offends you.) That sounds just about right.

I am a huge and unabashed fan of the work of D. Harlan Wilson who if he changed his name to Not For Everybody would be a perfect example of nominative determinism. You don't know what that is? Ah. Well, when you meet a veterinarian named Parrot or a podiatrist named Foot, there is a theory that their names led them to their professions. So there's that clarified.

Why I started doing Google searches and simple math equations is because Battle Without Honor or Humanity's collection of fifteen short stories – if that is indeed what they are – presented to me something I have never, ever encountered in half a century's reading. These are the closest you will ever see in print to true 'train of thought' writing.

Now, I'm not a simpleton so I know better. No one (other than an actual simpleton) would ever slap together his or her actual trains of thought between covers and present the compilation as a book. For one thing, how on earth could one find all the precisely imagined images of tits? For another, it is implied within the self-descriptive of Writer that the presenter of that title gives a shit, and giving a shit further implies editing. Editing is all about choices. We choose a language to write in, what story to tell, what words to use, right down to the font. Plus, all humans are at heart so many failed experiments in dog – we want to please yet we frequently (constantly?) suck at it. Therefore, I do not for a second buy that Wilson has actually reproduced his actual trains of thought in Battle Without Honor or Humanity but goddam the boy done come close.

Battle Without Honor or Humanity will exist as a perfect snapshot of our imperfect times. Before he chose to check out of the Hotel California with a bullet to the head, Hunter S. Thompson chose to describe our time as the Age of Doom. D. Harlan Wilson provides the play-by-play of the game of Doom. Rape, death, terrorism, paranoia, monsters, impersonality, secret police and the false imaging of TV and movies – they are all here. These stories, or chainsaw sections of a violent conveyor belt, force the reader into thinking along the same paths or rivers as Wilson. This is the most dangerous journey since Ronny Cox plopped up, arm askew, from the river in the movie version of James Dickey's Deliverance.

This may not make the author happy and I'm damn sure it won't make the publisher happy, yet there are only a handful of readers I know who will be able to take and appreciate Battle Without Honor or Humanity. You have to be willing to let go of traditional norms of what a story is in order to go along with D. Harland Wilson's narratives. This ain't what Hollywood and Debbie Reynolds taught you. But. But but but. That is the joy and brilliance of these collected dreams or nightmares. Hollywood took a sliver of our thoughts and presented then as the totality of what we should think. D. Harlan Wilson takes the curled strips of film left on the cutting room floor, splices them together and creates a monster movie.

This is a brilliant, challenging book by the man I choose to rename as Not For Everybody.

Be seeing you.

The Spawning Grounds by Gail Anderson-Dargatz

2016-11-08T06:15:00.001-05:00

The Spawning Grounds

Gail Anderson-Dargatz (Knopf Canada 2016, Hard Cover) 300 pages, $32 cover price

Well one thing's for damn sure, if I ever start to forget what Canada is like all I'll ever have to do is open The Spawning Grounds to any random page and back the memories will flood. Ah yes, flood indeed, just as the rivers themselves will flood in the spring sending the people who live beside them fleeing in terror, restoring the balance in the battle of Man v. Nature just as our goddess Margaret Atwood so deemed it as just all those years ago in Survival. Remember what she said back then?

“...the values ascribed to the Indian will depend on what the white writer feels about Nature, and America has always had mixed feelings about that. At one end of the spectrum is Thoreau, wishing to immerse himself in swamps for the positive vibrations; at the other end is Benjamin Franklin, who didn't like Nature. [p.91]”

I rather think Gail Anderson-Dargatz must have had that quote taped to her computer screen at the very least, possibly even shredding it into a bowl and having it each morning for breakfast with maple syrup and saskatoon berries sprinkled on top. I'm certainly not saying The Spawning Grounds is a bad novel, not at all, more that it reads like the successful winner of a competition to jam as much Canadiana into 300 pages as possible. Granted, there are a few elements left out: hockey, curling, and dull yet well-meaning politicians. Oh, and no one says 'eh?' Surely an oversight. Here however are the remaining Twelve Stations of the CanLit Cross:

Setting in remote settlement deep in pine wooded interior.
Reference to harsh days of pioneer life.
Soiling of natural environment by clumsy man-made activities.
Noble and wise Native population.
Skepticism of Native spirituality by white population.
The weather sucks.
The RCMP.
Domestic disharmony but no one ever gets really mean to anyone.
Elder characters addicted to booze, middle-aged to marijuana.
Animals as metaphor.
It snows.
Guilt sex.

That about covers it. The plot serving as the beer case for this twelve-pack is as follows: The river flowing between the Robertson home and the local Shuwap reserve in the B.C. interior is losing its life as a conduit for the spring sockeye salmon run due to silt and other pollutants built up from negligent usage by the settlers. This in turn darkens the mood of a river spirit, here called a Mystery, who takes to possessing the bodies of various Robertsons over the years until he finds one strong enough to bring down a vast and brutal storm that will wash those men right out of its hair. Complications arise.

With any novel using the supernatural as a plot device, you either buy into the concept or you're left outside the story. That's entirely a personal choice and not one that can be forced into reader's acceptance by a hundred novelists accompanied by a chorus of a thousand reviewers. I do believe that Anderson-Dargatz, herself resident in the same region in real life, has done her due diligence and got the spirituality aspects right.

Where I have to admit a problem is where and how the author delves into the aspect of white skepticism. Hannah, the 20 year old daughter of the late Elaine Robertson and absent father Jesse is the catalyst for two character elements that clang into each other. On the one hand she is most definitely the lead in this novel – her grandfather Stew is incapacitated early on, her brother Brandon becomes possessed by the Mystery, and Jesse when he returns to the old family homestead is pretty much a waste of skin. Jesse has a (literally) on and off again romance with the conveniently located neighbour Gina, married to the RCMP officer Grant, that has all the hot romantic perfume of a swift spray of bug repellent. So, almost be default, Hannah is the reader's eyes and ears. Besides, she carries salmon by hand past the silty narrows so they can spawn. She is a Good Egg who assists with, um, good eggs.

The problem is though, for an ostensibly smart young woman in the middle of a spiritual story she comes off dumber than a half-drunk mule. Alex, aka Coyote, her love interest from the Reserve tells her the story of the Mystery as does old Stew who remains remarkably lucid even though the local hospital keeps shooting him up with morphine. Hannah doesn't believe it. She watched her mother go mad after swimming in the river only once, but she still doesn't believe it. She watches her brother go mad after – again – swimming in the river once, but she she doesn't believe it. She sees ghostly visions of Brandon's soul standing outside the homestead, various animal figures walk on their hind legs, even footsteps magically appear in the river mud ... mmmm, still not sure. It honestly all gets a bit preposterous.

In the end, I suppose I'm damning The Spawning Ground with faint praise here, but it all rather reminds me of one of the 'serious' episodes of an old CBC television series that ran halfway to forever from the 1970s until 1990 called The Beachcombers. Any show that lasts that long has its merits and so did The Beachcombers. It was family fare, had an occasional nod to native-white relationships through a supporting character and occasionally made the viewer think about life and the environment, albeit not very deeply. Throughout its run it both reflected and helped to create Canadian cultural identity. The Spawning Grounds hits the exact same emotional and artistic marks. I am quite sure it will be held up as a sturdy example of CanLit alongside Susannah Moodie's Roughing It in the Bush or Stephen Leacock's Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town. Yeah, eh?

Be seeing you.

Play it Loud: An Epic History of the Style, Sound & Revolution of the Electric Guitar

2016-11-01T06:15:00.001-04:00

Play it Loud:

An Epic History of the Style, Sound & Revolution of the Electric Guitar

Brad Tolinski and Alan di Perna (Doubleday 2016, Hard Cover) 379 pages, indexed with b/w photography. $26.95 cover price

First of all the electric guitar was not invented by Les Paul although the long-lived legend never minded one bit if anyone said it was him. After all it's rude to correct someone to their face and besides, ol' Les never much minded getting a little extra slice of fame pie. Leo Fender did like hanging around in Les' workshop garage, sipping a few beers and tinkering around with amps, pickups and other such things, but Leo Fender didn't invent the electric guitar either.

In fact and as detailed in this thoroughly absorbing history of an instrument by two Guitar World veterans, it's actually fairly difficult to nail down who exactly was the father of the engine of rock n' roll. Ultimately the honours go to George Beauchamp, who made one leap of intuitive discovery in the late 1920s: Where earlier efforts had attempted to amplify vibrations from the guitar's top or bridge, Beauchamp realized that the string itself is the best source of vibration. Everything else is just secondhand vibration, after all. From that thought, he discarded any further experimenting with phonograph needles and instead gimmicked the first identifiable single-coil pickup, mounted inelegantly yet efficiently to a 2”x4”. Just to complete this part of the story, Beauchamp's first commercial model was named by his colleague and business partner Adolph Rickenbacker as the Pancake, for that is surely what it looked like: a round, plain, cast-aluminum pancake attached to a stringed and fretted neck. Thus was born the Ro-Pat-In A-25.

There is something soul-satisfying about Play it Loud in that virtually every notable development in the ninety year history of electric guitars came about because some curious guy (instrument gadgetry seemingly was an all-male preserve) fiddling around in his basement, his bedroom or his garage and coming up with something he thought sounded better, or different, or better and different. Corporations were basically lousy at it, as anyone who has played a Fender made by CBS for the first ten years after it bought out Leo in the mid-1960s will attest. Eddie Van Halen built his wildly-striped Frankenstrat from:

a plain ash Stratocaster body bought for $50
an $80 unfinished maple neck
a humbucker pickup from his own Gibson ES-335, covering the other two pickup holes with black vinyl
jumbo Gibson guitar frets
a brass nut on the neck
and a vibrato tailpiece from an old Strat of his

All of this was to make a guitar that sounded to Eddie's ears more like a 1959 Les Paul Standard, which on supposes he could have just bought at a vintage guitar shop, but where's the fun in that?

Some years after Van Halen's mad scientist work, Paul Reed Smith effectively went back to pre-Beauchamp territory and noticed that no matter how much one tried to ignore it, the type of wood or other material in the body made a difference. When Carlos Santana tried one of Smith's guitars and liked it, Paul Reed Smith wasn't a kid with a workshop any more, he was a business.

Because Play it Loud has so much territory to cover and so many names from inventors to manufacturers to musicians in pop, rock and Blues there is always a chance that a reader might be disappointed at what isn't there rather than appreciate what is. Even so, I found the biographical and interview material about or with Muddy Waters, Charlie Christian, Pete Townshend, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimi Hendrix, besides the names already mentioned more than adequate. Sure, there are stories left out – the lingering effects Hendrix had on Beck and Clapton did neither man much good – but on the other hand, I already know those stories so do I really need to read them again? To state the obvious, if you want to read about an individual artist, read a book about that individual artist.

As for the rest of the world, my one wish was that there had been more photos in the book rather than one or rarely two per chapter. I did find myself jumping to Google to see what I was reading about. Still and all, Play it Loud is a fine read and potentially a great gift for any guitar fan, player, or just those of us who want to be able to contribute something beyond 'uh huh' to a conversation among techs or musicians. Enjoy.

A Life in Questions by Jeremy Paxman

2016-10-25T01:32:00.000-04:00

A Life in Questions

Jeremy Paxman (William Collins 2016, Trade Paperback) 336 pages, illustrated and indexed. £14.99 cover price

It was just the other day, after one of the putrid demonstrations of junk theatre dubiously described as a debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump that I was engaged in a Skype conversation with one of my North American client authors, an extremely well-educated man well-versed in both government and electoral politics. As talks between intelligent friends tend to do, we drifted off the main topic of his book and entertained ourselves with our thoughts on this most appalling of modern American elections. Regarding the most recent debate, where not a word was spoken about the US bombing Yemen, the lock-up of journalists and documentary makers covering the oil pipeline protests in the northern Midwest, nor the environmental catastrophe that is our generation's greatest sin, I said to him, 'God what I wouldn't have given to have Jeremy Paxman run that debate.' From the slight confusion on my friend's face and the brief yet definite pause before he replied, 'Oh. Yes!' I could tell that he wasn't quite sure who Paxman was. That is a pity. Since then, and just before writing this review, I emailed him. I quote: 'Do get yourself a copy of A Life in Questions. It's one of the very very best memoirs I have ever read and that number must be approaching or has passed 500.'

I'm well aware that the farther you live from the UK the less likely it is that you know Jeremy Paxman's work as the premier interrogator of the powerful, principally from his twenty-six year run from 1989-2015 as the lead presenter on BBC Two's flagship public affairs program Newsnight. In addition, he has reported from Northern Ireland during The Troubles, the Middle East, El Salvador, and the US during its Presidential elections. What has driven him in a career approaching the half-century mark is curiosity. As he says in A Life in Questions, 'Curiosity, the thing that gets me out of bed in the morning, is common to both journalism and intelligence-gathering. But a spy finds things out in order to keep them quiet. A journalist finds things to pass them on.' My father and mother would have loved that adroit statement of pith; they were both journalists.

For my part, I came to Paxman's work much too near the end of his run on Newsnight although since moving across the Atlantic I clear time to watch his occasional documentaries or politics specials for Channel 4 or the BBC. I first heard him when I purchased my first iPad, while I was still living in Canada. Having grown increasingly frustrated with the weak as water news coverage on North American stations (in retrospect, I think at least a third of my weekly newspaper columns on television were moans and rants on that theme) I installed the BBC iPlayer so I could listen to the BBC News while making breakfast. There would be the main headlines, a deeper engagement with three or four of the stories, and a closing feature interview of several minutes' length. Paxman made me burn my bacon on several occasions but I haven't a complaint to make.

His manner in an interview was and is almost always one of challenge. Perhaps more specifically, he sounded like a high school principal or a wise parent who has just caught the boys 'up to something' in the alley and he was going to carve past the protestations that there was nothing going on because there is always something going on. Is there a closest comparison? Edward R. Murrow perhaps, although he was before my time. I'd love to say Gore Vidal or Christopher Hitchens as Paxman shares their lucid brilliance yet both Vidal and Hitch were better as guests than interrogators and they wore their politics openly. As for Paxman, even after having read A Life in Questions I am confident that we share the same political views, but I have no idea how he votes, although he does admit that he reluctantly voted for Remain in the Brexit referendum. (His comment on David Cameron is the perfect eulogy for a twit: 'greater love hath no man than that he sacrifice his country for his party') He did however suggest to Russell Brand that they hire an ice cream truck together and drive around Britain during the 2015 election dispensing sweets and gathering opinions, so there's a clue. That would have been brilliant television.

There is one structural aspect of A Life in Questions that I deeply admire. Paxman sticks to what is important. I have no idea if Jeremy Paxman has been married once, twice or never; if he has children they have been blessed with anonymity rather than having their lives cursed by the re-telling of mildly amusing embarrassments to arouse the laughter of total strangers. Good for him. On several occasions I have quoted the discomfort of the late Theodore H. White who essentially invented the 'behind the scenes' genre of political reporting with his The Making of the President series of books. Noticing the growing obsession reporters and their public had with the personal lives of public figures, White cursed his own legacy by grumbling, 'Who gives a fuck if he had milk with Total for breakfast?' I don't know what Jeremy Paxman has for breakfast, nor do I need to know.

What I – and you – do need to know are his views on journalism and television in general. In a nutshell, Paxman defines his medium thusly: 'Television remains an escapist medium even when it is most apparently rooted in reality.' Perhaps this is why the environment is not the predominant issue in recent elections; on-going stories are just less captivating than bombs going off in schools or political candidats groping models.

Let us not lose sight of the fact that A Life in Questions fulfills the essential mandate of a book. It is a cracking good read. I have dog-eared some forty or fifty pages containing anecdotes told with the same sort of delighted, smart amusement that I have missed since Vidal and Hitchens closed their accounts. Just to borrow one, there is the description of a reporter being sent out to cover a Satanic Ritual:

'In a basement flat he found half a dozen old wrinklies about to celebrate a Black Mass. They explained that since one of them was teetotal, they were using Ribena instead of wine. If Richard would provide the bread, he could observe the event. The corner shop was unfortunately out of loaves, so, ... he bought a packet of biscuits, which was deemed sufficient. A naked woman was draped across the kitchen table, and what the [reporter] witnessed that afternoon no pastry chef had ever intended. He returned to the office unable ever again to look a Custard Cream in the face.

Now I wonder what Channel 4 will do with The Great British Bake Off? Pardon me, I digress.

I know this about A Life in Questions. For someone like me, for anyone who is like Jeremy Paxman, endlessly curious about the world, its stories and how those stories are told, this is a book to be absolutely treasured. Give it as a gift and then impatiently insist on borrowing it back so you can read it for yourself, or vice versa maybe; hang it all, do you expect me to run your life for you? This is my favourite book of the year so far, and November through December had better pull up their socks if their releases intend to mount a challenge.

Be seeing you.