What's Bred in the Bone

I first read Roberston Davies when I was a summer student working at a camp. In the evening we returned to our quarters and ate slabs of meat blackened in a cast-iron pan. Afterwards, while the rest played crib, I crawled into bed and read Fifth Business. The elegant prose warmed me as much as the food and the heat from an oil-burning space heater.

The narrator of Fifth Business, Dunstan Ramsay, makes a brief appearance in What's Bred in the Bone, a novel that was shortlisted for the Booker in 1986. It recounts the life of Francis Cornish, the much ignored son of a wealthy family. He spends his early life in rural Ontario, is educated at Oxford, becomes an artist, works for MI5 during and after WW2, and ends his years as a rich but odorous miser in Canada.

The title comes from an old proverb: “What’s bred in the bone will not out of the flesh.” For Francis, what’s bred in the bone is his upbringing in a loveless and hypocritical environment. His mother is presented at the court of Edward VII on her “coming-out,” after which she celebrates by having sex with a stranger. When her pregnancy is discovered, her father arranges a speedy marriage with a monocled major of “unimpeachable family descent.” The major agrees to the marriage after presenting an invoice for his services. The child, when born, is found to be mentally deficient -- the result of several comic attempts at inducing a miscarriage. The boy is kept locked in an upper room, cared for by a servant, until he dies.

Thus, the household that Francis grows up in is financially rich, yet morally impoverished, and gradually his own life takes on a similar aspect. His own marriage, for example, is a distorted reflection of his parents’. He is duped into the union by Ismay, his cousin, when she becomes pregnant. Only after they are married does she reveal the child is not his. Meanwhile, her family milks him for as much money as they can get, until Ismay “scarpers” off to Spain to be with the child’s father. Francis assumes financial responsibility for the child but nothing more.

Next, Francis’s lifelong dream to be an artist takes a wrong turn when he agrees to apprentice under Tancred Saraceni, whose métier is “improving” old paintings. One of Francis's duties involves exposing a fake work of art being promoted by a competitor – a fraud exposing a fraud – after which the competitor takes his own life.

The crowning irony of his life is the death of a dear friend, Aylwin Ross, who is director of the National Gallery in Ottawa. Ross asks for money to buy a painting for the museum, a purchase that would also save his career. Francis refuses because the painting that Ross wishes to buy is a fake, painted by himself. Ross, whom Francis loves platonically, commits suicide.

What’s Bred in the Bone is an old-fashioned morality tale, gracefully told, full of wit and humour. Davies is never heavy-handed with his characters. They are deftly portrayed, and for all of their flaws, are generally likeable, or at least understandable. The prose is smooth and erudite. Discussions of art, religion and astrology are incorporated seamlessly, along with quotes from Browning and Ben Jonson, which form a kind of gloss on the story. There are many splendid lines.

She was worse than a blabber; she was a hinter. The British have some odd talents, and writing obituaries is one of them. If the testicles needed some stern talking-to from time to time, even more so did the penis. The pianist had been the great Teresa Carreno, a famous matador of the instrument, imprisoned forever on a perforated roll of paper. His breath suggested that he was dying from within, and had completed about two-thirds of the job. Few of these horses were of the noble breed with arching neck and flashing eye; most were miserable screws, rackers, the broken-winded, the spavined, often far gone with the botts, or with nostrils dribbling from the glanders.

The Author

Roberston Davies was one of those protean figures who seemed larger than life. He looked like a character in one of his novels. He acted at the Old Vic, and helped launch the Stratford Festival in Canada. He was a newpaper editor and publisher, then taught literature at the U of T, where he was Master of Massey College. He wrote plays, and humorous essays under the pseudonym Samuel Marchbanks, and a stack of fine novels.

The Salterton Trilogy
Tempest-Tost
Leaven of Malice
A Mixture of Frailties

The Deptford Trilogy
Fifth Business
The Manticore
World of Wonders

The Cornish Trilogy
The Rebel Angels
What's Bred in the Bone
The Lyre of Orpheus

The Toronto Trilogy (unfinished)
Murther & Walking Spirits
The Cunning Man

When Davies died in 1995, John Irving wrote a piece in Maclean’s that began by calling him the greatest comic novelist since Dickens.

Shelf Monkey

Have you ever tossed aside a book out of disgust for its inept writing? Have you ever wondered how such drivel gets published in the first place? And what about those rumours of bestseller lists being manipulated by bookstore chains to move vast quantities of trash?

Imagine how a booklover who is the teeniest bit unhinged might react. A booklover who, like a character named Aubrey in the novel, organizes his volumes by font:

My basement is mostly Cheltenham and variations. The kitchen is currently Arial and Bembo, the guest bedroom Bodoni.

Such is the premise for Corey Redekop's literary thriller about a group of bibliomaniacs who call themselves "shelf monkeys." Their gatherings have developed into a certain cult-like ritual that by the end of the novel gets way out of hand.

The book is replete with humour, profanity, and literary references. Identifying those references is one of the novel's main attractions. How many of the books recommended by the shelf monkeys have you read? Cryptonomicon? This All Happened? The Bear Went Over the Mountain? (Yes! Yes! Yes!)

There's also lots of literary name-dropping. Do you know who Winston Smith is? Chili Palmer? Lady Fuschia Groan? Valentine Michael Smith? Have you read China Mieville? Tibor Fischer?

When Aubrey appears at a costume event carrying a picture frame, is he referring to a book by Oscar Wilde or James Joyce? What is the reference when he says, "The first rule of Shelf Monkey Club? You do not talk about Shelf Monkey Club." Or when another character, petting a dog named Margarita, says to Aubrey, "So you're the Master I take it?"

The reason the shelf monkeys are so unstable? Most of them work in a big-box bookstore where they are forced to push dreadful books -- a situation that reminded me of Orwell's wonderful essay, "Bookshop Memories," in which he states that working in a bookstore destroyed his love of books.

There are some very fine lines in the book, some great laughs and invigorating rants.

...libraries, brothels of literature, old hags showing their stretch marks and cigarette burns, promising you a good time, sailor, I've got some tricks left, don't let the appearance fool you, just because some yahoo scribbled in my margins doesn't mean I can't pretend it's the first time with you, baby, just don't treat me too rough, or there'll be trouble, I've got friends...

There were a few places where I thought the book missed its mark, but overall Redekop's strong sure voice carries the day. He's certainly lined up some very big guns in his corner: Paul Quarrington on the back cover, and Miriam Toews in the acknowledgements.

Finally, a word about the physical object itself. The author has been well-served by his publisher, ECW. The book design is clean and crisp, while the cover is very bold indeed. Nary a word on the front, just a simple two-colour icon. A photo doesn't do it justice. The cover stock is thick and glossy with flaps, and feels good in the hands. I found myself repeatedly closing the book to admire it.

Riding the Iron Rooster

By Train Through China

Paul Theroux loves trains. His first great success was The Great Railway Bazaar, which described a journey by train from London to Japan, returning via the Trans-Siberian railway. Riding the Iron Rooster takes place in the mid-1980s, more than 10 years later, and describes a year spent in China travelling by train.

The book begins with a charming epigraph: "A peasant must stand a long time on a hillside with his mouth open before a roast duck flies in." But the charm is superficial. China is an ancient, hungry, overpopulated country. In some places people are still living in caves. Theroux explains:

The Chinese had moved mountains, diverted rivers, wiped out the animals, eliminated the wilderness; they had subdued nature and had it screaming for mercy. If there were enough of you it was really very easy to dig up a whole continent and plant cabbages. They had built a wall that was the only man-made object on earth that could be seen from the moon. Whole provinces had been turned into vegetable gardens, and a hill wasn't a hill--it was a way of growing rice vertically.

Theroux, able to converse in Chinese, crisscrosses the country by rail and examines everything with a microscopic eye. He reports on the Chinese penchant for spitting, the use of cormorants for fishing, an erotic novel that has been banned for five centuries. "The Chinese laugh," he tells us, "is seldom a response to something funny." A sign in a train reads: "Guests must not perform urination in sink basin." The death penalty consists of "a bullet in the back of the neck."

The food is an adventure in itself: sheep vein, snake soup, yak slices, cow tendon, caterpillar fungus, chicken foot stew, rotten eggs wrapped in seaweed, grilled bear's paw, stewed moose nose, stir-fried camel's foot, monkey-leg mushrooms, pig's trotters in gelatin.

He is particularly interested in Mao's legacy. What he discovers is that the Great Helmsman is in a kind of disgrace. The museum in his home town is closed. The Cultural Revolution is widely admitted to have been a mistake.

The book concludes on a positive note with a visit to Tibet. "Lhasa was the one place in China I eagerly entered, and enjoyed being in, and was reluctant to leave." Part of this is due Tibet being "a place for which China had no solution."

Theroux is an impeccable writer -- 480 pages and not a word out of place -- and he always has something interesting to say: a pithy observation, a telling description, an historical aside.

It should be added, however, that the book is more than 20 years old, and its portrait of China may be seriously out-of-date. It is also worth noting another Chinese proverb (one that Theroux himself is fond of quoting):

"We can always fool a foreigner."

Alligator

If you've heard of this book, you know the opening scene. A man puts his head between an alligator's jaws with predictable results. The splendid cover evokes the horror of such an encounter.

The novel is set in St. John's, bracketed by a pair of Louisiana gators. The opening scene, where a man's sweat triggers an instinctual reptilian response, is metaphorically replicated in St. John's, where it's hot and rainy, and spanworms descend from trees, giving the city a swampy feel. Through the streets a Russian psychopath moves like an alligator.

Moore does an impressive job getting inside the skin of each of her characters. Her approach is impressionistic, though, and it takes a while for readers to get their bearings. Tenses shift, scenes hustle back and forth in time, the POV changes from chapter to chapter. Finally the story sorts itself out and moves forward.

Madeleine has a heart condition and is trying to finish directing her last film, in which Isobel, an actress past her prime, has a role. Isobel is having an affair with Valentin, a Russian thug. Frank (an appropriately named hot dog vendor) falls in love with Colleen, a reckless teenager. She is the daughter of Beverly, sister to Madeleine.

Though the book is very readable, it's also sad and bleak. Everyone is alone, isolated. Madeleine thinks about happier days before her divorce. Beverly misses her dead husband, Frank his mother felled by cancer. Valentin was abandoned by his mother, his father executed, and he himself tortured. As for Isobel, she...

...had been pouring herself into camera lenses since she was eighteen and she had done this for her entire career without questioning the effects of the transference. She knew, now, that she had been diminished. She had become unknowable.

Headless images recur. The man with his head stuck in an alligator. A videoclip of a beheading. A naked Iraqi prisoner with a bag over his head. A mishandled ceremonial sword breezing past a little girl's face. An Inuk hanging by his neck in a rooming house.

Alligator was shortlisted for the 2005 Giller award, and won the 2006 Commonwealth Writers Prize for the Canada/Caribbean region.

Spook Country

Anyone who knows SF knows William Gibson. He has written two previous, loosely connected trilogies, one known as the Sprawl, the other as the Bridge.

The former is set in a dark future of drugs, cyberspace, and neural implants. The latter’s setting is an earthquake-ravaged Pacific Rim.

Gibson brought his vision to the present when he released Pattern Recognition in 2003, and Spook Country earlier this year.

The aftermath of 9/11 permeates these novels like background radiation, and two characters appear in both books -- Pamela Mainwaring and the ridiculously named Hubertus Bigend -- which leads one to believe that his next novel will conclude this set of real world adventures.

Bigend is the head of a shadowy organization called Blue Ant. He has a maglev bed, and says things like, "Quebec is an imaginary country" and Intelligence is "advertising turned inside out."

The title Spook Country carries several shades of meaning. First of all, the story is about “spooks” or intelligence agents. Second, non-corporeal entities can be found in each of the three narrative threads. Finally, the word “spooky” is employed in the sense of “scary.”

The book consists of 84 titled chapters, tracks the movements of a mysterious shipping container, and concludes in Vancouver.

Hollis

A former member of a cult rock group, Hollis has come to LA to do a piece on locative art, virtual reality pieces commemorating events in the location where they occurred. For example, by donning a VR helmet a person can witness Scott Fitzgerald having a heart attack.

The scene is created in much the same way that game designers create shapes, beginning with a wire frame and adding textures. The piece exists on a server somewhere, and is made accessible by Wifi and GPS. The technical end has been worked out by a Canadian geohacker named Bobby Chombo. Spatially tagged hypermedia is the way it’s described by Odile, curator of this new artform.

Tito

Tito is a Cuban-Chinese teenager living in New York. He is part of a tight-knit family of "illegal facilitators" who employ impeccable KGB tradecraft. Sometimes they work for the government, sometimes they don’t. Tito speaks Russian, delivers iPods used as storage devices, and is a gifted streetrunner who at times gets a supernatural assist.

Milgrim

Milgrim is a drug addict held captive by a man named Brown, who may or may not be a government agent. Brown is coordinating surveillance of Tito's family, who seem like ghosts to him and his colleagues, one of whom used to work for Blackwater.

Brown introduces Milgrim to a new drug called Rize, which at one point allows Milgrim to catch "glimpses of spectral others, angels perhaps." Milgrim speaks Russian, and knows a dialect called Volapuk used for text messaging on keyboards not equipped with Cyrillic characters. Vancouver, according to Milgrim, "had an oddly low fuckedness index."

The Author

William Gibson came to Canada as a counterculture kid in the Vietnam era. He’s lived in Vancouver for over 30 years, and earned a degree in English from UBC.

His first novel Neuromancer, released in 1984, is one of the most influential in all of SFdom. Today, it is still on Amazon.ca’s best seller list for first novels, and its opening line is one of the most recognized: "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."

Gibson coined the word cyberspace and jumpstarted a whole new subgenre called cyberpunk, a future noir of drugs, urban sprawl, and computer cowboys who plug their brains directly into the Internet.

To understand Gibson’s vision, you must realize that the World Wide Web did not exist in 1984, and the first PC virus had not yet been invented.

Later, Gibson co-authored with Bruce Sterling a book called The Difference Engine, which featured a mechanical computer created by Charles Babbage. The book spawned another subgenre called steampunk.

But it is not just Gibson’s vision for which he is famed. He is above all things a stylist, turning sentences into a menacing cocktail of technology and brand names.

A Mondrian security man was looking at her, one ear Bluetoothed beneath the shaven cliff of a military haircut. The door opened like some disturbing hybrid of bank vault and Armani evening purse, perfectly balanced bombproof solidity meeting sheer cosmetic slickness. [The rifle’s] barrel...was encased in a long tube of lustrous gray alloy that reminded her of expensive European kitchenware. Like a rolling pin by Cuisinart.

About Blogs

Bobby Chombo, talking about reality, locative art, and how cyberspace has "everted," delivers the following McLuhanesque observation:

But when you look at blogs, where you're most likely to find the real info is in the links. It's contextual, and not only who the blog's linked to, but who's linked to the blog.

Official Site: William Gibson

The Tower

Look on its broken arch, its ruin'd wall,
Its chambers desolate and portals foul;
Yes, this was once Ambition's airy hall,
The dome of Thought, the palace of the Soul:
Behold through each lack-lustre, eyeless hole,
The gay recess of Wisdom and of Wit,
And Passion's host, that never brook'd control:
Can all saint, sage, or sophist ever writ,
People this lonely tower, this tenement refit?

                                               -- Byron

Refiner's Fire

I was overjoyed when I realized there was one more Helprin novel I had not read -- his first, the full title being Refiner’s Fire: The Life and Adventures of Marshall Pearl, A Foundling.

Marshall is born on a vessel packed with Jewish refugees running a British blockade of the new state of Israel. His mother dies after giving birth, so the ship’s captain sends him to America, where he is raised by a family named Livingston. While still in high school, Marshall and the Livingstons relocate to Jamaica for a couple of years, where he gets involved in fighting Rastafarian bandits.

Back home he goes to Harvard, but drops out in his senior year, wanders America for a while, and has some surreal experiences. He spends an unknown length of time working in a Midwest slaughterhouse, after being recruited by a black man named Monroe, who (like Robert Service’s Sam McGee) warms himself in the flames of a furnace. In the Rockies he meets a biologist who is studying eagles, and whose 40-foot telescope has the ability to look into the past. He is the sole survivor of a shrimp boat that sinks in a fierce storm, only to discover later that the boat was lost years ago.

Finally he is reunited with Paul Levy, the captain on whose ship he was born. Levy explains that the reason Marshall’s life has been so erratic is because of his lost heritage as a Jew. Marshall soon ends up in Israel, where he is conscripted and badly wounded during a major Palestinian offensive.

These are the broad outlines of the novel, whose chief attraction is the quality of Helprin’s prose. It flows across the page like a mountain cataract, an exuberant torrent of wit, silliness, and striking images. A little boy invents a horse bicycle. A little girl wonders what would happen if the White Sea flowed into the Black Sea. A mechanic works on a car "as if he were cleaning a fish and did not fear the entrails."

[Soldiers] had a crazed demented look which caused their eyes to seem like the windows of a slot machine in which were visible not the symbols of apples, diamonds, or bells, but rather a high-speed shuffling of evil thoughts, remembrances and anticipations of evil deeds, and the singular electrical flashes of the evil mind.

Helprin fans will forgive the fairy tale ending, having already been rewarded by the rich prose, the wild and goofy adventures, and the enjoyment of Helprin’s trademark passions: horses, trains, paintings, mountains, New York, the Hudson, winter, war, etc. In particular they will enjoy recognizing in Refiner’s Fire the seeds of all his later novels.

A punishment meted out to Marshall in school (he is forced to eat a coffee bean) beomes the departure point for Memoir from an Antproof Case.

The Italian family that he stays with before attending Harvard (the daughter heads off to attend the University of Rome) presages A Soldier of the Great War, which is set in Italy during WWI.

Marshall’s travels across America are repeated by the Prince and Princess of Wales in Freddy and Fredericka.

In Winter’s Tale the "colour gravity" affliction of Pearly Soames harks back to Marshall Pearl’s seizures caused by flashing colours, and the impassable cloud wall that surrounds New York City is first glimpsed during the storm that sinks the shrimp boat in Refiner’s Fire.

Is it Helprin’s best? Probably not. I still prefer Winter's Tale, followed by A Soldier of the Great War. But then I've noticed that (Helprin being such an unique writer) people often like best the first of his books they encounter.

Official Site: Mark Helprin
Harvard Magazine article: Literary Warrior

Third Class Superhero

Every once in a while you take a chance on a book with a great cover and it turns out to be a fabulous choice. Third Class Superhero is that kind of book, chock full of the kind of stories I love, stories that are not just well written, but have an innovative or experimental bent. In fact, the book reminds me of one of my favourite literary movements, the New Wave.

If you've never heard of it, the New Wave was a long-ago movement that consisted of fiction whose form or content defied logic. Though published in SF venues, New Wave writers sought to sever ties with traditional SF.

Two of the most powerful stories I've ever read came from that movement. They are "Descending" by Thomas Disch, and "The Heat Death of the Universe" by Pamela Zoline. The former describes an event that could never occur, thus placing it in the realm of fantasy or allegory, yet without the obvious trappings of either. The latter is a story that is fractured in such a way as to reflect the narrative, a housewife's nervous breakdown.

It is "The Heat Death of the Universe" that the stories of Third Class Superhero most resemble. They tend to be plotless and fragmented, sometimes with numbered or titled sections, and often with doses of scientific or pseudo-scientific blather. Despite the occasional SF paraphenalia, the author's interest remains with issues of identity and existence rather than cosmic adventure.

The titles of some of the stories give a clue to Charles Yu's intent: "Problem for Self-Study," "The Man Who Became Himself," "Man of Quiet Desperation Goes on Short Vacation."

Stories like these are not easy to write, for they can easily become boring and pretentious. Only the concluding story in the collection comes close to suffering this fate. For the rest, the author delivers wry humour, great ingenuity, and darn good writing.

"401(k)" features a couple trying to find meaning in an existence defined by the products they consume. "We don't need the Good Life. The Pretty Good Life would be just fine."

"My Last Days as Me" is about an actor in a family sitcom whose members are constantly being replaced. The story is full of wonderful lines. "Just to get things straight. Me is sixteen years old. I am twenty-two. I have been playing Me for as long as I can remember."

"Realism" begins with the narrator's mother reading a book called Realism. The narrator asks, "What is a story in this kind of universe? What is character, what is plot?" A little later Yu performs a reverse Kafka by having an insect turn into a human being.

In "Florence" the narrator is trapped on a distant planet, alone and neurotic. His boss sends him messages, singing in the nude. A parcel arrives from his aunt Betty. Everyone is a recording.

Christians in the year A.D. 1,002,006 are few and far between. A lot of people don't even know what they are. Mainly because there are hardly any people left. Also, most of us stopped believing in God after black hole XR-97-ID got so massive it started swallowing itself over and over again in a recursive loop -- like some cosmic Escher print -- resulting in an object ten times the mass of the rest of the known universe. Personally, that did it for me.

"32.05864991%" refers to the statistical equivalent of the word "maybe," and the story itself is a crazy combination of probability, parallel universes, and the likelihood of a man and a woman making a connection through a telephone call.

"Two-Player Infinitely Iterated Simultaneous Semi-Cooperative Game with Spite and Reputation" begins by describing a game somewhat like The Sims, then morphs into something entirely different by offering a game cheat. Enter player 1's house, turn on the shower, and look into the mirror:

If you wait long enough, the game will give up and override its defaults. It will recognize your reflection in the mirror as a different player, Player 2. Now you are Player 1 and your reflection is Player 2. Now, say you are sorry.

The title story is the most conventional of the lot, featuring a superhero named Moisture Man, whose special power is the ability to condense moisture out of the air, which allows him to douse small fires and quench the thirst of his colleagues. A minor ability, to say the least. That's why he's stuck at being a third class superhero. After years of trying he's still unable to move up the ladder, and each year has to re-write a test to keep his superhero licence. This year he looks around and sizes up the other losers who are in there with him, writing the exam.

To my left is Itch-Inducer Boy. To my right is a pebble shooter. Over by the door are Malaise Man, The Fatiguer, and The Nauseator aka Slight Discomforto."

Charles Yu's intelligence, humour, and ability to craft great lines makes this one of the most entertaining short story collections I've come across in a long time.

Late Nights on Air

Late Nights on Air revolves around four main characters – Dido Paris, Harry Boyd, Gwen Symon, and Eleanor Dew. They all work at the CBC radio station, and have come North to leave something behind.

Dido and Eleanor are escaping unworkable marriages. Dido married a man younger than herself, only to fall in love with someone much older – her father-in-law. Eleanor had the misfortune to love a man who did not want to consummate their union. Harry returns North, disgraced after an unsuccessful jump to TV. Gwen, younger than the rest, is the only one who has not married. She arrives with a bruised throat. Yellowknife, she thinks, is “a place where anyone could make a fresh start.”

But it’s also a place that can get to you after a while, as it did to Eleanor’s former roommate, “who’d decided suddenly she couldn’t face one more day in Yellowknife.” Another says, “Winter here does terrible things to people. You’ll find out.” People depart as suddenly as they arrive. More than one character disappears in the blink of an eye.

Overlaid against all this local colour are a couple of fantastic themes. One is the story of John Hornby, whose death in the Thelon in 1927 has reached an almost mythical status. Gwen, who has read The Legend of John Hornby several times, reminds Harry of Edgar Christian, who died with Hornby. There is so much musing about that fateful event that a canoe trip to the Thelon is inevitable. Naturally we expect the worst.

The other fantastic theme is pure myth, the story of Queen Dido of Carthage. Our present-day Dido is the olive-skinned daughter of a Latin teacher, raised in Europe and come to Canada to cause confusion in the hearts of men and women, perhaps because she herself is romantically (and possibly sexually) ambivalent. While she waits in Yellowknife, hoping for the arrival of her father-in-law, she becomes involved with two men. One of them is Eddy, a technician at the station and former Viet Nam vet, who arrived in Yellowknife one day on a whim. He is, of course, the story’s Aeneas.

The portrayal of Yellowknife was excellent. I also liked learning about the workings of a radio station – the pots and carts and stings, and editing tape the old-fashioned way, with a razor, and how to create different sound effects, like using corn starch to simulate walking across snow. I liked the way the author investigated the intimacy and isolation of radio broadcasting, announcers alone in a darkened room speaking to an invisible audience. "Extroverted introverts," one character calls them.

More Yellowknife

Late Nights on Air came out around the same time as my own novel, Yellowknife. They share some interesting similarities:

• Both take place at pivotal periods in the history of resource extraction in the North. In Late Nights on Air it's oil, in Yellowknife it's diamonds.
  
• A Japanese adventurer pops up in both books, and John Hornby, who is frequently mentioned in Late Nights on Air, makes an actual appearance in Yellowknife.
• Both novels culminate in a trip that heads off in the same direction -- the Thelon in Hay's book, the East Arm of Great Slave Lake in mine. Both trips end in a similar fashion.

Other books of interest, in no particular order:

Yellowknife by Ray Price. An entertaining history of Yellowknife.

Solomon Gursky Was Here by Mordecai Richler. A visit to Yellowknife and a survivor of the lost Franklin expedition are just two elements of this many-faceted novel.

A Discovery of Strangers by Rudy Wiebe. An historical novel about Franklin's disastrous journey through the area in 1820.

Snow Man by Malcolm Waldron. A classic account account of John Hornby in the Arctic.

The Third Suspect by Staples & Owens, and Dying for Gold by Selleck & Thompson. Two differing views of the underground murders at Giant Mine in 1992.

Denison's Ice Road by Edith Iglauer. A classic account of one of the pioneers of ice-road construction.

Rogue Diamonds by Ellen Bielawski. Excellent portrayal of the Dene point of view during the diamond negotiations in the 1990s.

The Terror

The title does admirable double duty, bearing the name of one of Franklin's lost ships and alerting readers they are venturing into the world of horror. At 769 pages it's a typical Simmons offering -- a big smooth page-turner.

The disappearance of Franklin and his 1845 expedition is one of the most enduring mysteries of the North. The two ships have never been found, and the only written communication from the expedition is a single sheet of paper that does little to shed light on what went wrong. In other words, the expedition is a perfect candidate for a fictional re-working. Mordecai Richler briefly exploited it in Solomon Gurski Was Here, but but only in passing. The Terror is the first, I believe, to focus exclusively on the expedition itself.

The book is extensively researched and accounts for all the known facts of the expedition. The endpapers consist of maps showing its route and final movements, and each of the 67 chapters begins with a date and is precisely located by longitude and latitude. Simmons recreates the sights, sounds, and smells of shipboard life, and does a fine job of portraying many of the crew members, especially Captain Francis Crozier -- who, according to Inuit oral history, may have survived many years after the ships were lost.

Almost every character in the book is an actual historical person. Two major exceptions are an Inuk named Lady Silence, and a supernatural creature from Inuit legend, a sort of giant polar bear that dispatches most of the crew members (including Franklin himself) by ripping them apart.

Ken McGoogan (a Franklin scholar and author of Fatal Passage and Lady Franklin's Revenge) noted in the Globe and Mail that the monster could be seen as allegorical -- that is, as an embodiment of all the things that contributed to the expedition's demise, from scurvy to cultural hubris. Since everyone died, the monster must be omnipotent and invincible.

The book has garnered nothing but laudatory reviews since it appeared. Certainly, introducing a monster to a story that is already monstrous is a wonderful conceit. Yet I found myself wishing Simmons had tapped another literary source and recruited a different monster. Frankenstein, if you remember, ends in the Arctic with the monster leaping from a ship and fleeing over the ice -- a monster with vulnerabilities, a monster who (I think) offers far better allegorical possibilities. Even the dates match, the first “popular” edition of Frankenstein coming out in 1831, only 14 years before Franklin set sail. The monster that Simmons created is so over the top (especially the tongue-ripping ceremony) that I found it difficult to suspend my disbelief.

There are other aspects of the novel that are similarly too extreme. Temperatures that plunge to minus 100 degrees, 80-foot pressure ridges, lightning storms as fierce as artillery barrages, hailstones as big as cannonballs, a surreal costume party out on the ice.

And one final gripe. When Franklin sees Lady Silence, his face turns white. He thinks she is Greenstockings, the beautiful Dene woman whom he encountered on his first expedition, and whom two of his officers were prepared to fight a duel over. I was delighted by this development, but (unless I missed it, which is certainly possible), Simmons does not provide an explanation, leaving us to assume that Franklin was mistaken.

The endpapers provide a useful map of the area.

Suttree

Cornelius Suttree, an educated man from a privileged stratum of society, has for some unknown reason abandoned his family and chosen to live among the poorest and most disadvantaged of Knoxville, Tennessee.

The women are long-suffering, while the men like to drink, fight, and spit. There is a ragman, a junkman, a witch, an Indian, a huge black man who cannot stop brawling with the cops, a transvestite who keeps his dead father in a fridge, a young grifter whose idea of a big score is stealing coins from payphones.

Suttree goes to jail, ends up in hospital after a barroom brawl, steals a police car, falls in love with a whore, and ekes out a living catching fish.

There are some fine comic lines, but this is no Tortilla Flat celebrating the simple lives of the poor. "Doomed" is the word that best describes Suttree and all his acquaintances, and probably (I'm guessing) most characters in any McCarthy novel.

McCarthy writes like an Old Testament prophet, his prose mesmerizing in its intensity, Proust-like in its detailing of the physical world, and weighty with diction that requires frequent recourse to the OED. A typical line:

Great cleavers and bonesaws hung overhead and truncate beeves in stark abbatoir by cambreled hams blueflocced with mold.

When I heard that his most recent novel is set in post-apocalyptic America, I guessed the chief difference between it and Suttree (or perhaps any McCarthy novel) would simply be a smaller cast of characters.

McCarthy is a great and fearful writer.