steve zipp

Mortal Games

2012-01-29T17:56:00.000-05:00

The Turbulent Genius of Garry Kasparov

The author of Waiting for Bobby Fischer pals around with Kasparov during his world championship match in 1990, and provides an intimate portrait of him at age 27: charming, intense, moody, flamboyant, abrasive, haughty, impatient, intimidating, and filled with prodigious energy.

Kasparov made no secret of his dislike for his opponent, Anatoly Karpov, calling him "a creature of darkness" due to his close ties with Brezhnev, the KGB, and the communist party. Kasparov was still traumatized by the massacre of Armenians in his home town of Baku earlier that year, and from which he had barely escaped with his life. He claimed the pogrom was instigated by the KGB with the full knowledge of Gorbachev.

The 24-game match began in New York and ended in Lyon. There are no accompanying diagrams, only brief but exciting accounts of the games. The author is more interested in the human side of the struggle, focusing on personalities. Of Kasparov he writes:

He is beautiful when he plays, a wild creature. His body is tense, his face taut, punishing, at times fierce, as if he is about to physically attack. I have seen top grandmasters wither from his fury, becoming dishevelled, alarmed...

Both he and Karpov played brilliantly at times, sometimes arriving at positions so complex that other GMs were unable to say who had the advantage.

"These games are like Hitchcock mysteries," said Mikhail Tal, sitting in the pressroom. "No one knows what will happen next." ... In his prime he had been known as a player able to impose complications that his opponent simply could not figure out in the allotted time, but now Tal made it clear that the depth and abstraction of games 3 and 4 were beyond anything he had ever seen before in championship play. "But for all the complications, at times these games remind me of ice hockey," he said, "fast, hard, brutal."

Yet both players also committed blunders, and after 15 games each had won only a single game. Karpov was the underdog, and Kasparov's popularity had waned recently.

A large majority of the players favored Karpov in the match, and several days before, when he had won game 17, a group of them stood and cheered. In 1984, Karpov had been much hated in the chess world, but grandmasters in Lyon were calling the new Karpov "a regular guy" and "a gentleman," claiming that when you got to know him. "he was very kind."

Still, not everyone was satisfied with the course that some games took, and during game 18 Boris Spassky put on a comical show for reporters:

...he was pompous, theatrical, funny. He imitated the high nasal voice of Karpov. Mimicking Kasparov, he lumbered around like a gorilla on speed. He grabbed his nose with his hand to signal that there was something rotten about how Karpov and Kasparov were playing, but teasingly refused to elaborate. Then he crossed his fingers to signal that the game would be a draw. "They do not want to fight." His melodic voice dripped with disgust.

When Kasparov finally came away with a one-point victory, he sold the trophy he won in order to fund a relief program for Armenian refugees.

One of the most moving stories in the book is that of a reporter named Manny Topol. His father had walked out of Poland during the lead-up to WWII and survived by hustling chess for money. Eventually he wound up in America but was never able to get his son interested in the game. Now, covering this match, Manny finally saw its beauty and uttered one of the most poignant lines I have ever heard:

"Oh, what I wouldn't give to have one more chess game with my father."

The Last Season

2011-12-17T10:04:00.002-05:00

A strange mixture of hockey and the supernatural featuring NHL enforcer Felix Batterinski, better known as Frankenstein (opposing fans), Monster (his grandmother), and Bats (his friends). He uses stick, fists, and cheap shots to intimidate opponents, and lovingly describes the way he knocked Bobby Orr out of a game -- after Orr had scored on a breakaway.

He wins two Stanley Cups with the Broad Street Bullies, then is traded to the LA Kings who offer him a sweet contract. He thinks he's set for life until he discovers that his agent has bilked him of almost everything. He ends up as a player-coach for a semi-pro team in Finland. The reason they're in last place? "They all have their teeth. All of them, all their teeth."

When spit on by a fan during an exhibition game in Sweden, he climbs out of the penalty box and chases the fan all the way out of the arena. Then, celebrating their win after the game in a hotel bar, one of his teammates "hoots in derision" when he pours himself a small drink.

I hold up my hand, silently calling for patience. My mood is strange and I am not quite certain what it is that's making me do this, but instead of going for more alcohol to prove the point, I suddenly find myself pulling at my fly as I stand there. In front of the entire table, I whip it out and slowly pee several more shots into the glass. Then zipping back up, I raise this yellowed sparkling liquid toward the chandeliers, cut off my breath and quickly drain the glass to the bottom.

Felix batters his way through life, both on and off the ice, in part to escape his Polish heritage. He grew up in a shack without electricity or running water, a child of immigrants maligned as DPs and Bohunks. Though crude and foul-mouthed himself, he never gets over his embarrassment at his father's accent.

Worse, his personal life seems cursed, bringing death and misfortune to those he is closest to. Does it have something to do with his malevolent grandmother? The book takes place during the years of the Solidarity movement in Poland, which has implications when his Finnish team travels to Leningrad for a game, and sets up a preposterous ending when he flies back home.

The ending tells us what the author thinks of such rats, er, people, who have so deformed Canada's game -- and that includes not just enforcers like Felix but also coaches, fans and sportswriters:

"We're going to have to do something about all this violence," the late Conn Smythe once said, "or people are going to keep on buying tickets."

Review by Lucas Aykroyd

The Ghosts of Cannae

2011-12-05T22:59:00.002-05:00

Hannibal and the Darkest Hour of the Roman Republic

Before this book I had a schoolboy’s knowledge of Hannibal: a Carthaginian who crossed the Alps with elephants. Now that vacuum in my brain has been admirably filled.

Hannibal was a military genius who never lost a major battle during his invasion of Italy. His most famous victory was at Cannae, where he annihilated a Roman army that outnumbered his by almost two-to-one. One of the chief difference-makers was his cavalry, which he used to flank the Roman thrust. By the end of the day around 50,000 Romans were dead, including a significant number of their leaders, while Hannibal’s force remained "basically intact."

But despite his battlefield brilliance, Hannibal lost the war against Rome. Eventually he returned to North Africa to defend Carthage, and finally was defeated at the Battle of Zama by another military genius, Scipio Africanus. This brought an end to the Second Punic War, "one of the most important wars in recorded history."

Hannibal was forced into exile, but continued to run afoul of the Romans. When he was about to fall into their hands he is reported to have said, "Let us now put an end to the great anxiety of the Romans, who have thought it too long and hard a task to wait for the death of a hated old man." And then took poison.

The Legacy of Cannae

The Romans soldiers who survived Cannae were scapegoated for the defeat. Their pay was withheld and they were banished to Sicily. The author refers to them as "the ghosts of Cannae." They remained in Sicily until rehabilitated by Scipio Africanus, who incorporated them into the invasion force that finally defeated Hannibal at Zama.

Poetic justice, you say? But there’s more:

...these ghosts of Cannae would live to haunt the republic. For one day, legionaries would look to their generals and not Rome for a future, and that perspective would spell civil war and absolute rule. This more than anything else was the battle’s legacy.

The ambitious Scipio "set a pattern that led eventually to Caesar and the collapse of the republic." Thus:

In the very act of fighting Hannibal, Rome put itself on the road to civil war by coming to rely on charismatic generals for survival. If this is the case, then Hannibal had the last laugh.

Cannae remains one of the most studied battles in history. Two thousand years later men like Guderian, Rommel, Eisenhower, and Schwarzkopf were trying to emulate Hannibal’s tactics.

More

A brief sampling of other interesting bits from this engagingly-written book:

After Carthage was defeated in the First Punic War, Hannibal's father, Hamilcar, made his nine-year-old son swear "an oath of eternal enmity toward the Romans."

It took Hannibal two weeks to cross the Alps, a passage that cost him three-quarters of his force and most of his elephants. His "Panzer pachyderms," however, were "a questionable military asset," as likely to trample friend as foe.

When the leader of the first Roman army to engage Hannibal in Italy was wounded, his son "led a band of horsemen back into the fight to surround and protect his fallen father." That 17-year-old was Scipio Africanus.

For a hard-headed pragmatic bunch, Romans were surprisingly superstitious, being "obsessed with the proper taking of auspices and obedience to various portents." When Hannibal invaded Italy, they consulted the Sybelline books and the oracle at Delphi to find out how to propitiate the gods.

Not only were Romans a militaristic people, but their view of honour was bound up with "individual marital courage" expressed through face-to-face combat. The author reminds us that in The Iliad, Paris was reviled for using a bow.

"If Romans harbored a national nightmare, it was the Gauls." After sacking Rome in 390 BC, they "had come to symbolize irrationality, violence, and disorder." They were taller than Romans and fought bare-chested, berserker-style.

CBC interview with the author

The Township of Time

2011-11-23T14:30:00.002-05:00

A Chronicle

A collection of 20 stories set in Nova Scotia and spread over two centuries, the first taking place in 1786, the last in 1950. Some are complete in themselves, while the outcome or full import of others is not revealed until later. Together they form a sort of tapestry of interrelated lives, and lead to observations by several characters about the evanescence of time.

Keeping track of the many characters (some of whom are only bit players) is complicated by the use of nicknames, names that are similar, and even identical names. Many characters reappear in later stories, but the necessary connections are not always spelled out.

An Example

In "The Fiddlers of Point M'sieu 1873" young Col Forester goes fishing for mackerel. Four stories later he returns home having spent most of the intervening years at sea, and discovers his brother Ray has run off, his sister-in-law Edith dead, and their unnamed infant son in the care of Edith's sister, Clara. Three stories later we meet a boy named John Forester, who is being cared for by "Mam" (who turns out to be aunt Clara) and "the Captain," whom we are left to infer is Col Forester.

Similar threads extend through other stories for the reader to piece together, making them not so much linked as interwoven.

Trees

The image on the cover picks up on an interesting device that the author has used to add cohesiveness to the book. In "Juniper 1813" the first Colin Forester (Col's great-grandfather) plants an apple tree each time his wife gives birth, and these trees are known by the names of the children they were planted for. Several generations later in "The Bad Day 1921" John Forester refers to some apples as being "off the old Jen." And later, in "The Wind in the Juniper 1945" when he lies dying, it is the memory of a juniper tree (also planted by Colin) that triggers thoughts of home.

Bruce and Buckler

Charles Bruce and Ernest Buckler wrote nostalgic, almost romantic, portrayals of rural Nova Scotia, and were particularly skilled at capturing events from a child's point of view.

Bruce is better known as a poet, having received the G-G for The Mulgrave Road, but to my knowledge The Township of Time and his lone novel The Channel Shore (set in the same location as Township and sharing a few characters) are no longer in print.

That’s a shame. Bruce's descriptions are crisp and evocative, his dialogue excellent, and some of the stories in this book (like "The Bad Day") are very fine. His work deserves as much attention as that of Buckler or Frank Parker Day.

Ox Bells and Fireflies

2011-10-29T17:39:00.001-04:00

It’s the sort of title you'd expect on a volume of verse, and therefore doubly appropriate as many of the 21 pieces are filled with lyrical prose and tagged with similar names:

Wicks and Cups
Fireflies and Freedom
Drop Mail and Diplomats
Soft Soap and Drawknives
Plow, Scythe, and Peavey
Wildcats, Tetrazzini, and Bee Beer

They present an idealized picture of farming and village life in the Annapolis Valley when oxen were still being used to plough fields. Together they make up a nostalgic album of memories related in a way that is often dreamy and impressionistic:

The ground has been ribboned into dark furrows. They lie like brothers side by side, the earth's rich secrets exposed willingly to the sun.

In several pieces the language is a little less poetic in order to accommodate the more traditional shape of a story, while others move into Leacock territory with folksy accounts of how people act at election time or on wedding nights.

The affectionate parade of rustic characters includes a woman "violently allergic to horse farts" and another who "sounds like a bee under a cup." One tardy fellow was "always behind, like a boar's nuts," while another "ate fried bullfrogs to deepen his voice," and a third "said 'Good Morning' to any cow he passed."

Sex is "a blend of comedy and sheet lightning." Oxen "rise like prophecies" and plant "their great slow feet like sorrows." A pig has "moneylender eyes" and hens rustle "their cuneiform feet in the straw."

There are also moments of grief and misfortune, but they only serve to bind people closer together, as in the wonderful opening story, "Seven Crows a Secret," in which a young boy observes how the death of a neighbour brings out a touching tenderness in his parents.

The author, Ernest Buckler, referred to the book as a "fictional memoir." It was published in 1968.

Parasite Rex

2011-10-07T22:16:00.002-04:00

Inside the Bizarre World of Nature's Most Dangerous Creatures

It's a disturbing fact that the body of any creature, including our own, is potential habitat. We are a house and the mice want in. Or as the prologue puts it: "a vein is a river."

The life cycle of a parasite can be ingenious, complex, and gruesome, and the book provides some startling examples. Among the 16 pages of b&w photos you'll find one of a crustacean that has devoured the tongue of a fish and taken its place. But what makes this book remarkable is that it goes beyond such sensational examples and addresses broader issues.

Parasites, it seems, have been practising their trade since the dawn of life, and any ecosystem without them is likely to be unhealthy. Parasites may even have been responsible for the development of sex and language.

Then there are social parasites, like the cuckoo. Ultimately we ourselves may be seen as parasites -- with the planet our host.

Behaviour Modification

One of the truly shocking aspects of parasitism is the ability of some organisms to alter the behaviour of their host. Toxoplasma causes rats to be less wary of cats, the parasite’s final host.

Ants that have ingested lancet flukes leave their sisters and spend the night at the top of a blade of grass, the better to be consumed by a grazing mammal.

Sacculina, a parasitic barnacle, penetrates a crab’s leg joint, sends out "roots" through the crab’s entire body, and emerges as a sac on its ventral surface. The crab loses its ability to reproduce, becoming "genetically speaking, a zombie: one of the undead serving a master."

...parasites such as Sacculina...control their hosts, becoming in effect their new brain, and turning them into new creatures. It is as if the host itself is simply a puppet, and the parasite is the hand inside.

Makes one think of Heinlein’s Puppet Masters, and the movie Alien, doesn’t it? The author mentions them too.

Carl Zimmer

I enjoyed Parasite Rex so much that I immediately went out and bought two more of Zimmer’s books. Check out his website, which contains numerous articles he has written, as well as Chapter 1 from this book.

You can also find a link to his blog on Discover’s website, and there a link to a a photo gallery of scientific tattoos, the basis for a cool book coming out this fall called Science Ink.

Zimmer has had a tapeworm named after him.

A Few More Quotes

It’s time to put the parasite alongside the lion.

Castration is a strategy that any number of parasites have hit on independently...

Parasites have been a dominant force, perhaps the dominant force, in the evolution of life.

There are more human intestinal worms than humans.

The Good Body

2011-09-14T12:21:00.019-04:00

An inspired blend of hockey and Canlit that makes you wonder why such an obvious combo hasn't been tried before.

Bobby Bonaduce has laboured 20 years in the minors, the high point of his career being a single shift with the Maple Leafs. Or perhaps it's a low point, for in that short span he speared an opponent's spleen, got into three fights, pushed a linesman, spit at a fan, and knocked off a cop's hat.

Now with his career over, he's heading north to reconnect with his son Jason, who is playing hockey for UNB in Fredericton. He bluffs his way into the graduate program for creative writing in the hope that he'll be able to join the team.

This makes for some great comic moments on and off the ice. Bonaduce is predictably disdainful of works like "Lady Windermere's fucking Fan" and at sea in seminars like "Canadian Writers of the British Diaspora," the first hour of which is spent defining "Britain."

The writing has a distinctive rhythm and tone, and offers up some cool observations.

Hockey

...you have the puck and you're lugging a bag of gold to market surrounded by fast bandits.

Canlit

Reading her novel, he'd felt a shovel-the-snow kinship to Atwood, though her tough-shit sharpness made him nervous; and to Davies, though he was a stuffed shirt. But you could tell they'd both shovelled driveways.

Grad school

This was pretty good, gift as a verb, one of the better ones in the new language he'd been learning here. Other verbs he didn't like so much. Dialogue. Let's dialogue. Hell, why not get Sally and trialogue. Eight of us at Murray's lousy party, octaloguing away.

He went to the bathroom, to urine.

The ex-wife

Her eyes, her bright eyes. You looked in and saw she was smarter than you but also that this wasn't a bad thing. You could also see how she felt her body to be not quite hers, or not quite her. She could hold her body at arm's length. You could see she respected her body, but also that she saw it to be a kind of playground.

The book is filled with likeable characters save for a roommate with a withered arm. But perhaps Toby and Bobby are intended as doppelgangers, as both are afflicted with a physical disability that gives an ironic twist to the book's title. The image of Bonaduce driving around with a dead Christmas tree on the roof of his car is a telling one. It's clear from the start that the book can only end one way, but funny and sad make for a powerful combination.

Hockey Lit

A good companion to this book is a more recent one by Gaston, Midnight Hockey, a non-fiction work in which he mentions his own hockey career.

You can also check out this review by Angie Abdou. Her novel, The Bone Cage, was defended by former NHL enforcer, Georges Laraque, in the CBC's 2011 Canada Reads event.

Two other hockey novels I have enjoyed: King Leary and Salvage Kings, Ya!

Bobby Fischer Goes to War

2011-09-04T18:09:00.008-04:00

The True Story of How the Soviets Lost the Most Extraordinary Chess Match of All Time

The "Match of the Century" has already been the subject of many books, but this one has benefited by coming out more than 30 years after the event.

Thanks to the ending of the Cold War, the authors had access to sources of information formerly unavailable. They spoke to many of the key people involved (the main exception, of course, being Fischer himself), and have put together this compulsively readable account.

In 1972 the match caught the imagination of people in the West because it was seen as a Cold War battle enacted over a chessboard, with a lone American taking on the seemingly invincible Soviet chess collective.

The authors have a different view: "Far from being a simple ideological confrontation, the championship was played out on many levels, of which the chess itself was only one." Thus their focus is more on what happened away from the board. They begin by describing the two opponents: Fischer the "enfant terrible of chess," and Spassky something of a maverick himself, a patriotic Russian who felt little allegiance to the Soviet Union. He was not a party member, and once raised hackles by asking:

"Did Comrade Lenin suffer from syphilis?"

The authors explain how Fischer was able to dictate the terms of the match in a way that had never happened before. The event almost never took place because he demanded an unprecedented amount of money. British businessman Jim Slater came to the rescue by kicking in an additional $125,000. That got Fischer to Reykjavik, but the barrage of demands continued, some of them quite ridiculous:

The legs of the $1200 custom-built mahogany table should be shortened, the sumptuous chessboard changed, the front rows of seats removed, the camera towers pushed right back to the point where filming would be nigh impracticable, the lighting brighter –- no, less bright, no, brighter than that.

Opposing him was the likeable Spassky, who had never been beaten by Fischer, and who was perhaps more accommodating than he should have been. The cumulative effect of Fischer’s tantrums and ultimatums wore down the champion even before the match began. He also undermined his own efforts by quarrelling with his handlers and insisting on putting together his own team. He did not prepare as hard as he could have, and was surprised by Fischer's use of atypical openings, like the English.

When Spassky fell behind, the Soviets expressed concern that the Americans were using “non-sporting” means to gain an advantage – telepathy, chemicals, parapsychology, etc. Fischer’s chair was x-rayed, revealing a strange u-shaped tube inside it, which did not show up on a second x-ray. Was it a diabolical device? Or was it planted then removed by the KGB?

"I'm crushing him with brute force. Haaaaaa!"

Fischer is reported to have said this during game 3, which he won -- the first time he had ever beaten Spassky. In the end he won 7 games to Spassky's 3 (one of which Fischer forfeited by not showing up). The rest were draws, though "far from being dull, lazy games, several of these had been desperate, protracted bare-knuckle brawls, exciting if not always pretty."

The final score was 12.5 - 8.5 after 21 games. Fischer earned over $150,000, while Spassky took home $93,750, making him a wealthy man in the USSR.

Fischer never defended his title despite lucrative tournament offers. When he was due to meet Karpov, the winner of the next Candidates tournament, he issued a list of 179 demands. When FIDE refused to meet them all, he resigned his title. Many observers believed he was frightened of the chessboard. After winning the championship, he had nothing left to achieve and descended into "an abyss of unreality."

A few final quotes:

Reykjavik changed chess itself.

Spassky went to Reykjavik to celebrate chess. Fischer went to fight.

There never has been an era in modern chess during which one player [Fischer] has so overshadowed all others.

A movie based on the book is in development.

The Cunning Man

2011-08-12T12:18:00.006-04:00

"Should I have taken the false teeth?"

A great opening line delivered by the narrator, Jonathan Hullah, a physician who grows up in Sioux Lookout where two medical practitioners are presented as possible models. One is a shamanistic healer, the other a second-rate doctor who is also the town's bootlegger.

Hullah goes away to a boarding school where he makes two close friends, Charles Iredale and Brocky Gilmartin, whose lives continue to intertwine with his own throughout adulthood. Iredale becomes an Anglican priest, Gilmartin a respected prof of English literature, and Hullah a doctor who employs unorthodox methods of diagnosis. Their professions provide the three principal motifs in the book, and give Davies a broad canvas on which to display his erudition. There is a boggling number of literary references, as well as forays into theatre, opera, painting, and church music.

But the great thing about Davies is the way he mixes his erudition with comedy, often of the ribald variety. Here is Hullah examining one of his patients:

...not that he demanded to peep up her chimney, or anythng like that...but he stared at her until she said she blushed from head to toe. Then he poked at her with an enquiring finger simply everywhere! He grabbed her tum until she thought he was trying to dislodge something inside, but it appears it was just an unusually prolonged and searching examination of the spleen. He made her turn over and did the same sort of investigation of her back, including a prolonged parting of the buttocks while he seemed to be staring at her exit – about which she seems to be extremely secretive. He did a lot about feet. Then – and this is what really shook her -- he began to sniff at her, very close up, and he sniffed her from head to foot, very slowly and even quite a lot of sniffing in that area which Miss Fothergill described as You Know Where...

But he's not merely a "twat-sniffer." He believes the health of the body is inextricably bound up with the health of the spirit, and combines modern medical techniques with enemas and poetry-reading. He refers to himself as a Paracelsian physician, melding humanism with medicine. He is the modern version of a village wise man who can also mend bones – a "Cunning Man."

The novel proceeds with a combination of satisfying plot twists, outrageous incidents, and lots of playful but wide-ranging dialogue fueled by good wine and fine scotch. There is a murder, a couple of miracles, a bad breath contest, and a scene during the war when a bomb explodes while Hullah is taking a bath, leaving him trapped in the tub for four days.

In the penultimate chapter Davies introduces a brave new character who takes over some of the narrative duties. She writes numerous letters in an amusing "schoolgirl-slangy vein," letters which later come into Hullah's possession. When he incorporates them into his Case Book and comments on them, the result is an interesting narrative crossfire.

In the final section Hullah reaches retirement age and devotes himself to working on a revolutionary approach to literature. He is going to re-evaluate the the characters of great works from a medical point of view. Was Shakespeare constipated? What about Mr. Pickwick's prostate? The Anatomy of Fiction will be the title, in homage to Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, from which is taken The Cunning Man's epigraph.

Some Great Lines

A brief sampling of the many delightful turns of phrase:

She blabs to conquer.
a trumpeting of flatus
a hymen like parchment
a melting young beauty
English beef-witted folly
some dark cupboard in my mind
the portcullis of respectability
the small change of her conversation
The church is an anvil that has worn out many hammers.

Names

The book has an astonishing number of characters. Many of them are minor, some appearing only once, but Davies names them all, a formidable task in itself. He always comes up with some great ones.

Dr. Ogg
Elsie Smoke
Hugh McWearie
Emily Raven-Hart
Edwin Allchin
Richard Craigie
Father Ninian Hobbes
Father Tommy Whimble
Pansy Freake Todhunter (aka Chips)
Hercules McNabb and his wife Dorsy
Lieutenant Dorrington
Prudence Vizard
Joe Sliter

An Unfinished Trilogy

One of the sweetest aspects of Davies's work is the way the books in his trilogies complement each other. The Gilmartin family tree was exhaustively explored in the preceding book, Murther & Walking Spirits, and while not necessary to understand The Cunning Man, it so enriches it that I've revised somewhat my earlier opinion of that book.

The ending in particular harkens back to Murther in a couple of respects – Esme wondering whether Gil's ghost might be hanging around, and a misdirected telephone inquiry about a movie. Those who have read Murther will immediately understand their significance.

And not only do the books in the trilogies overlap, but the trilogies themselves occasionally do. For example, Dunstan Ramsay has a brief walk-on as a history teacher at Colbourne, the boarding school attended by Hullah and his friends. And Brocky ends up a prof at Waverley University in Salterton, the setting for Davies’s first trilogy.

Unfortunately The Cunning Man is Davies’s last novel. He had begun preliminary work on another, mostly likely the concluding volume in what has been termed the Toronto series, when he died. While it's useless to speculate on what the contents of that book may have been, it's also fun. The main question is who would have been the lead character. Perhaps Nuala Conor, Brocky's wife and Hullah's lover.

Since Murther and Cunning Man both open with a death, it's not unreasonable to suppose the final volume would have done so as well. Perhaps it would have been that of Darcy Dwyer, who died of stab wounds in Gilbraltar.

There is a character in Murther known as the Sniffer. In Cunning Man, Hullah is also a sniffer, using his nose as a diagnostic tool. Would there have been another sniffer in the third book?

The Gilmartins

Since several of Brocky's relatives pop up in Cunning Man, I made an abbreviated family tree to refresh my memory. All except for Ollwen appear in Murther. The names in bold are those who appear in this book.

The Female Line (5 generations)

Anna Vermeulen + Major Gage
--Elizabeth Gage + Justus Vanderlip
----Nelson Vanderlip
------Cynthia Vanderlip + Dan Boutelle
------Virginia Vanderlip + William McOmish
--------Caroline, Minerva & Malvina McOmish

The Old World Gilmartins (5 generations)

Thomas G.
--Wesley G. (adopted)
----Samuel G.
------Polly G. + John Jethro Jenkins
------Walter G. + Janet Jenkins
--------Elaine, Maude, Lancelot, Rhodri G.

The New World Gilmartins

Rhodri G. + Malvina McOmish
--Brochwel "Brocky" G. + Nuala Conor
----Conor "Gil" G. + Esme Barron
-----Ollwen G.

Martin Chuzzlewit

2011-08-02T10:18:00.002-04:00

The plot of the novel originates with a quarrel between two men, both named Martin Chuzzlewit. One is wealthy and old, the other is his grandson. They were on good terms until young Martin fell in love with Mary Graham, an orphan raised from childhood by the grandfather. As a result young Martin is disinherited and heads to America with Mark Tapley in search of fortune, only to be conned into buying worthless swampland in a place called Eden. When they return to England, Martin has been transformed by his experiences into a better person.

During their absence, old Martin’s brother, Anthony, dies. His avaricious son, Jonas, marries Mercy, the daughter of a sanctimonious hypocrite named Pecksniff. Tigg, the prosperous chairman of the Anglo-Bengalee company, learns that Jonas hastened his father’s death with poison. Jonas is blackmailed into investing in Anglo-Bengalee, then forced to persuade his father-in-law, Pecksniff, to do the same. Tigg pays for this with his life.

Old Martin, who has pretended to fall under Pecksniff’s influence in order to expose his hypocrisy, now confronts Jonas about his role in Anthony’s death. To the surprise of everyone, including Jonas, it is learned that Anthony only pretended to take poison and died of a broken heart. Jonas, however, does not go free, as he is immediately taken into custody for the murder of Tigg, and commits suicide by swallowing poison. Old Martin denounces Pecksniff and is reconciled with young Martin, who regains his inheritance and weds Mary.

The novel was not as well-received as previous titles, and the first one to suffer a decline in readership.

Memorable Characters

Pecksniff is a major figure in the book. His smarmy hypocrisy and glib fawning ways are wonderful to behold. He is "soft and oily," has a flabby face, and is described by Jonas as "a sleek, sly chap...just like a tomcat." At one point he tells young Martin, "I am an honest man, seeking to do my duty in this carnal universe and setting my face against all vice and treachery. I weep for your depravity, sir."

Mrs. Gamp is a fat old woman with a swollen red nose and a liking for booze and snuff. She works as a nurse, midwife, and "performer of nameless offices about the persons of the dead." A comic figure and loquacious spouter of malaprops, she goes to "a lying-in or a laying-out with equal zest and relish." One of her sayings: "Rich folks may ride on camels, but it ain’t so easy for ‘em to see out of a needle’s eye."

Mark Tapley is a jolly fellow in search of a trying situation. He wishes “to come out strong under circumstances as would keep other men down.” In Martin he sees the potential he is looking for.

Highlights

The wonderful glimpses of Victorian England -- a steak wrapped in a cabbage leaf, straw on the floor of a stage-coach for passengers to shove their feet into for warmth, a medication called a slime draft, patches of pickled brown paper applied to Pecksniff's head, sacks stuffed up a chimney to keep the rain out, men carrying letters in their hats and walking arm-in-arm in convivial friendship. The draymen, thimbleriggers, underporters, and coal-heavers; and the quaint antiquarian objects -- hunting-whips, portmanteaus, tea-chests, pudding-basins, stone brandy-bottles, fish-baskets, waist-coat strings, toasting forks, key-bugles.

Dickens's delight in food: oysters for breakfast, potted boar's head, intensely pickled salmon, beef-steak pudding, sheets of ham, stewed kidneys, a hot leg of mutton, innocent young potatoes, a cool salad, a crusty loaf, cunning tea-cakes, flowing mugs of beer, jorums of hot punch.

Some fine comic scenes, including the row between Mrs. Gamp and Betsey Prig, and Tigg's weasely cadging at the beginning of the novel when he is still a shiftless bum. And the nightmarish carriage journey undertaken by Jonas and Tigg.

Finally, the book is not burdened with a labyrinthine plot as some of the later novels are. It is relatively free from sentimentality; there are no cloying characters or tear-jerking death scenes. And young Martin’s slightly flawed character makes him more likeable than other bland heroes, like Arthur Clennam in Little Dorrit.

America

Dickens wrote Martin Chuzzlewit after a disappointing trip to America, and vented some of his ire in this book. Most Americans are portrayed as glib, crass, pretentious, and hypocritical. They are gluttonous feeders with swinish table manners, and have the unpleasant habit of spraying tobacco juice everywhere. Despite such comedic potential, this portion of the book (7 of 54 chapters) was the least satisfying, because the characters are pretty much cut from the same cloth, with the result that none stand out the way Pecksniff and Mrs. Gamp do. Some great names, though:

Colonel Diver
Major Pawkins
General Fladdock
General Cyrus Choke
Major Hannibal Chollop
Professor Mullit
Doctor Dunkle
Jefferson Brick
LaFayette Kettle
Zephaniah Scadder
Mrs. Hominy

Reversals & Improbabilites

As much as I enjoy Dickens I always seem to have difficulties with his plotting, and in this book the appalling bipolar behaviour of old Martin is more a function of plot than of character. The senseless quarrel with young Martin, and especially the ruse of pretending to be in Pecksniff's power, are neither credible nor creditable. Dickens has a lot of explaining to do at the end, but none of it is very convincing. He is not unaware of the problem, for he has Pecksniff declare, "Whether it was worthy of you to partake of my hospitality, and to act the part you did act in my house, that, sir, is a question which I leave to your own conscience."

Equally unbelievable is Anthony’s pretending to take poison, and Tigg's transformation from a scruffy cadger at the beginning of the book into the well-dressed and prosperous chairman of Anglo-Bengalee. Again, these are functions of plot rather than character.

Also related to Dickens's handling of plot is the way some characters are dragged back into the story when there is no need for it. Chevy Slyme shows up at the end of the book as an officer of the law, and the woman Mark assists during the journey to America reappears with her husband in Eden and again in London in the last chapter. This is perhaps an effort to make the sprawling tale seem a little more shapely than it actually is, tidying up ends that are not really loose.

Still, one might argue that some plot decisions are based on the recurring theme of character reversal, of which there are many in the book. Anthony, Pecksniff, Tigg, Slyme, Mercy, both Martins, and the suitor of Mercy's sister all undergo (or pretend to) some sort of transformative change. This is underscored by the change in Tigg's name -- from Montague Tigg to Tigg Montague.

It might also be said that some of Dickens's most entertaining characters are no more believable than his twisted plots, and that together they are but two sides of the same coin of his teeming genius.

Links

The 1994 BBC production of Martin Chuzzlewit is superb and quite faithful to the book. Paul Scofield as old Martin, Tom Wilkinson as Pecksniff, and Pete Postlewaite as Tigg are especially good. You can find clips on Youtube.

Here's a map of London showing locations mentioned in the novels of Dickens. The boarding house of Mrs. Todgers is close by the Monument near London Bridge.

Cabbagetown

2011-07-15T22:28:00.003-04:00

A minor Canadian classic, this book provides a sobering look at a time when Canada was not a prosperous country. It takes place during the Depression in a part of Toronto that was once a slum. Everyone is down on their luck, and for a group of teens entering adulthood, things generally go from bad to worse.

The main character is anti-hero Ken Tilling, who yearns for Myrla Patson until he discovers that she's pregnant. He leaves town in a boxcar and leads the life of a hobo. He's beaten up by railroad bulls, earns pennies a day harvesting crops, and develops left-wing leanings. His simmering anger is directed at government and big business.

An unsavoury affair continues Myrla's descent, which ends with her walking the streets. Bob McIsaacs moves from a life of petty crime to more serious offenses, a prison break, and a hail of bullets. Billy Addington works in a candy factory over vats of boiling chocolate despite being so malnourished that he has fainting spells. (You can guess what happens next.) Theodore East is a little better off than the others, but in seeking to escape Cabbagetown falls in with nasty anti-Semites and effete pseudo-intellectuals.

The book ends on a curiously hopeful note with Ken leaving Canada to fight in the Spanish Civil War.

Despite the grimness of the story, the spare prose speeds the reader along. It's not an unpleasant read by any means, and the Hemingwayesque style makes an interesting match with characters as ill-fated as those in any Hardy novel.

Jack Illingworth's view: "As literary art, Cabbagetown is decidedly second-tier... Nonetheless, its brutal honesty makes it a consistently rewarding novel, and far more than a mere historical curiosity."

Hugh Garner

Cabbagetown was expurgated when it came out in 1950. The version I read was the unabridged edition, which appeared in 1968 and was included in A Hugh Garner Omnibus as well as several short stories, excerpts from two other novels, and a single piece of journalism, "A Loyalist Soldier Returns to Spain." The latter makes an excellent companion piece to Cabbagetown, because Garner fought in the International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War. He writes, "...going there to fight was one of the few things I am proud of having done," and incorporated a number of undisguised details directly into the book.

He won the GG in 1963 for a volume of short stories.

Links

Imagining Toronto
Hugh Garner: The "One Man Trade Union" of Publishing
One of the Greatest Authors of All Time
Historical Plaque

For Love of Insects

2011-06-15T11:44:00.008-04:00

Science fiction writers in need of an alien or two have only to peruse this book for inspiration. There's the bombardier beetle, for instance, which is capable of discharging with great accuracy jets of boiling acid from its butt.

Yes, boiling.

Spraying is only one way to deliver a toxic substance. Some millipedes, for example, ooze cyanide from glandular pores. Others creatures, lacking defensive glands, are reflex bleeders – their toxic bodily fluids leak out from easily ruptured cuticle. Additional delivery methods include defensive vomiting and defecating. Yowza!

Larvae of the leaf beetle protect themselves by extruding fecal matter in long strands, which they then attach to themselves until they are completely hidden from view, creating the appearance of a tiny haystack.

Some insects practice seminal gift giving. In one species of moth, males lose 10% of their mass when mating. They transfer not just sperm to females, but also nutrients and protective alkaloids. Copulation takes upward of 9 hours.

Butterflies engage in a strange behaviour called puddling. They drink and expel prodigious amounts of water (eg 600 times their body mass) in order to acquire sodium, which is then transferred to females during mating.

Bolas spiders, which do not make webs, bring down their prey bola-style, using a thread with a drop of glue at the end.

These are only a few of the creatures you'll meet in this wonderful book, which is packed with brilliant colour photos that illustrate the bizarre goings-on of insects and arthropods.

The author, Thomas Eisner, is one of the fathers of chemical ecology. He tells us that probably far less than half of all insect species have been discovered, leaving unknown a vast reservoir of chemical compounds. "Chemical prospecting in the world of insects can still bring real rewards," he writes.

He passed away earlier this year.

Maurice Richard

2011-06-01T10:29:00.005-04:00

The dressing-room was his telephone booth, where he donned the red and blue costume of the Habs.

Off ice he was as mild-mannered as Clark Kent, a devoted husband and father, respectful citizen and church-goer.

On ice he was Rocket Richard, a man with a short fuse and blazing eyes, "defender and exemplar of the downtrodden French Canadian through both his brilliant play and the righteous violence of his fists." All he lacked was a cape.

In 1955 he was involved in a stick-swinging incident with Hal Laycoe of the Bruins, in the course of which he punched out a linesman. He was suspended for the final three games of the season and for the playoffs. Enraged fans attacked NHL president Clarence Campbell at the Montreal Forum and a riot ensued. The next day Richard calmed the city with a few words on the radio.

Of the authoritarian Campbell, author Charles Foran writes:

Living and working in Montreal did little to heighten Campbell’s insensitivity. Operating out of the imposing stone Sun Life building, an edifice that, more than any other, represented Anglo financial dominance and smugness, and residing nearby the mentally walled ghetto of Westmount, the league president carried on both his professional duties and private life as a colonial administrator in India or Africa might have done...

The Richard Riot was a manifestation of the simmering dissatisfaction felt by Quebecers, and a precursor to the Quiet Revolution that began in 1960, the same year Richard retired.

Stuff I Didn't Know

How tough Richard was. Early in his career he fought twice with a player on the NY Rangers, "a marginal talent with a background as an amateur boxer." Both times Richard knocked him out with a single punch.

He tried several times to enlist during the War, but was turned down when x-rays showed that breaks in his ankle, leg and wrist -- incurred while playing hockey -- had not healed properly. "The ankle, in particular, was permanently misshapen."

The emergence of “gladatorial hockey” occurred after the War with the return of veterans. "'If you know nothing else about the time I played,' Richard would later say of this period, 'know how violent the game was.'"

One year he led the league in penalties. Fans routinely paid his fines.

His famous jersey number was chosen after the birth of his first child, who weighed nine pounds.

After he retired Richard became so unhappy at the way he was treated by the Canadiens organization that he refused to drink Molson’s beer or allow it to be served in his tavern.

The shocking end of Howie Morenz: leg broken in four places during a game, hospitalized with his leg in traction, began drinking heavily, had a nervous breakdown, and -- still in hospital a month and a half after being admitted -- died of a heart attack. He was 34.

End Thoughts

This slim compact book is more of a sketch than a full-fledged bio, and similar in scope (I assume) to others in the series of "Extraordinary Canadians". No illustrations.

Series editor John Raltson Saul mentions the filming of forthcoming documentaries. Until then a worthwhile substitute is the feature film, The Rocket, with Roy Dupuis as Richard and several NHLers in supporting roles, including Vinnie LeCavalier, Mike Ricci and Sean Avery.

You can also view a four-minute clip from a CBC Fifth Estate documentary about Richard.

Dust jacket painting by Tavis Coburn.

The Human Comedy of Chess

2011-05-18T08:58:00.000-04:00

A Grandmaster's Chronicles

Though it seems a strange admission, I am not a chess player. I learned the game as a child from my grandfather, who played postal chess. He bought me a small book suitable for my age, but I was more captivated by the names of the openings than the openings themselves.

It was not until university that I became truly interested in the game, for it was then I became friends with a provincial champion and thanks to him glimpsed the human side of chess, an aspect of the game that has fascinated me ever since.

The Human Comedy of Chess is a work exactly suited to my interests. It’s a collection of articles written in the 1990s by Dutch GM Hans Ree and splendidly translated by Willem Tissot and Maureen Peeck. It contains 56 articles with an average length of just around five pages and bearing titles such as:

Chess with the KGB
Karpov's Revenge
Khan of Kalmykia
What is Beautiful?
Heroic Tales
The Chess Murder
Adjourned Games

There are pieces on the history of chess, and on familiar names such as Reshevsky, Tal, Botvinnick, Marshall, Keres, Nimzowitsch, Koltanowski, Duchamp. Scattered throughout are a number of games with brief but colourful annotations. Particularly entertaining is Ree's account of the matches between Karpov and Anand, Short and Timman, and Short and Kasparov.

The writing is smooth, witty, engaging, with pungent observations on nearly every page. A sampling:

Today's top chess: rather like the headhunting frenzy of axe-wielding savages

Tal: doctors had accidentally removed not a kidney, but his appendix

Krylenko: executed in 1938 because he had neglected to propagate the social meaning of chess.

Duchamp: after the game, chess pieces were sent into the air by balloons

Kasparov: uproots heavy trees with bare hands

FIDE: a banana republic run by gangsters

Time trouble: an addiction

Soviet chess: before Sputnik circled the earth chess was the only field in which the Soviet Union had caught up with the rest of the world and outdone it

Nor has Ree neglected the dark side of chess. He mentions bribery, conspiracy, intimidation, scandal, con men, imposters, bodyguards, chess bosses, "gruff telephone calls from blackmailers," and bald-faced attempts at cheating. "Sometimes," he writes, it is "hard to distinguish between the chess community and the world of organized crime."

But the best parts of the book are those that communicate Ree's infectious love of the game. Of a match with Topalov, he writes that Kasparov "conjured up an attack out of nothing, with a rook sacrifice," after which he made "fifteen mortal blows in a row, all of marvelous beauty." He concludes by saying, "Those who were privileged to be present knew they would tell it to their children and grandchildren, as long as chess will be played in this world."

This wonderful book gives a thrilling glimpse into a world that ordinary mortals like me would not otherwise see.

The Golden Spruce

2011-05-09T08:38:00.004-04:00

A True Story of Myth, Madness and Greed

Winner of the Governor General’s award for non-fiction in 2005 for its combination of fine writing, gripping story, and fascinating detail.

The setting is the BC rainforest and the Queen Charlotte Islands, where trees "like Tolkien's Ents" can be found. The backstory includes the troubled history of the warlike Haida, whose totem poles were at one time cut down and used for pilings; the hair-raising dangers of logging as experienced by chokermen, whistlepunks, donkey punchers, and high-riggers; and the deadly waters of Hecate Strait (between the BC mainland and the Queen Charlottes) with its overfalls, blind rollers, clapitos, and katabatic winds.

But in the end what makes this book so compelling are its elements of Shakespearian tragedy. The people and events will stay with you for a long time to come.

The Greed

The forest industry in BC has clearcut an unimaginable amount of rainforest and left behind “traumatized landscapes.” Worst of all is the removal of old growth trees that have lived for centuries and whose harvest resembles “terrestrial whaling.” BC, the author notes, “has been described as a banana republic, only with bigger bananas.”

The Myth

One tree on the Queen Charlotttes was utterly unique, a Sitka spruce with golden needles. An "arboreal unicorn" is how the author refers to it, while another person said, “This was not just a physical tree of unusual beauty, it was in fact a unique symbol of the islands and ourselves. It was a mythic tree.” According to the Haida, the tree had once been a human being. MacMillan Bloedel had abstained from harvesting it.

The Madness

A gifted and formidable woodsman working in the logging industry became disillusioned with the devastation it was causing. After suffering a religious experience, he cut down the sixteen-storey Golden Spruce to publicize his concerns. He called it a freak, MacBlo’s "pet tree." He wrote, “We tend to focus on the individual trees like the Golden Spruce while the rest of the forests are being slaughtered.”

He refused to travel by public transport to the Queen Charlottes for his trial because he feared that he would be murdered. Instead he set out by kayak and was never seen again. Many people, including former colleagues and Haida elders, believe he is still alive. His former wife called him “indestructible.”

The Author

John Vaillant is also the author of another fascinating book, The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival.

Imagining Mars

2011-05-01T13:20:00.001-04:00

A Literary History

A scholarly work with 30 pages of footnotes, this book wades through many obscure volumes before arriving at ones that modern readers will be familiar with. Yet it’s a necessary journey in order to provide context to those later works.

Especially helpful is the correlation between fiction and scientific knowledge of the day, as well as portraits of two influential astronomers, Camille Flammarion and Percival Lowell, whose writings incorporated as much fancy as fact.

Their work stimulated the first outpourings of fiction about Mars late in the 19th century. So potent was Lowell's romantic notion of a heroic but dying Martian civilization that it remained a modern myth, even after it had been discredited scientifically.

The space age put to rest such “obsolete fantasies,” especially with the Mariner flybys in the 1960s and the Viking landings in the 1970s. Fiction about Mars became energized by a new realism, with terraforming a major theme.

Dozens upon dozens of novels are investigated in the book, with the following authors given the most prominence: H.G. Wells, Ray Bradbury, Frederick Turner, and Kim Stanley Robinson. Below are a few scattered observations and quotes.

The War of the Worlds

Wells's portrayal of Martians as inimical non-humanoids was meant as a rebuke to the Victorian attitude of cultural superiority. "...for the first time, the inhabitants of Mars are depicted not as kindlier and nobler versions of ourselves but as monsters..."

John Carter

ERB’s John Carter books belong to a group of “masculinist fantasies” that became popular early in the 20th century. They portrayed Mars as a frontier outpost and Martians as savages needing to be pacified. Such books reflected the racist and imperialist attitudes of the day.

The Martian Chronicles

This 1950 novel represents "the last flowering of a romantic vision of Mars," yet remains "one of the half-dozen or so fictions about Mars that are central to the imaginative tradition." Bradbury is quoted as saying, "Mars is a mirror, not a crystal."

Stranger in a Strange Land

Heinlein's "send-up of American sexual Puritanism and fundamentalism" is "full of his customary libertarian doctrines and cartoon characters masquerading as personalities."

Frederick Turner

An author I was not familiar with. His 1978 novel, A Double Shadow, and 1988 epic poem, Genesis, are discussed in some detail. Genesis is “the most original treatment of Mars produced in the 1980s."

Final Thoughts

In any survey such as this it’s inevitable that some books will be left out. In my case I regret the absence of Desolation Road by Ian McDonald, especially since one of his short stories, “The Old Cosmonaut and the Construction Worker Dream of Mars,” is mentioned as a possible new direction in Martian fiction, able to mesh the literary heritage of a canaled Mars, which seems embedded in our imagination, with the reality of a harsh and lifeless planet.

The book includes eight colour plates. As the subtitle indicates, this is a literary history, so only a few films are mentioned.

Certainly, a huge undertaking with many valuable insights.

The Ukimwi Road

2011-04-18T09:34:00.010-04:00

From Kenya to Zimbabwe

The word "intrepid" scarcely seems adequate to describe Dervla Murphy. In 1992 she set out on a four-month, 3000-mile, bicycle trip through East Africa -- alone, and at the age of 60.

Early on she is challenged by an African pastor to speak out about AIDS (ukimwi in Swahili). "There's no medicine for this plague, only information to stop it," he says, and his words are borne out by people who believe the disease is caused by alcohol, or witchcraft, or American biological experiments. Condom use is widely disdained, one reason being the belief that only inferior ones are sent to Africa, another that they are part of a Western plot to slow African population growth.

AIDS thus becomes the book's leitmotif, and Dervla reports on the devastation she glimpses and the tangled ethical and moral issues it has stirred up. She also voices some pet peeves -- the IMF, the World Bank, and "UN free-loaders." At one point an FAO Land Cruiser whizzes past her, "vividly illustrating the reality of Western 'aid' to Africa. Hundreds of such vehicles, normally carrying only one or two expatriates, zoom around rural areas; but the locals, to whom transport would be a boon, knew better than to expect a lift."

Yet the book is not shrill or single-minded, and contains the usual elements of good travel writing -- description, anecdote, conversation, historical context, economic status report, observation both sympathetic and caustic -- as well as her own somewhat eccentric behaviour. She tipples Nile beer in Uganda, Tusker in Kenya and Tanzania, and Carlsberg in Malawi. She registers herself as a Russian astronaut at a police station, and alters a date on her vaccination booklet to facilitate a border crossing.

Throughout her travels she is repeatedly cautioned by concerned Africans about her safety, yet the only violence she witnesses are two episodes of brutal government repression in Kenya. True, she is harassed by belligerent louts, jeering children, and uncooperative officials, yet such acts are overshadowed by many instances of friendliness and generosity, people who go out of the way to help her when she has a flat, gets lost, falls sick.

Kenya (2 chapters)

From Nairobi she heads west to the port of Kisumu on Lake Victoria, then continues on to Uganda. While in Kenya she observes that "a half-century of White settlement created a racial chasm," and mentions the legacy of paternalism exemplified in the writings of Karen Blixen and Elspeth Huxley.

Uganda (4 chapters)

She "salutes the Nile" at Jinja, visits friends in Entebbe, and tours the Sese Islands in Lake Victoria. She spends time in Kampala, then heads west to Fort Portal and skirts the Ruwenzoris.

Tanzania (2 chapters)

After a stop in Bukoba, she takes the ferry to Mwanza at the southern end of Lake Victoria. The road is so corrugated that she departs from it at Old Shinyanga and (in my favourite part of the book) heads overland to Dodoma -- on a footpath! She camps out four nights in succession after being reassured that leopards and hyenas are rare in the area. After this detour she returns to the road system and continues on to Iringa and Mbeya in the beautiful southern highlands.

She blames much of "Tanzania’s drab and uniform poverty" on Nyerere's disastrous ujamaa policy.

Malawi and Zambia (3 chapters)

Faced with visa limitations in Malawi during a time of upheaval, she departs from her planned route and takes a rough mountain road which turns out to be one of the highlights of the trip. She delights in Malawian charm, and in Zambia declares, "The good news, in Zambia, is the Zambians – warm-hearted, open-minded, high-spirited against all the odds."

After a stay in Lusaka, she crosses the Zambesi into Zimbabwe where she is immediately felled by malaria and the book ends in Karoi (where the family of Alexandra Fuller once farmed, as described in Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight). When she recovers she heads back to Nairobi by public transport, a journey that regrettably she does not describe, for part of it was on the Tanzam railway from Lusaka to Dar, which I very much would have enjoyed reading.

Dark Star Safari

Paul Theroux replicated part of this route about 10 years later, as recounted in Dark Star Safari. He was about the same age as Dervla at the time of her trip, and though he didn’t travel by bike he was as intrepid as her in his own way, and equally scathing about aid workers. Moreover, as a young man he lived and taught in Malawi and Uganda, and still retains a grasp of Swahili. It’s interesting to compare the two books.

Links

Dervla's Website
CBC "Writers & Co." interview (podcast)

The Drunkard's Walk

2011-04-14T10:43:00.004-04:00

How Randomness Rules Our Lives

Some of the concepts in this book have names so colourful they seem designed to counter the impression that statistics and probability are dull:

gambler’s fallacy
hot-hand fallacy
sharpshooter effect
Pascal's wager
drunkard’s walk

The latter, which supplies the book’s title, refers to random changes in direction. Randomness is difficult for us to grasp because of the way our minds work. We are constantly seeking to create order out of disorder, which makes us susceptible of drawing the wrong conclusions from randomly occurring patterns.

Why does this matter? Because "much of the order we perceive in nature belies an invisible underlying disorder and hence can be understood only through the rules of randomness."

Mlodinow’s explanation of these rules is so breezy and easy to follow that I was able understand most of it. He traces the development of probability through numerous key figures, and provides lots of examples from sports, gambling, wine tasting, the stock market, and the entertainment industry.

He also includes some rather alarming examples involving doctors and lawyers, exposing their lack of understanding of probabilistic arguments. DNA testing, for example, is not as statistically sound as prosecutors make it out to be, due to the inevitable effect of human error.

Quiz

1. You're flipping a coin, and against all odds each flip produces a head. Is there an increase in probability that the next flip will produce a tail?

2. Are there more six-letter words that (a) end in ing, or (b) have n as their 5th letter?

Answers

1. No. This is an example of the gambler's fallacy.

2. Most people make the incorrect choice of (a) because it is easier to conceptualize. In fact (a) is less inclusive, being a subset of (b). This is an example of availability bias.

Homework

Look up Benford's Law on the internet. It's a freaky example of how weird randomness can be.

The Big Short

2011-04-10T23:14:00.002-04:00

Inside the Doomsday Machine

Lewis’s books are either about sports or finance. An odd combination, yet his procedure is the same in either case. He focuses on people to such an extent that his books read almost like novels.

The Big Short then is not a dry financial text, but a fascinating look at a handful of characters who figured out what was wrong with subprime mortgages and were able to profit from it.

All were mavericks to some extent. One was an abrasive iconoclast who identified with Spiderman and enjoyed disrupting meetings. “He’s not tactically rude,” his wife says. “He’s sincerely rude.”

Another was a one-eyed doctor with Asperger’s Syndrome who refused to wear shoes with laces, and blogged about investing between 16-hours shifts at the hospital. These and other characters as well as Lewis himself deliver some withering criticism of Wall Street:

“However corrupt you think this industry is, it’s worse.”

"The fraud was so obvious that it seemed to us it had implications for democracy. We actually got scared.”

For more than twenty years, the bond market’s complexity had helped the Wall Street bond trader to deceive the Wall Street customer. It was now leading the bond trader to deceive himself.

Subprime

Lewis’s first book, Liar’s Poker, describes his job as a bond salesman at Salomon Brothers in the 1980s. He relates how the firm pioneered the pooling of home mortgages for resale as mortgage bonds, which made the firm immensely profitable. In The Big Short, he picks up the story 20 years later with the subprime loan fiasco.

Subprime loans were devised to make the purchase of homes available to people who couldn’t afford them, borrowers who “tended to be one broken refrigerator away from default.” They were enticed into the deal with a fixed-interest “teaser” rate that would remain in place for two years, after which the rate would float. The floating rates were inevitably more expensive, forcing people to refinance, which was not a problem as long as the value of their home had increased. The banks didn't care what happened, because either way they stood to gain -- by repossessing or refinancing.

The loans were risky, but a loophole in the bond rating system allowed investment banks to hide the fact. They did such a good job that virtually no one in the industry had a clear idea of exactly what the mortgage bonds contained. It was a financial shell game that in the end conned the banks themselves. By the time they got a whiff of financial rot, they were so exposed to risk that they tried to reduce their losses by making side bets (credit default swaps) against them. It was, as Lewis puts it, like taking out fire insurance when the house was already engulfed in flames.

A fascinating book.

Postcards from Mars

2011-03-21T18:25:00.006-04:00

The First Photographer on the Red Planet

This is as close to Mars as most of us will get, a coffee table book with photos taken by the two Mars Rovers that arrived there in January of 2004. You may remember the event, especially the landing procedure, which involved bouncing the airbag-encased landers across the Martian surface.

Jim Bell, the book's author, is the lead scientist for the Pancam colour imaging system on the Rovers. He gives an interesting behind-the-scenes account of the mission -- launch preparations, technical problems, communication challenges -- but book's main attraction is the 150 or so photos. Postcards he calls them, but not because of their size. You'll actually need a coffee table to spread out the double-page fold-outs. There are four of them, each almost four feet long.

The two rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, arrived on opposite sides of the planet, Gusev Crater and Meridiani Planum -- not the most exciting places visually or scientifically, but for landing purposes they were a necessary trade-off. Nearly half of spacecraft send to Mars in the last 40 years have failed.

Spirit

Gusev Crater was thought to have once have been a lake, but Spirit found no sedimentary rocks, only a rugged lava plain with "dry, primitive volcanic basalts." It therefore set out for the Columbia Hills, 3-4 km distant, where it discovered evidence of layering in outcrops.

Along the way it overcame a wonky wheel and power problems caused by dust on the solar panels. By utilizing slopes oriented toward the sun, and with the fortuitous intervention of the wind, NASA scientists were able to keep the rover alive.

The panoramas are mostly flat desert-like expanses littered with rocky rubble. The light is dim, and the sky is a paler shade of the rust-coloured terrain.

Opportunity

Meridiani turned out to be very different from Gusev -- darker soils, prominent sand dunes, and weathered outcrops that reminded me of the Canadian Shield. More importantly there were BB-sized hematite "blueberries," and a mineral called jarosite in layered sedimentary deposits -- "key evidence that there was once liquid water on Mars...either on the surface in a lake or shallow sea, or just below the surface in extensive underground aquifers or groundwater systems."

The presence of water, however, does not guarantee an environment hospitable to life. On Mars the abundance of sulfur might have resulted in water too acidic for organic molecules to form.

More Mars

A cool companion to this book is the documentary film, Roving Mars. It recreates the Rovers' journey with a combination of actual images and computer-animated graphics. A delightful bonus is the hour-long episode, "Mars and Beyond," that aired in 1957 on the TV program "Disneyland," and is introduced by Walt himself.

When the book and the film came out in 2006, the two rovers were still functioning, having far exceeded their expected travelling distance of 600 meters and life expectancy of 90 Martian days (aka "sols," 39 minutes longer than Earth days). In 2009 Spirit got mired in soft sand, but Opportunity is still carrying out its mission. Current info on the rovers, including updates from Opportunity, is available at the following sites:

Mars Exploration Rover Mission
NASA - Mars Exploration Rovers

Finally, more info about the book can be found on the author's website, including a few images from the book.

Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight

2011-03-18T17:43:00.017-04:00

An African Childhood

Much of this book is a child's-eye-view of Africa during the civil war in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). There's the constant threat of bloodshed plus the usual exotic risks -- snakes, scorpions, leopards, etc. The family drives a bomb-proofed Land Rover, and the children learn how to clean and load their father's assault rifle, their mother's Uzi. When the war ends they remain in Zimbabwe, though many other white settlers leave and their farm is sold out from under them. Eventually they relocate to Malawi and then to Zambia.

The author's portrayal of her family and herself is vivid, unflinching, and firmly cemented into place by the b&w photos that head each chapter. She writes:

I felt as if I needed to find a way to explain the racism I had grown up around, to justify the hard living of whites in Africa, to expunge my guilt over the injustice I had witnessed in my youth.

Not an easy task, delivering a sympathetic portrayal of her flawed but hard-working parents, along with her own dawning awareness of native Africans as fully rounded human beings, and tempered with a few glimpses of the excesses of post-Independence Africa.

Her descriptions of the sights, sounds and particularly the smells of Africa are rich and evocative.

When the ship veered into the Cape of Good Hope, Mum caught the spicy, woody scent of Africa on the changing wind. She smelled the people: raw onions and salt, the smell of people who are not afraid to eat meat, and who smoke fish over open fires on the beach and who pound maize into meal and who work out-of-doors. She held me up to face the earthy air, so that the fingers of warmth pushed back my black curls of hair, and her pale green eyes went clear-glassy.

"Smell that," she whispered. "That's home."

Many sad, humorous, poignant, tense and uncomfortable moments fill the book. Clueless missionaries and hitchhikers pop up, border officials are either welcoming, venal or dangerous. There is a pot-smoking cook and a man with an almost preternatural skill as a tracker. The mother -- beautiful, feisty, eccentric -- suffers a nervous breakdown after the loss of her third child (two of whom rest in unmarked graves).

I wonder what sort of book Jane Austen would have produced if she had grown up in Africa.

The Author

Though Alexandra Fuller attended university in Canada (Acadia here in Nova Scotia), and now lives in the US, she still thinks of herself as an African. Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight was a New York Times notable book, and finalist for the Guardian First Book Prize.

You can find out more about her at her website.

A Sound Like Water Dripping

2011-02-24T13:21:00.029-05:00

In Search of the Boreal Owl

Youthful idealism motivated the author to tackle the boreal owl as a research project while attending the University of Guelph. At the time little was known about the species, including whether or not it even nested in Ontario.

Undeterred, he set out for Kapuskasing in late winter equipped with camping gear, climbing irons, and a recording of a Tengmalm's owl (a European version of the boreal). Thanks to his determination and resourcefulness he not only confirmed that the owl was indeed nesting in the province, but also gathered much useful information about the species.

The following year he continued his research in northern Alberta, and travelled to Sweden in the book's final chapter to compare notes with a fellow biologist studying the Tengmalm's owl. A few of his experiences:

One moonless night while returning to camp he walked smack into a moose.

Boreal owls are quite small, and so unwary he was able to catch one with his bare hands.

He got a personal demonstration of an owl's striking power (their prey is usually killed outright) when an attack left him with a splitting headache and bloody talon marks across his face.

One of the best anecdotes in the book explains how a snake was cowed by its intended meal, a fearless white lab mouse.

While you'll learn a lot about owls and nature and wildlife biologists, what really makes this book so readable is its human side. You'll meet the guys at a logging camp, and a married couple running an owl rehabilitation centre, and a fellow student the author fell in love with. You'll admire his resourcefulness when he makes an owl-trap out of an aluminum lawn chair, and uses a mechanical clock to record the comings and goings at a nest, and fixes up an old cabin by installing windows, door, and a pole floor.

This is a quintessentially Canadian book, infused with honesty, enthusiasm, and a genuine love of nature. It contains 23 b&w photos and a beautiful line drawing by one of the author's friends (whom you'll also meet in the book). The title comes from the Montagnais name for the boreal owl: the water-dripping bird.

The Buzz about Bees

2011-02-18T15:02:00.013-05:00

Biology of a Superorganism

Of the 20,000 species of bees worldwide (most of them solitary), only nine are honeybees, the subject of this book. As the subtitle indicates, the focus is on biology rather than beekeeping. The book's priceyness is justified by the superb colour photos. There's one on nearly every page, and you can preview them in Google Books.

Honeybees live in colonies that biologists now refer to as a superorganism, that is, a group of individuals that acts as a single unit. Such a colony, the author says, is not only a "being," it is equivalent to a vertebrate animal.

There is no hierarchy of authority within a hive, even though its maintenance is a complex business composed of many tasks -- foraging, brood raising, wax making, honey ripening, and temperature control (to name just a few). Each bee simply takes on a task that needs doing.

This ability to self-organize is sometimes referred to as "swarm intelligence" and has interesting technological applications.

Fascinating Details

Each hive has a dance floor.

Honeybees have hairy eyeballs.

A queen lays her weight in eggs every day.

Drones are fatherless; they develop from unfertilized eggs.

The temperature at which bees are raised influences their lifespan.

Don't eat bananas around a beehive. The odour might cause bees to attack.

Honeybees have gravity receptor organs in their legs, and are somehow able to sense the earth's magnetic field.

A colony is potentially immortal.

The Story of an African Farm

2011-02-06T15:41:00.009-05:00

First published in 1883, this is the story of two orphan girls (Em and Lyndall) and a boy (Waldo) raised on an ostrich farm in South Africa. The farm is owned by Em's fat stepmother (Tant' Sannie), while Waldo is the son of the gentle German overseer (Otto).

A conniving Englishman wanders into their lives and sets out to woo Tant' Sannie. He takes advantage of Otto and treats Waldo cruelly, but is finally driven off when Tant' Sannie overhears him making advances to her niece, Trana.

Years later a second Englishman wanders into their lives. His name is Gregory and he declares his love first for Em, who has turned into a kinder version of Tant' Sannie, then for Lyndall, who has returned from school a disillusioned beauty. Astonishingly, Lyndall agrees to marry him, but with a proviso. She wants nothing from him but his name. Several surprising twists follow, one of which is that Gregory is a transvestite. Waldo meanwhile develops into a sort of South African Heathcliff.

The polemical chapter that opens Part 2, and several rather heavy-handed allegorical passages, weigh down the book but do not sink it. The Story of an African Farm is surprisingly modern, not only for its feminist and agnostic views, but also for its memorable characters and affecting scenes.

The final line has got to be one of the best ever: "But the chickens were wiser."

The 64-Square Looking Glass

2011-02-01T10:06:00.021-05:00

The Great Game of Chess in World Literature

Chess in fiction is most often employed as a superficial metaphor or shallow plot device. There are a number of reasons for this, which probably explains why chess stories are scarce and chess novels even scarcer.

Nevertheless I keep hoping to find a few fictional offerings that genuinely communicate the excitement and dazzle of the game, or at least offer a fresh take on it. Thus I was very pleased to come across this anthology, the most comprehensive I've found so far. It includes a wide selection of verse, non-fiction, short stories, and novel excerpts.

Non-Fiction - 7 selections

The two pieces I enjoyed most are:

"Playing Chess with Arthur Koestler" by Julian Barnes
"Chess Reclaims a Devotee" by Alfred Kreymborg

I've never read anything by Julian Barnes before, but this piece convinced me I must read more. The others are:

Vladimir Nabokov, from Speak, Memory
E.M. Forster, from "Our Diversions" in Abinger Harvest
Charles Krauthammer, "The Romance of Chess"
A.L. Taylor, from The White Knight: A Study of C. L. Dodgson
Andrew Waterman, from his introduction to The Poetry of Chess, an anthology of chess poetry

Verse - 6 selections

Jorge Luis Borges, "Chess"
Lord Dunsany, "The Sea and Chess"
Robert Lowell, "The Winner"
Ezra Pound, "The Game of Chess"
Lord Tennyson, excerpt from Beckett (a verse play)
Bulwer-Lytton, "The Chess-Board" (not that Bulwer-Lytton)

Short Stories - 13 selections

The two I enjoyed most are both humorous:

"Check!" by Slawomir Mrozek
"The Gossage-Varebedian Papers" by Woody Allen

The first (from The Ugupu Bird) is an amusing account of players in a living chess match taking matters into their own hands. The Woody Allen piece is about a postal match gone horribly wrong, and has been called the funniest story ever written about chess. I won't disagree. It can be found online in a number of places.

There is also an excerpt from the novella "The Royal Game" by Stefan Zweig, thought by some to be the best story ever written about chess.

Of the remainder, two are by famous authors -- "All the King's Men" by Kurt Vonnegut (from Welcome to the Monkey House), and "Pawn to King's Four" by Stephen Leacock (from Happy Stories Just to Laugh At).

Three are crime stories:
Harry Kemelman, "End Play"
Theodore Mathieson, "The Chess Partner"
Henry Slesar, "The Poisoned Pawn"

And the rest are:
Poul Anderson, "The Immortal Game"
Spencer Holst, "Chess" from The Language of Cats and Other Stories
Vasily Aksyonov, "The Victory -- A Story with Exaggerations"
Miguel de Unamuno, "The Novel of Dan Sandalio, Chessplayer" from Ficciones
Sholem Aleichem, "From Passover to Succos, or The Chess Player's Story" from Tevye's Daughters

Novel Excerpts - 17 selections

Several come from the hand of famous authors:
Martin Amis, Money
Samuel Beckett, Murphy
Anne Bronte, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass
Thomas Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes
Sinclair Lewis, Cass Timberlane
Vladimir Nabokov, The Defense

Four are from detective or espionage novels:
Ian Fleming, From Russia with Love
David Delman, The Last Gambit
John Griffiths, The Memory Man
Alan Sharp, Night Moves

The rest are:
Walter Tevis, The Queen's Gambit
Brad Leithauser, Hence
Claud Cockburn, Beat the Devil
Ilf and Petrov, The Twelve Chairs
Fernando Arrabal, The Tower Struck by Lighting
Elias Canetti, Auto-da-Fe (Canetti was the Nobel winner for literature in 1981)

The Magic Journey

2011-01-27T11:43:00.015-05:00

Second of a trilogy (the first being the wonderful Milagro Beanfield War), this book starts off with a bang -- the explosion of a busload of dynamite in Chamisaville, a town in the southwestern US. In the middle of the resulting crater stands a man wearing nothing but his boots.

It's a miracle!

The Holy Chapel of the Dynamite Virgin is quickly erected, followed by a Dynamite Shrine Motor Court and the sale of "sacred wooden dynamite fetishes." In the midst of this money-making grab is the owner of the bus, Rodey McQueen, a conman from Muleshoe, Texas. He has his eye on bigger things, possible only if the backward and impoverished community of Chicanos and Native Americans can be transformed into a cash-based economy.

One of the earliest signs of progress is the arrival of the first automobile owned by a local farmer. The vehicle is dubbed the Horse without Shit and its purchase destitutes the farmer.

Another early attraction is an embalmed whale, which results in the following incident:

A pale, taciturn youth named Ralphito Garcia walked eighteen miles into town one day, gingerly placed his palm against the whale, then left without a word, a beatific smile lighting up his bewitched features: he promptly hitchhiked to the West Coast and drowned himself in the Pacific Ocean.

This symbolic event is referenced again and again throughout the book, as a dripping Ralphito reappears numerous times with seaweed in his hair. He presages the outcome of the "Betterment of Chamisaville" scheme, which McQueen and his band of developers (the "Anglo Axis") are implementing by robbing people of their land.

Local opposition includes an exhausted lawyer, a hundred-year-old outlaw, and McQueen's own daughter, April Delaney. Vivacious and impossibly beautiful, her hunger for life leads her through many travels and numerous marriages, before she returns to Chamisaville to oppose her father's ruthless ambitions.

A Real Kitchen Sink

That's how the author describes the book in his Introduction, and he's right. It's a big rambling work, bursting with characters, full of humour and compassion and raunchy sex, but also simmering with rage, which does not become truly apparent until the gut-wrenching ending. The Magic Journey has some of the same range, expansiveness, and multitude of characters as Pynchon's V and Gravity's Rainbow, though I much preferred The Magic Journey to those.

In the Introduction the author also says that he was "politicized in the mid-1960s by feminism, the antiwar movement, environmental activism, the fight for civil rights." All of these elements are present in the book. He adds, "Call this a 'regional' novel and I'll kill you."

Here's a typical passage, McQueen reflecting on his early years:

[He was] a skinny hobo tacker wild as a corncrib rat riding boxcars, hunting cigarette butts in gutters, pitching hay on west Texas prairieland until his back was almost broken, curled up under tattered blankets in snow-sprinkled winter arroyos half starving to death, grappling big-breasted farm girls ugly as homemade soap in horse-shit-smelling three-room shotgun shacks, and getting drunk in disaster alleys with other tow-headed buck-toothed big-eared scrawny redneck good 'ol boys on Saturday nights in small cowboy towns with names like Lampasas, Tulip, Ropesville, Tokio, Turkey, Matador, Rankin, and Iraan.

McQueen had strung barbed wire, milked cows, played $6.98 Sears Roebuck guitars, shot horses for meat (and rustled them, too), hunted rattlesnakes in annual roundups, stolen cars, spent a year in jail and another six months in the workhouse and on a road gang, managed a travelling carnival, and ridden broncos and bulls bareback in a hundred rodeos. He had failed in a dozen occupations before arriving in Chamisaville: logger, cowboy, trainman, wetback runner and farm contractor, oil rigger, all-around conman, poacher, Bible salesman, semipro football player, whatever had come his way.

Murther & Walking Spirits

2011-01-07T15:18:00.025-05:00

Connor Gilmartin is killed by his wife's lover in the opening sentence, but it is not his own life that flashes before his eyes. Instead he sees the lives of his forebears -- the Welsh Gilmartins and the Vermeulen-Gages, Loyalists of Dutch stock who fled New York during the Revolution.

These two families experience lots of ups and downs, illustrating a saying in the book attributed to Heraclitus -- "anything, if pursued beyond a reasonable point, turns into its opposite." During the course of the story more than one rags-to-riches-to-rags story is told, in terms of wealth, religion, and love.

As usual, the prose of Davies is a pleasure to read, polished but not flashy, filled with great lines and imaginative diction, and managing somehow to be both earthy and erudite. A few favourite quotes:

a killing moustache

orray-eyed drunkards

the winey air of Canada

the gumbo of their emotions

the lion-like face of Gladstone

an ill-used toy of circumstances

she dashed off arpeggios like confetti

donkey liver fricassee, and orange Jell-O to top it off

the spirit of a very rich fruitcake, made habitable

clothes that looked as if they had been made not by tailors but by upholsterers who had heard tell of the human figure but had never seen one

What is a pistol to a bear?

The novel is populated by a huge cast of characters, many of them minor yet wonderfully named: Hugh McWearie, Tabitha Drinker, Liz Duckett, Elsie Hare, Guinevere Gwilt, Reverend Cattermole, Louida Beemer, Forty-Pie Doane, and Bug Devereux ("so called because, when he was seventeen, his face welled hugely and at last burst, and a great black bug crawled out of it, spread its wings, and flew away").

Yet despite the fine writing, the book doesn't quite reach the level set by the Cornish trilogy. It gets off to an excellent start, but begins to wallow a bit midway through. Part of the problem may be a lack of overall cohesiveness. The narrator, Connor Gilmartin, is present throughout but remains a minor character, his role mainly that of an observer. In the end he achieves self-knowledge, but it seems a rather thin discovery.

And while there are deft touches of humour throughout the book, there is no memorable comic scene or character. Of the latter, two of the most interesting are Thomas Gilmartin and William McOmish, but they occupy the stage for too short a time.

The Gilmartins

Thomas Gilmartin is a Welsh weaver-preacher who adopts a pot-boy named Gwylim Griffiths and renames him Wesley Gilmartin. Wesley has two sons, Samuel and Thomas.

Thomas finds work as a servant, while Samuel becomes a tailor and his children include Walter and Polly. Polly marries the untrustworthy John Jethro Jenkins, and they move to Canada.

Walter marries Jenkins's sister Janet, and they have several children, including Rhodri. Their family too relocates to Canada.

The Gages

After her husband is killed, Anna Vermeulen Gage and her children flee overland to Canada. Her daughter Elizabeth marries Justin Vanderlip. Cynthia and Virginia are their grandchildren. Cynthia is lame and mean-spirited; she marries Dan Boutell, who eventually skips out on her. The frigid Virginia marries a master builder named William McOmish, who goes broke building a church. Their children include Malvina and Minerva.

The Two Lines Merge

Rhodri Gilmartin marries Malvina, who in lying about her age causes a rift between them. She is firmly rooted in Canada, while his dreams lie in Wales, where he eventually buys and furnishes Belem Manor. Their son Brochwel (Brocky) Gilmartin is the father of the dead narrator, Connor Gilmartin.

Not a word is said about the narrator's mother, Nuala Connor. Her story is most likely taken up in the next book (The Cunning Man) of this unfinished trilogy.

Nicholas Nickleby

2010-12-17T13:13:00.044-05:00

What better time of year to read Dickens than Xmas, with his cosy celebrations of family, friends, food and drink, while Scroogelike villains pinch their pennies?

My choice for this season was Nicholas Nickleby, which Dickens produced next but one after my current favourite, Pickwick Papers. I was hoping for something simpler and more comic than the last three I read, Bleak House, Our Mutual Friend, and Little Dorrit -- and until midway through the book I was not disappointed.

The plot moves along in a straightforward and unencumbered fashion. Ralph Nickleby finds employment for his nephew Nicholas with a brutal one-eyed schoolmaster named Wackford Squeers. Nicholas thrashes Squeers and runs away with a simple-minded young man named Smike, an abandoned student kept on at Dotheboys Hall as a servant. Nicholas finds employment tutoring French for the Kenwigs family, then he and Smike end up with a theatrical company run by Vincent Crummles. They return abruptly to London on receiving an urgent message from Newman Noggs, Ralph’s clerk. It regards Nicholas’s sister, Kate.

Ralph is a familiar figure in the pantheon of Dickensian villains, an implacable “usurer” whose chief goal in life is the acquisition of money. After finding employment for Kate with a milliner named Madame Mantalini, he dangles her before two debauched noblemen, Sir Mulberry Hawk and Lord Verisopht, as an inducement to maintain their financial dependence on him. They pursue Kate when she takes up new employment as a lady's companion with Mrs. Wititterly.

By this time Nicholas is back in the city and happens to overhear Kate’s name being bandied about by Hawk and his confederates. He accosts Hawk, rescues Kate from the Wititterlys, and denounces Ralph.

This is a very condensed version of the novel's first half, which I enjoyed enormously. But then a change takes place as Dickens starts herding his characters toward a conclusion. Comedy gives way to cloying sentiment, unlikely coincidences, contrived backstory, ridiculous melodrama, and stuffy Victorian morals. All of these elements are present to some extent in any Dickens novel, but they overwhelm the last half of this one. The turning point comes with the introduction of the insufferable Cheeryble brothers, through whose charitable hands money pours "as freely as water" (chapter 35), and the astonishing change of Lord Verisopht from a weak-willed dupe to a defender of Nicholas and Kate (chapter 38).

Dickens is forced to introduce several shady new characters to service the plot - Bray, Brooker and Arthur Gride. Squeers is dragged back into the story more times than is necessary. There is a soppy death scene for Smike, and an outrageous passage where Frank Cheeryble and Newman Noggs sneak into a room and get close enough to Squeers to peer over his shoulder at an important document – a will, of course. The marriage of Madeleine Bray to a disgusting old miser (Gride) is prevented by the timely passing of her father, which not only contributes to Ralph’s ruin but also saves her for Nicholas (who loves her even though he has scarcely spoken to her).

The worst is saved for the end – the revelation that Smike is Ralph’s son (with an implausible explanation of how he ended up with Squeers), followed by a saccharine triple wedding. One illustration in particular (see below) sums up all the corny melodrama.

This is not to say the last half of the book is without merit. Chapter 50, for example, is a fine set piece, culminating in the duel between Hawk and Verisopht. Overall, though, the final half fails to live up to the superb promise of the first half.

Characters

For me the most memorable characters are Wackford Squeers and Mr. Mantalini. Is it not odd that two such scoundrels are also the most amusing? The combination of humour and villainy makes for doubly potent comedy, and is one aspect of Dickens’s genius that I greatly admire.

I also enjoyed seeing Nicholas portrayed as a headstrong and fiery young man. His physical courage in confronting Squeers, Hawk, the actor Mr. Lenville, and his uncle Ralph is refreshing; while Kate as a spirited young woman is more satisfying than the meek and long-suffering Madeleine Bray, who serves as a template for subsequent boring heroines like Esther Summerson.

One of the best scenes in the book occurs when Nicholas seeks employment with an MP named Gregsbury, at the same time that he is being confronted by dissatisfied constituents. The Crummles theatrical troupe also affords a number of excellent moments.

Of no interest whatsoever are the saintly Cheeryble twins, who are as credible as Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Also, the machinations of Ralph Nickleby are a little too convoluted to be completely believable, though a trace of remorse early in the novel for manipulating Kate is a nice touch, as is his rationalization for doing so.

Marriage

Marriage, family, and parental responsibility figure large in the work of Dickens, but here they are of central importance. Of the five weddings in the book, three of them take place at the very end -- Nicholas and Madeleine, Kate and Frank, Tim Linkinwater and Miss La Creevy. The other two occur earlier and offstage -- John and Tilda Browdie, and Mr. Lilyvick and Henrietta Petowker. The latter relationship ends when Henrietta runs off with a half-pay captain. A sixth wedding (Madeleine and Gride) is aborted at the last moment, and a wedding anniversary is celebrated by the Kenwigs.

In Chapter 4 we are introduced to Mr. Snawley, who, having just married, is sending his two stepsons off to Dotheboys Hall to prevent his new wife from squandering money on them. Dotheboys Hall, it turns out, is a dumping ground for unwanted children. Ironically Squeers is devoted to his wife and offspring. The Squeers and Mantalini families form a suitable contrast to the happy Kenwigs and Crummles (the latter containing the celebrated "Infant Phenomenon").

Family contrasts are also central to the Nickleby saga. The secretive marriage of Ralph ended badly, his wife running away with another man, his child (unbeknownst to him) ending up at Dotheboys Hall. Nicholas senior, on the other hand, married for love and headed up a happy family. Unfortunately, while Mrs. Nickleby's heart is in the right place, her brain isn't. She urged her husband to speculate, which led directly to his death and the family's financial ruin. She completely misjudges Hawk and Squeers, and in this respect resembles another incompetent parent, Madeleine's father. Apparently she is modelled on Dickens's own mother.

As important as love is, it takes second place to other things, and not just money. Nicholas and Kate are both ready to forgo it for the sake of appearances; they don't want the Cheerybles to think they are being taken advantage of. In a similar confusion of values, Madeleine Bray is willing to suffer a loveless marriage out of blind devotion to a worthless father.

Consider Her Ways

2010-12-03T14:16:00.023-05:00

"Go to the ant, thou sluggard, and consider her ways," says the Bible, and Frederick Philip Grove takes the advice to heart, travelling to Venezuela to study leaf-cutter ants and making telepathic contact with Wawa-quee, leader of a great journey of exploration undertaken at the behest of Queen Orrha-wee. The book is the record of that journey.

The expedition heads north, crossing the Panama canal and the Mississippi River before arriving in New York City. The journey takes years to complete, and enables the author to introduce a wide variety of ants and their amazing adaptations. In addition to the agricultural leaf-cutters, we meet army ants, honey-pot ants, harvester ants, slave-making ants, and ants that herd aphids.

The author's second purpose is Swiftian satire. He gives us an ant's-eye view of human affairs that is delightfully skewed, while at the same time poking fun at the ants themselves, who are as guilty of misplaced pride as the humans they look down upon. During the journey they meet a dentist, a farmer, and a myrmecologist, but the most amusing bits occur in New York City. There they take up residence in the Public Library, and one of them becomes addicted to crime fiction. Wawa-quee's confused observations about clothing are priceless.

Unfortunately, while ants are fascinating creatures, Grove fails to find a consistently entertaining way of melding fact with fiction. The subplot he comes up with (seditious egg-laying) is not very compelling, and in fact is just another way of including an interesting bit of ant lore. As a result the book is rather dry and tedious until the last of the five chapters, when the ants finally reach New York. For me, the book remains an interesting but flawed attempt (like Anthill by E.O. Wilson) to novelize the lives of ants.

Frederick Philip Grove

Grove was born in Europe, where he translated into German the work of many important writers (Swift, Dickens, Flaubert, Balzac, etc.). He was a friend of H.G. Wells, and led an adventurous and somewhat unsavory life, which included a stint in jail and a faked suicide, before he finally ended up in Canada. Grove is not the name he was born with, and he wrote under a number of pseudonyms.

In Canada he achieved a lasting respectability, publishing the following novels: Settlers of the Marsh (1925), Our Daily Bread (1928), The Yoke of Life (1930), Fruits of the Earth (1933), Two Generations (1939), Master of the Mill (1944), and Consider Her Ways (1947). He won the GG for non-fiction in 1946 for the autobiography In Search of Myself (parts of which are fictionalized). He died in 1948.

The Cave

2010-11-21T09:04:00.000-05:00

The Sentimentalists

2010-11-14T09:57:00.040-05:00

Being fortunate enough to live only minutes away from Gaspereau Press, I was able to stroll into a local independent bookstore and get my hands on the hottest book in the country, though it still bore a slightly out-of-date "Giller Finalist" sticker.

There was a whole box of them next to the counter and a steady stream of customers filing in and out. The lady at the counter paused regularly to answer the phone, saying, "Yes, we do. I'll put one aside for you."

Everyone in the store was talking about the book, the author, and Gaspereau's predicament.

"They can only produce 1000 copies a week."

"Andrew is on the radio right now, talking to Jian Ghomeshi."

"Gary's trying to get in touch with the author, she's in Turkey."

"No, no, I heard she's travelling on the Trans-Siberian Railway."

Getting Physical

The book itself is printed on rich creamy paper, and housed in a burly dust jacket that weighs twice as much as those from most other publishers. Anyone who's bought a book recently and been shocked by the crappy paper, which at times is scarcely better than newsprint, will appreciate Gaspereau's dedication to quality.

The typeface, in a nod to the author, is Joanna.

Getting Sentimental

The life of the narrator's father is a shambles. He walked out on his family years ago, the only clue to his problems being a stray comment by his wife about not blaming everything on the war. Years later, when the narrator has reconnected with him, she and her sister have also fled wrecked relationships.

The central metaphor of the book is a sunken town, flooded during the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway. The submerged part of the narrator's father's life is an incident that occurred in Viet Nam. He does not speak of it until very late in his life.

The Nam segment takes up the last half the novel. Up to this point the comma-studded prose has been dense and choppy. Now it becomes smoother, takes on more of a narrative quality. Paradoxically events become even murkier. There is little of the visceral quality that most Nam novels have. There are no jungles or rice paddies. Events are blurred by culture shock, befogged by war and pot. Everything feels like it is taking place underwater. (Is this the reason the author refers to C-rations as "sea rations" ???)

The ending is unconventional but feels right -- an epilogue that includes a transcript from a military inquiry, followed by the narrator's attempt to wring some sort of truth out of it, and "Remember Me," a striking poem by war poet Keith Douglas, which provides the inspiration for the novel's title.

For me, the most memorable scene in the book is a brief but indelible account of the narrator stumbling upon an act of infidelity. It sets up the following superb passage:

It happened simply. While standing at the intersection of Dominion and Queen, on my way to work one day. In that briefest moment of repose, when the lights, lingering momentarily between red and green, had paused traffic in four directions. So that, even when I could hear again the cars lurch from their standing positions forward, even when I could feel again the thrombotic pressure of their blinking lights, now stalled, now pulsing with longing, to turn left, to turn right, I myself stood still, caught at that particular intersection from which I could go no further. The birds on the top strand of the telephone wires whose notes, which had remained always, in previous days, a background melody that I had not heard, seemed suddenly to hit precisely the chords which resonated in my own stopped heart. And though a great pressure continued to propel the earth forward, tilting it along its axis in a precise and singular direction as it went, careening through space, in another, I myself remained static and unmoving.

I can't help thinking that the fuss over this book's availability will only make it more desirable -- notwithstanding some disingenuous bellowing by the media and big bookstore chains.

Jian Ghomeshi's conversation with Andrew Steeves

James Fitzjames

2010-11-06T11:01:00.065-04:00

The Mystery Man of the Franklin Expedition

The early naval record of James Fitzjames, third in command of the lost Franklin expedition, is confusing and incomplete. He gave conflicting accounts of his age and place of birth, and his baptismal certificate was fraudulent.

The story that author William Battersby has pieced together is this: Fitzjames was the illegitimate son of an important British diplomat serving in Brazil, while his mother was "almost certainly" Portuguese. In England, he was raised "from an early age" by a foster family, the Coninghams, and maintained a deep attachment to them for the rest of his life.

At the age of 12 he went to sea on a ship captained by a blood relative, and a few years later parlayed an ambiguously worded letter into a rating as midshipman.

After serving in the Mediterranean, he signed on with the Chesney expedition, which was endeavouring to set up a mail route to India via the Persian Gulf. As part of this expedition he undertook a 1000-mile overland journey from the Euphrates to Beirut.

He received advanced training in gunnery, which he put to use in China during the Opium Wars. His fighting there came to an end when he was struck by a musket ball that pierced his arm, entered his body via the armpit, and lodged next to his spine. It was successfully removed without the benenfit of anaesthesia.

A second unknown in Fitzjames's life is the act of assistance he rendered to Sir John Barrow's son, George, in Singapore. Whatever it was, it was enough to earn Sir John's lasting gratitude, and resulted in Fitzjames obtaining his first command, the HMS Clio, and later his place on the Franklin expedition.

The Franklin Expedition

Fitzjames harboured a secret ambition. Once the Northwest Passage was conquered, he wanted to deliver the news to England via an overland journey across Siberia. It was a characteristic attitude of the time that all one needed in a risky undertaking was sufficient pluck.

Ironically he thought Franklin reckless for piling on too much sail as they made for Greenland, and ordered the canvas reduced after Franklin had gone to bed. But he was not alone in this view, and Franklin after all had not commanded a ship in 10 years, and never in arctic waters.

Several of his crewmates were close friends or former shipmates, including LeVesconte, DesVoeux, Fairholme, and Couch.

Refutations

Battersby is at pains to correct the previous image of Fitzjames as "well-educated, aristocratic, wealthy, of good family, Church of England, fast rising in the service -- and thumpingly, lispingly, English to the core," which is Scott Cookman's description of him in Ice Blink, and one that has been generally accepted for over a century, and so entrenched that it has found its way into popular works of fiction (e.g. Clive Cussler's Arctic Drift and Dan Simmons's The Terror.)

Fitzjames, who was responsible for selecting most of the crew of the Erebus and Terror, has been criticized for choosing men without polar experience. Battersby refutes this charge, and here again Cookman is specifically mentioned.

Battersby also challenges the contention of Michael Smith (Captain Francis Crozier: Last Man Standing?) that Crozier's Irishness was prejudicial to his advancement within the Royal Navy.

Summation

This book contains an astonishing amount of original research, though some of the conclusions that Battersby reaches are speculative. He provides an interesting snapshot of what it was like to serve as an officer in the Royal Navy in the first half of the 19th century -- the hardship, danger, camaraderie, and travel to far-flung places.

Fitzjames, in the course of his career, visited Lisbon, Malta, Troy, Constantinople, Babylon, Damascus, Beirut, Baghdad, Bombay, Calcutta, Singapore, and Hong Kong -- to name some of the better-known spots. Two of his more colourful experiences: being mooned by a group of women while steaming up the Euphrates, and being clawed by a pet cheetah while aboard the Clio. (It used to climb up the rigging with the sailors.)

Fitzgerald himself was handsome, charismatic, and ambitious. He was fluent in Portuguese and French, with some knowledge of Spanish and Arabic. He was a competent artist (the book reproduces a few of his sketches) and the author of a 10,000-word naval poem. He was a lover of elaborate practical jokes, and almost recklessly brave.

In the end he left this life as mysteriously as he entered it.

Links

Updates and Corrections

Hidden Tracks (Battersby's blog)

Review by Russell Potter

Waterland

2010-10-26T15:30:00.029-04:00

History teacher Tom Crick approaches his subject in a novel way, mixing in intimate details of his own life with accounts of the Fenlands of East Anglia, the French Revolution, and the unfolding saga of his forbears, the Cricks and the Atkinsons.

Those personal details? Why, nothing less than sex, murder, suicide, incest, abortion, kidnapping, revenge, madness, and a legacy of hallucinogenic beer.

But it's not the lurid bits that make the book worth reading, it's the superb prose, fanciful tone, and fey observations about life and the nature of history.

The latter after all is just a yarn, circular and unreliable, full of "useless Ifs." Yet:

There are times...when good, dry, textbook history takes a plunge into the old swamps of myth and has to be retrieved with empirical fishing lines.

The story's various strands are chopped up and fed to the reader in a vaguely chronological order. The setting is a "fairy-tale place" of floods, locks, catchments, barge pools, lighter wharves, sluice-engines, drainage boards, silt, phlegm, and...

Eels. The book is full of them. People catch and eat them, there's one in the frontispiece, and another that gets thrust into a girl's knickers. They even turn up in shell holes during WWI. An entire chapter is devoted to their mysterious ways, and at the end of the book, when Cricky's half-brother, a potato-head named Dick (with an enormous dick), dives into the water, he is obeying perhaps "the call of the far Sargasso."

Waterland was published in 1983 and shortlisted for the Booker that year. (It lost out to Coetzee.) In 1996 its author, Graham Swift, won for Closing Time.

The Tiger

2010-10-18T19:03:00.014-04:00

A True Story of Vengeance and Survival

We tend to associate tigers with jungle settings, but the Siberian subspecies lives in the subarctic and has no difficulty surviving minus 40 degree temperatures. It's the largest big cat in the world, but unlike its Bengal cousin does not have a reputation as a man-eater. Yet in 1997 a male killed and devoured two men in Primorski Krai, a region in the Russian Far East.

John Vaillant's book recounts these events, and the subsequent tracking down and killing of the tiger. It's a sensational topic, but the author's handling of it is sensitive and wide-ranging. His portrait of life in Primorski Krai, and of the ghastly effects of perestroika, is empathetic without being sentimental.

Particularly moving is his sketch of the first man to be killed. He was poacher, yes, but he was also a person who had not been ground under by the harsh realities of life in post-Soviet Russia. Whether or not he was a victim of bad luck, or caused his own demise by interferring with the tiger in some way, perhaps by pilfering some of its kill, remains unknown.

What is astonishing is the vindictive manner in which the tiger acted, seeking out this man's cabin, vandalizing everything he had touched, and then waiting for his return. There can be no question that the tiger was targetting him.

Vaillant's approach to this extraordinary tale is similar to that of Sebastian Junger in The Perfect Storm. Indeed, Siberian tigers are so fierce and implacable they seem like a force of nature. Vaillant likens an attack to having a piano dropped on you from a two-storey window. The difference is that tigers act with intent. They are endowed with ferocious cunning, a hypnotic gaze, an earth-shaking roar, and an almost supernatural ability to move invisibly through the forest.

As of December 2009, only 400 remain in the Russian Far East. Some of the proceeds of this book go toward their protection.

Go HERE to watch the author speaking about The Tiger. He won a G-G for a previous book, The Golden Spruce.

Zero History

2010-10-15T14:23:00.044-04:00

More thriller than SF, Zero History is set mainly in London. It's not the latest Ono-Sendai cyberdeck that's being sought, but a particular kind of denim and a designer who markets her clothing in secret.

The narrative alternates between two characters last seen in Gibson's previous novel, Spook Country -- Milgrim, a recovering drug-addict, and Hollis Henry, formerly of the cult band The Curfew. They are now working for Hubertus Bigend and Blue Ant, two unifying threads in the trilogy.

Gibson's fine prose propels the story along magnificently until about two-thirds of the way through when Hollis's boyfriend, Garreth, rides in on his wheelchair. Although he likes jumping off very tall buildings, he is far less interesting than Hollis. His presence dilutes her role somewhat, and the ending he orchestrates is a little underwhelming.

Still, Gibson slides in a couple of pleasant surprises which nicely tie together the three books. These surprises are a reward, or Easter egg, for those who have read Pattern Recognition.

Best of all is the prose, a cutting-edge combo of clipped sentences and ornate descriptions, infused with with brand names and technological gadgetry. Even when Gibson writes about the present, it sounds like SF.

At just over 400 pages, this is his longest book yet, and good value for your money.

Misc. Observations

Gibson's always had strong female characters. Here, in addition to Hollis, there's a dispatch rider named Fiona, and Hollis's former bandmate and drummer, the foulmouthed Heidi Hyde, who likes nothing better than a good dust-up.

Gibson has a good ear for names. In this book: Oliver Sleight (Bigend's IT specialist), Michael Preston Gracie (rogue arms dealer), Winnie Tung Whitaker (DCIS special agent), Olduvai George (keyboardist), and Bobby Chombo (unpleasant Canadian hacker who appeared in Spook Country).

Some techy stuff: rattan bone, ekranoplan, darknets, RFIDs in US passports, using a Taser to disable a LAN.

And listen to this for Gibson's keen powers of observation:

Some very considerable part of the gestural language of public places, that had once belonged to cigarettes, now belonged to phones.

At the end Gibson not only thanks SF writers Jack Womack, Paul MacAuley, Cory Doctorow, and Bruce Sterling, but also fellow Vancouverite Douglas Coupland.

Bering

2010-10-02T13:49:00.031-04:00

The Russian Discovery of America

Vitus Bering was a Dane who served in the Russian navy from 1704 until his death in 1741. He is best known for leading the Second Kamchatka Expedition, which sailed from the Russian Far East to the Gulf of Alaska.

This book is primarily an account of that astonishing journey, which started out from St. Petersburg and took four years just to cross Siberia. On the east coast another four years passed before two ships, the St. Peter and the St. Paul, finally put out to sea in June of 1741. They made landfall on several islands in the Gulf of Alaska and brief contact with native Americans. In the latter case the two groups only succeeded in perplexing each other.

The St. Paul returned to Kamchatka in October, but Bering's ship, the St. Peter, was hampered by bad weather and bad decision-making, and in November was wrecked on an island (later named after Bering), which was mistaken for the mainland. Bering died the following month at the age of 60. The survivors built a smaller vessel out of wood scavenged from the St. Peter and sailed to Kamchatka the following summer.

Misc. Notes

The author incorporates two recent sources of information. One was the exhumation of Bering in 1991 by a joint Danish-Russian expedition. The other was the discovery in 1996 of a dozen letters that Bering and his wife had sent home from Kamchatka.

Bering (the author says) was virtually a hostage of his officers. In an eerie foreshadowing of socialism his orders were sometimes overturned by a sea council. The fatal decision to land on Bering Island rather than continue sailing west was not made by the captain.

Bering Island was thronged with "wicked" arctic foxes. They "dragged apart all the baggage, ate the leather sacks, scattered the provisions, stole and dragged from one man his boots, from another his socks and trousers, gloves, and coat.... They even dragged off iron and other implements that were of no use to them."

The men survived by killing manatees, also known as sea cows. One was 30 feet long and weighted nearly four tons. The men not only ate the meat and fat of these gentle creatures, but also drank their milk.

Bering's "discovery" of Alaska led to an influx of Russian fur traders, and the eventual formation of the Russian-American Company, which constructed settlements as far south as California. "Russian America" came to an end in 1867, the same year as Canadian Confederation, when the US purchased Alaska.

Stellar Steller

Bering for me remained a rather distant and shadowy individual. As the author explains, there are valid reasons for his aloofness and expensive tastes, but these are attributes that do not endear one to a modern sensibility.

Most readers, I think, will find Georg Stellar a more interesting and praiseworthy figure. A naturalist and physician, he was the butt of much unprofessional behaviour by the officers and Bering himself. Yet Steller's interest in nature remained unquenchable, and his humane behaviour when shipwrecked was exemplary. He used plants and fresh meat to cure scurvy in his crewmates, and provided the kind of leadership that helped carry them through the winter.

Steller survived the expedition, returned to Kamchatka, and died a few years later in Tyumen. Today his name graces a number of species, including Steller's Jay and Steller's Eider.

His Journal of a Voyage with Bering, 1741-1742 is available in a 1993 edition prepared by the author of Bering, Orcutt Frost.

Death with Interruptions

2010-09-22T15:42:00.020-04:00

A light-hearted tale set in a small European country where people stop dying on January 1st, with unwelcome consequences for hospitals, funeral homes, insurance companies, and religious institutions.

Worst off are those permanently stuck on the verge of death, neither recovering nor passing away. Soon family members find a very pragmatic solution. They cart their loved ones across the border, where death still has dominion, and bring them back for burial.

After seven months of these moral and economic difficulties, a letter arrives from death. People will resume dying after being notified one week in advance so they can put their affairs in order.

At this point we meet death herself, who is portrayed as a skeleton, and learn of a difficulty of her own. A letter she has sent out is inexplicably returned. It was intended for a cellist in a local orchestra, but somehow he remains alive.

Death clothes herself in flesh and pays him a visit.

Mortal Syntax

When death's initial letter is published in a newspaper, after its grammatical errors are cleaned up, including the "obsessive elimination of paragraphs" and "the intentional and almost diabolical abolition of the capital letter," death pens a heated response.

In fact, the same "syntactical blunders" in the letter are present throughout the entire novel.

What letter is that, Let's just say that I wrote it after attending the rehearsal for your concert, You were there, Yes, I was, But I didn't see you, Of course not, you couldn't, Anyway, it's not my concert, As modest as ever, And saying let's just say isn't the same as saying what actually happened, Sometimes it is, But not in this case, Congratu-lations, you're not only modest, your're very perceptive too, What letter do you mean, You'll find out in time, So why didn't you give it to me if you had the opportunity, Two opportunties, Exactly, so why didn't you give it to me, That's what I hope to find out...

Saramago won the Nobel in 1998. He died earlier this year.

Desolation Road

2010-09-15T22:28:00.168-04:00

I've been a fool for Mars ever since I read Robert Heinlein's juveniles as a kid. So I was immediately hooked when I saw Desolation Road's splendid cover by Stephan Martiniere. It captures perfectly the flavour of the book. (Click on the image for a closer look.)

Desolation Road is the story of a remote community on Mars that pops up unexpectedly in the middle of the Great Desert. Transportation is supplied by the Bethelem Ares Railroad, which exploits local resources as well as its own workers under the guise of "industrial feudalism."

What makes the book special is the author's fervid imagination, and his obvious relish in embroidering this world with extravagant detail. Various travelling side-shows visit the town, the Poor Children of the Immaculate Contraption erect a basilica, and the Truth Corps of the Whole Earth Army sets up a pirate radio station that broadcasts vampire music.

The large cast of characters includes:

Persis Tatterdemalion
Inspiration Cadillac
Johnny Stalin
Ruthie Blue Mountain
Our Lady of Tharsis
Heart of Lothian
a time-travelling greenperson
a fetus that gets exchanged for a mango
a man whose soul passes into a locomotive
an aging couple who turn into trees
the Greatest Snooker Player the Universe Has Ever Known
the legendary King of Swing, Glenn Miller, who arrived on Mars via a time warp

My only complaint is that the latter part of the book is dominated by a series of tedious battles. I got tired of the all the tachyon beams and casual bloodshed, and especially of the ultimate deus ex machina, a timestorm brought about by Dr. Alimantando's chrono-kinetic arts.

Once things quieted down the story rolled on to a shapely and satisfying conclusion. The book is a clever combination of fantasy and SF, and the writing (The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction calls it "rococo") is superb.

More Mars

Books:
Red Planet (Robert Heinlein 1949)
The Martian Chronicles (Ray Bradbury 1950)
The Sands of Mars (Arthur Clarke 1951)
Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars (Kim Robinson 1992, 1993, 1996)
Mars, Return to Mars, Mars Life (Ben Bova 1992, 1999, 2008)
Moving Mars (Greg Bear 1993)
Red Dust (Paul McAuley 1993)
The Martian Race (Greg Benford 1999)
How To Live on Mars (Robert Zubrin 2008)
Packing for Mars (Mary Roach 2010)
Postcards from Mars (Jim Bell 2010)

DVDs:
Total Recall (1990)
Mission to Mars (2000)
Red Planet (2000)
Stranded (2001)
Ghosts of Mars (2001)
Roving Mars (2006)

ERB's John Carter of Mars is in production and due for release in 2012.

Galore

2010-09-07T20:50:00.030-04:00

Galore reads like a chunk of the Old Testament set in a Newfoundland outport, where pagan and Christian beliefs exist side-by-side, and the characters are as odd a bunch as you'll find in fiction.

There's a witch, a ghost, a rogue priest, a man swallowed by a whale, a woman with webbed fingers, a mummer named Horse Chops, a horribly scalded boy, a nasty merchant who gets his ears sliced off, a 16-year-old girl who wants all her teeth pulled out, and identical triplets who impersonate each other so often they forget who they are.

When an American doctor named Newman shows up at the beginning of Part 2, his arrival signals the outport's gradual entry into the modern world. Some of the doctor's impressions:

They described the deathly ill as wonderful sick. Anything brittle or fragile or tender was nish, anything out of plumb or uneven was asquish. They called the Adam's apple a kinkorn, referred to the Devil as Horn Man.

They'd once shown the doctor a scarred vellum copy of the Bible that Jabez Trim had cut from a cod's stomach nearly a century past, a relic so singular and strange that Newman asked to see it whenever he visited, leafing through the pages with a kind of secular awe.

He felt at times he'd been transported to a medieval world that was still half fairy tale.

In managing such a large cast of characters, the author skims over them quickly, giving us just enough information to keep the story moving along. There is no linear plot as such, just the constant ebb and flow of life and death over several generations, and the slow movement away from a life of hardship and superstition, and the interactions of two warring families whose names, the Sellers and the Devines, provide a clue as to their roles.

The book is filled with wonderful dialogue, thronged with humour and character and incident, and topped off with a satisfying conclusion that gives the story a fine symmetry.

This is a rich novel that people will read more than once.

Jerome

Judah, the man swallowed by a whale, reminded me of Jerome, a man found legless on the Fundy shore in the 19th century. Who he was, where he came from, and how he got there were never discovered. He spent the rest of his life in Nova Scotia without uttering a word. Was he mute like Judah, or did he simply refuse to speak? How he lost his legs, and even his real name (like Judah's), remain a mystery to this day.

John Mutford's interview with Michael Crummey

Slow Man

2010-08-29T15:28:00.033-04:00

First Paul Rayment loses a leg in a cycling accident, then a meddlesome stranger barges into his life. She introduces herself as Elizabeth Costello and quotes the opening sentence of the book. She is an Australian novelist, protagonist of a previous book by Coetzee.

She installs herself in Rayment's flat and harangues him about his indecisiveness. "It doesn't have to be this way, Paul. I say it again: this is your story, not mine. The moment you decide to take charge, I will fade away."

Towards the end she chivvies him into a bold act, but the result is a debacle. "All that fury!" she observes disingenuously. "All that self-righteousness!"

The book concludes with an astonishing proposal. When Rayment turns it down, she says forlornly, "But what am I going to do without you?"

Elizabeth Costello

I didn't much care for her or the metafictional aspect of the book. At times Slow Man seems very self-indulgent, in part because I could not shake the impression that Rayment is modelled on Coetzee himself. It's a layered book -- serious, yet playful -- and sometimes hard to tell which is which.

"Losing a leg is not a tragedy," says Elizabeth at one point. "On the contrary, losing a leg is comic."

It's as though Coetzee is amusing himself with a highly polished piece of recursive fiction.

Two Bookers and a Nobel

Coetzee didn't win these awards for nothing. The best part of the book is the Jokic family, superbly drawn and full of surprising turns. The surname is suggestive -- a family of jokers. Like them, nothing in this book is what it seems.

The prose is precise as a scalpel.

Despite having no arms the Venus of Milo is held up as an ideal of feminine beauty. Once she had arms, the story goes, then her arms were broken off; their loss only makes her beauty more poignant. Yet if it were discovered tomorrow that the Venus was in fact modelled on an amputee, she would be removed at once to a basement store. Why?

This is my first Coetzee, and his first since winning the Nobel in 2003. Like all his work, it's inspired strong reactions. Here's one from (a distant relative?) Yvonne Zipp.

Orwell: The Transformation

2010-08-19T11:29:00.008-04:00

This book examines a brief period in Orwell's life, beginning with the publication of his first book (1933) and ending with his flight from Spain (1937). This period, the authors say, marks the transformation of Eric Blair to George Orwell.

It was a very productive time for him. He made ends meet by teaching, working in a bookstore, and bashing out three novels. He also got married, and experienced his first real success with The Road to Wigan Pier, a non-fiction expose of poverty in England.

More importantly the book sharpened his political sensibilities, and led directly to his joining the republican side in the Spanish Civil War. When he returned from Spain, he was a confirmed socialist, with his greatest books still ahead of him.

Glimpses of Orwell

"...a tall, painfully thin figure, shabbily dressed, wearing a jacket whose sleeves were much too short for him, with a ravaged face that looked...as though it belonged to an El Greco saint."

He had a poodle named Marx.

"...if ever a man was born not to be a disciple, it was Orwell..."

After getting married, he and his wife lived in a house that was 300 years old and eleven feet wide.

"...that curious voice of his...rather bored and slightly apologetic..."

He seemed to be defined less by his likes than his dislikes. A few of the latter: vegetarians, contraception, the Scottish.

"...his inveterate pessimism..."

His will requested that no biography of him be written.

Hemingway

The book mentions the stylistic resemblance of Orwell and Hemingway, and in particular the "similarities of rhythm and phrasing" in the opening sentences of To Have and Have Not and The Road to Wigan Pier.

The two met briefly in Spain (though it is not mentioned in this book), and I was keen to know what Orwell thought of For Whom the Bell Tolls, but alas could find no review of it in his collected journalism.

Complete Works Online

Adventures Among Ants

2010-08-10T16:54:00.016-04:00

A Global Sarafi with a Cast of Trillions

Mark Moffett studied under E.O. Wilson, who described ant societies as "civilizations in the dirt." This book, printed on coated stock and illustrated throughout with wonderful close-ups of ants, is a justification of that term.

The focus is on six different kinds of ants: marauder, weaver, leafcutter, Amazon, Argentine, and African army.

A few interesting details:

The global biomass of ants equals that of human beings.

Ants are self-organizing -- they have no leaders -- yet somehow accomplish feats rivalled only by humans.

Some build roadways. Others herd insects and create underground gardens.

Some are arboreal, constructing shelters in trees out of leaves.

Some raid the nests of other ant species and carry home the pupae, which become willing "slaves" of their kidnappers.

Some are a suicide bombers, blowing themselves up and spraying out a toxic glue that immobilizes foes.

Some can remain underwater for several hours, and others when dislodged from a tree can control the direction of their fall and glide back to the tree.

Argentine Ant

This is an introduced species that doesn't sting and is too small to bite humans. Yet somehow it has developed the ability to form "supercolonies," which consist of widely distributed nests.

One of them has taken over most of California. Thus an Argentine ant from LA can be dropped among other Argentine ants in San Francisco, and not be torn to pieces. It is accepted as a sister.

The largest such colony to date is one that stretches from Italy to Spain.

The only ant which so far has been able to resist the Argentine ant is the fire ant, which originates from the same area of Argentina.

Links

Adventures Among Ants website

Mark Moffett's website

Great ant photos by Alex Wild

The Kraken Wakes

2010-07-27T15:14:00.079-04:00

This classic SF novel was first published in 1953 and is still in print, a testimony to John Wyndham's ability to create pleasantly chilling scenarios. His calm, matter-of-fact tone is perfect for relating catastrophic events.

In this book, ETs have arrived on earth and taken up residence in the deepest parts of the ocean. Soon ships begin disappearing, then coastal raids take place. Finally the glaciers and ice-caps start melting. London floods and Parliament is forced to relocate.

Through it all a husband-and-wife team working for the English Broadcasting Company provide a sane and steady perspective, especially when society begins falling apart. Their breezy and intelligent conversation helps carry the book through the slow buildup to disaster.

Compounding the problem are inept governments, misguided newspapers, and befuddled scientists. An observation about rising sea levels sounds like it was written today:

...an assurance by that old fool Stackley, who is a geographer who knows damn-all about oceans, that the overall rise cannot be more than ten or twelve feet at the most. Heaven knows what he bases it on...

Wyndham's books are the equivalent of cosy English murder mysteries, perfect for summer reading.

1965 CBC radio adaptation (downloadable)

More Tales of a Ruined Earth

The Last Man by Mary Shelley 1826
The Purple Cloud by M.P. Shiel 1901
Earth Abides by George R. Stewart 1949
The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham 1951
Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank 1959
Davy by Edgar Pangborn 1964
The Stand by Stephen King 1978/1990
Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban 1980
The Postman by David Brin 1985
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood 2003
The Road by Cormac McCarthy 2006

A few that I've particularly enjoyed:

Daybreak - 2250 AD by Andre Norton 1952
On the Beach by Nevil Shute 1957
A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller Jr. 1960
The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard 1962
Ariel by Steven R. Boyett 1983
Fiskadoro by Denis Johnson 1985
Cloud Master by David Mitchell 2004

The City & the City

2010-07-23T15:19:00.013-04:00

A murder has been committed in Beszel, a city in Eastern Europe, and Inspector Tyador Borlu of the Extreme Crime Squad is assigned the case.

But far more mysterious than the crime is the setting. Somehow Beszel and a sister city, Ul Qomar, share the same location, even though the inhabitants speak different languages, have different customs, and are generally distrustful of each other.

Moreover, occupants of each city are forbidden to interact in any way. When they pass in the street they must "unsee" each other. There's only one official channel between the two, and that is (the brilliantly named) Copula Hall, which is a sort of customs and border post.

Should anyone violate the rules of non-interaction, they are said to have "breached" the invisible membrane separating the two cities, and are quickly apprehended by a shadowy but much-feared group known only as "Breach." Its powers take precedence over those of the local authorities.

It is uncertain whether Beszel and Ul Qomar were once a single city, or whether they were two cities that have somehow converged. Canadian archeologists have been working in Ul Qomar, and one of them has written a provocative book called Between the City and the City, which suggests a precursor civilization called Orciny.

Interpretations

At first the book reads like an urban fantasy, describing something that could never exist in the real world. Yet as the reader learns more and more about Beszel, Ul Qomar, and Breach, it becomes apparent that the situation is not beyond the realm of possibility. Surreal, yes, but not impossible.

Even if it were, it still contains uncomfortable echoes of the real world, where there are (or were) divided cities like Berlin and Jerusalem, and societies whose sense of reality has been distorted by secret police. And who among us has not walked past beggars or the homeless without seeing them?

Conclusion

Though the ending was not as satisfying as I wished for, The City & the City is built on a fascinating concept.

Mieville has also altered his style to one that is gritty and noirish, with lots of choppy dialogue and awkward sentences, to reflect the strange and ugly place he's describing. It's a risky but effective artistic choice.

I can't wait to get my hands on Mieville's latest, which came out just last month. There's no author better equipped to tackle a novel named Kraken.

Links

China Mieville talks about The City & the City

SF Reviews

Schuler Books

Moneyball

2010-07-20T11:21:00.039-04:00

The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

This book follows the fortunes of the Oakland A's around the turn of the century. Under the guidance of general manager Billy Beane, the team compiled some wonderful winning records despite having one of the smallest payrolls in major league baseball.

In an early chapter, "Field of Ignorance," we learn about sabermetrics, a word coined by baseball nut, Bill James, who came to notice in 1977 when he self-published a mimeographed annual Baseball Abstract. In it he described his thinking about the need for better baseball stats. He sold 75 copies.

Now, decades after that humble beginning, sabermetrics has become a mainstream concept. Some of the ideas mentioned in Moneyball:

clutch-hitting is a myth
bunting, base-stealing, and sac flies are counter-productive
on-base percentage is a more important stat than batting average or RBIs

Billy Beane's implementation of such radical new ideas makes for great reading, especially as he wheels and deals for players undervalued by traditional stats. People like submariner Chad Bradford, whose unnatural delivery kept scouts from seeing his true worth. His knuckles would actually scrape the ground when he threw.

And catcher Scott Hatteberg, whose damaged arm should have spelled the end of his career. He didn't have a flashy batting average, but he did have an uncanny ability to get on base, so the A's rehabilitated him as a first baseman. Says Lewis: "He waits for pitches like a man picking through an apple bin at a grocery store, looking for the ripest."

Hatteberg's patience at the plate, and his ability to foul off pitches he didn't like, furnishes a priceless anecdote. During a game a frustrated pitcher stepped off the mound and said to him, "Just tell me what you want. Tell me what you want and I'll throw it."

Billy Beane

Baseball is full of colourful characters, and Billy Beane is one of them. His own story is as fascinating as any in the book, first as a highly regarded prospect, then as a maverick GM.

It was hard to know which of Billy's qualities was most important to his team's success: his energy, his resourcefulness, his intelligence, or his ability to scare the living shit out of even very large professional baseball players.

J.P. Ricciardi, who was the A's director of player development, said that watching Billy do a deal was "like watching the Wolf talk to Little Red Riding Hood."

(Ricciardi took Billy Beane's approach with him when he was hired as the Blue Jay's GM. One of the first things he did was hire Bill James as a consultant.)

More Lewis

This book was so interesting, so entertaining, that I could not stop reading. I sped through it with increasing delight, and when I finished I immediately made plans to buy more books by Michael Lewis.

One of these has already been turned into a pretty good movie, The Blind Side. Moneyball is next, with Brad Pitt playing Billy Beane.

Anthill

2010-07-13T15:32:00.082-04:00

As fascinating as ant societies are, they seem to have limited narrative potential. Usually they're portrayed as menacing hordes or anthropomorphized creatures with little resemblance to the real thing.

Thus, when I heard that the great myrmecologist, E.O. Wilson, had brought forth a novel, I was keen to see how he approached this challenge.

The Ants

The heart of the book is a 70-page account of warring anthills in southern Alabama. A slight mutation has caused one of the anthills to become a supercolony with thousands of "queenlets." This allows it to outcompete all other colonies in the vicinity, to the point that its success becomes its downfall. It is out of balance with its surroundings, and on the verge of a Malthusian downfall, when humans intervene.

The name of this section is "The Anthill Chronicles." It is centrally positioned in the book and purports to be a laundered version of Raff Cody's honours thesis. The colonies inhabit a patch of old-growth forest with which he is intimately acquainted.

The People

Prior to "The Anthill Chronicles" we learn the story of Raff's upbringing, and are given a satisfying glimpse of life -- both animal and human -- in southern Alabama where Wilson himself grew up.

In the final portion of the book, after "The Anthill Chronicles," Raff heads off to Harvard to study law, the application of which he decides is the best way to save the old-growth forest. Wilson's acquaintance with academic life in "the great brainy anthill" of Harvard infuses this part of the story.

After graduating Raff returns to Alabama and, in a nice dove-tailing of events, gets caught up with the very people who intervened in the fate of the supercolony.

The Ending

The novel so far has been an enjoyable read. It educates, it entertains, it keeps us guessing. Now it suddenly shifts gears and becomes a plot-driven thriller with a conclusion that felt (to me) unsatisfying and out of character with the rest of the book.

The Lesson

In a short prologue Wilson says, "This is a story about three parallel worlds, which nevertheless exist in the same space and time." They are the world of ants, the world of humans, and the world in which both live, the biosphere.

The supercolony then is a symbol for humanity. It "mastered the environment, subdued its rivals and enemies, increased its space, drawn down new sources of energy..." We too are in danger of authoring our own demise by our very success. And just as humans played a godlike role in the supercolony's destiny, so too might the biosphere play a similar role in ours.

Links

Margaret Atwood's review ("Homer of the Ants")

Barbara Kingsolver's review ("Ear to the Ground")

Radio interview with Anna Maria Tremonti

Suggested Reading

"The Empire of the Ants" by H.G. Wells (1905) appeared in The Time Machine and Other Stories.

Consider Her Ways by Frederick Philip Grove (1947) is a Canadian SF classic, not to be confused with the John Wyndham novella of the same name.

The Ant Men by Eric North (1953) is pure pulp fiction, yet appeared first in hard cover before going through several softcover printings.

The Fungus Garden by Brian Brett (1988) takes the reader on a surreal journey underground into the world of termites.

Les Fourmis trilogy by Bernard Werber includes Les Fourmis (1991), which sold more than two million copies worldwide and has been translated into over 30 languages (Empire of the Ants in English), Le Jour des Fourmis (1992), and La Revolution des Fourmis (1996).

The Hacker and the Ants v. 2.0 by Rudy Rucker (2003) is a sci-fi tale involving software ants.

Journey to the Ants by Wilson and Holldobler (1994) is one of my favourite books, and likely more fascinating than any work of ant fiction can aspire to. Highly recommended.

Adventures among Ants by Mark Moffett (2010) is a work of popular myrmecology by a former student of E.O. Wilson. Fabulous photos.

Devotion

2010-07-09T16:46:00.019-04:00

Howard Norman's novels always begin with a startling announcement: a theft, a murder, a fatal accident.

This one opens with an altercation between two men -- newly married David Kozol and his father-in-law, William Field, who ends up with serious injuries. The story then proceeds to an estate near Parrsboro, Nova Scotia, where William works as caretaker.

Incredibly David is there too, not only caring for William but also taking over his duties, one of which is looking after a number of mute swans. These are birds that were injured in the past, and now remain in captivity with their wings clipped.

William, himself temporarily mute, hands David a note. "We've been thrown into a strange situation here, haven't we?" And another: "Not too long, I'll be able to knock your lights out. Looking forward to the day."

Both men are so likable that that I couldn't wait to find out more, but the explanation of the quarrel arrives slowly. First we must backtrack to learn how David and his wife, Maggie, fell in love. This is told in a beautifully restrained piece of writing that never becomes corny or saccharine. It's a perfect illustration of young couples "inventing happiness."

There are surprising turns, arresting images, and one amusing scene involving skywriting that made me laugh out loud. The spareness of the prose, the brevity of the tale (190 pages), and the subject matter (human frailty) makes this story read like a modern fable.

Howard Norman has become one of my favourite writers.

Battle Cry of Freedom

2010-07-08T11:07:00.034-04:00

The Civil War Era

This 900-page treatment of the Civil War was published in 1988. It won the Pulitzer Prize, and may be the finest one-volume history of the war.

It's not just an account of the terrible battles that took place. It also provides political, economic, and social commentary. The first shots are not fired until page 273.

Having read the book, it now seems to me impossible to understand the United States without having a sound knowledge of the Civil War. As the author points out, more books have been written about it than on any other topic of American history.

There are useful quotes from speeches, newspapers, diaries, and letters from soldiers. Scarcely a page escapes a footnote, yet the writing is clear and easy to follow.

There are two sections of black-and-white photos, and numerous battlefield maps.

Lincoln

The Civil War (1861-65) exactly defined Lincoln's presidency. His election in 1860 triggered the secession of seven Southern states before he even took office. The month after he was inaugurated in 1861, the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter, and four more states joined the Confederacy. Four years later, within days of Lee's surrender to Grant, he was assassinated by a Rebel sympathizer who took umbrage at a speech promoting black suffrage.

Lincoln was the first Republican president. The party had only been in existence for a few years. It opposed the pro-Southern Democrats, and one of its avowed goals was to prevent the sanctioning of slavery in newly formed states. Since it was composed completely of Northerners (making it the first "sectional" party in power), the South realized it had lost the ability to influence the federal government, and thus elected to secede.

Lincoln took an active role in the war -- haunting the telegraph office for reports from the battlefield, suggesting strategy to his generals and urging them to take the offensive, visiting fortifications when Rebels invaded the North (where he was told to keep his damn fool head down). When the Confederate capital of Richmond was captured, Lincoln was sitting in Jefferson Davis's study within 40 hours of the Confederate President's departure.

During the war Lincoln and the Republicans enjoyed public support as long as the war was going well. At other times there was widespread alarm, panic and even riots. Confederate forces at one point were five miles from the White House. Lincoln feared that he would not win re-election in 1864.

Generals

In combat, officers "led from the front, not the rear" and "generals suffered the highest combat casualties, their chances of being killed in battle were 50 percent greater than the privates'." In one battle, when Robert E. Lee tried to lead "a desperate counterattack," his troops pleaded with him to return to the rear.

Two of the Confederacy's most effective generals, Stonewall Jackson and James Longstreet, were mistakenly felled by Rebel fire. Jackson died, and Longstreet was out of combat for five months.

During the war several Union generals were removed from command for their timidity in engaging the enemy.

John C. Breckinridge, Vice President under James Buchanan (the President who preceded Lincoln), became a general in the Southern army.

After the war Union General Lew Wallace wrote Ben-Hur, the best-selling American novel of the 19th century.

Tactics

"The close-order formation was...necessary to concentrate the firepower of these inaccurate weapons [muzzle-loaders]" and "bayonet charges could succeed because double-timing infantry could cover the last eighty yards [the effective range of muzzle-loaders] during the twenty-five seconds it took defending infantry men to reload their muskets after firing a volley."

"The transition from smoothbore to rifle had two main effects: it multiplied casualties; and it strengthened the tactical defensive. Officers trained and experienced in the old tactics were slow to recognize these changes. Time and again generals on both sides ordered close-order assaults in the traditional formation. With an effective range of three or four hundred yards, defenders firing rifles decimated these attacks."

"The tactical predominance of the defense helps explain why the Civil War was so long and bloody. The rifle and trench ruled Civil War battlefields as thoroughly as the machine-gun and trench ruled those of World War I." Photos of battlefields in both wars are eerily similar.

"...the large caliber and low muzzle velocity of Civil War rifles caused horrible wounds with the bullet usually remaining in the body rather than going through it... Stomach wounds were generally fatal because there was no known prevention of peritonitis."

Miscellaneous

Over 600,000 soldiers died, more than the combined total of all other wars that America has fought in, before and since.

Both sides claimed to be fighting for freedom and liberty. The industrial North wanted to keep the Union intact and end slavery. The rural gentrified South fought for autonomy and against the "wage-slavery" of Northern workers. "We are either slaves in the Union or freemen out of it," declared a secessionist without irony.

The ironclad CSA Viriginia, aka Merrimack, sank two unarmored Northern warships in the space of a few hours, "a feat no other enemy would accomplish until 1941." The next day it met the Union ironclad, Monitor, and fought to a draw. The battle caused the London Times to declare that nearly all of the British fleet was now obsolete.

The James and Younger brothers began their careers as Southern guerillas in Missouri. Wild Bill Hickok was a scout for the Union army in Missouri. Another famous name on the Union side was George Armstrong Custer, who took part in the "bloodiest cavalry action of the war" north of Richmond.

During the war, the North enacted for the first time conscription on a national level. However, draftees still had the option of hiring substitutes to take their place, a practice "hallowed by tradition."

"Several hundred women...dressed as men and managed to enlist as soldiers...."

Lincoln and Jefferson Davis were both born in Kentucky.

Nova Scotia

My interest in the Civil War was triggered last month by a grave marker ceremony organized by the Maritime Civil War Living History Association. A re-enactment unit, the 20th Maine Volunteers, No. 1 Company (New Brunswick), paid tribute to three local veterans:

Ardent Tupper - served in the 20th Maine Infantry, present at Lee's surrender at Appomattox

William Kinsman - served in the 1st Massachusetts Light Artillery, took part in 17 battles

Ben Jackson - served in the Union navy, awarded the Civil War Campaign Medal

Damon Runyon

2010-06-24T17:19:00.066-04:00

Damon Runyon's life spanned the lawlessness of two eras - the Old West and Prohibition on the East Coast.

As a newspaperman he covered wars and sporting events. He loved to gamble and hang out in nightclubs with gangsters, sometimes even accompanying them on the way to a job.

According to Breslin, Runyon preferred the company of gangsters because they were much more colourful than politicians and bigshot businessmen, who were equally corrupt.

It was unfortunate that Charles Barney was not smart enough to stop stealing even when he had to take his clothes out of the closet to make room for his money, and he continued into some impossibly corrupt real estate businesses. One day he woke up and found the only way he could see his way out was to blow his brains out, which he did. This did not stop his heirs, who founded Smith Barny stockbrokers and used as their motto, "We make money the old-fashioned way. We earn it." They should have said, "We steal it," but that's all right. This is America.

Patrice

The book opens and closes with Patrice, Runyon's second wife. He met her in Juarez when he was covering Pancho Villa. She was a barefoot girl just past 12 who wanted to be a dancer. He promised to find her a job in New York if she learned to read and write, and paid for her education. Years later he made good on his promise when she showed up unexpectedly in the Big Apple. She became his mistress and later his wife. He was 51 and she 26 when they married. The bridesmaid was his own daughter. His first wife had just died.

Together they fabricated a tale that made her a Spanish countess who possessed one of the 10 largest diamonds in the world. The fabrication was similar to one of Runyon's short stories, and so complete that they came to believe it themselves.

Patrice however chafed at the difference in their ages, and soon began fooling around with the boxer, Primo Carnera. Runyon arranged for Carnera to fight Joe Louis, whose body "looked like the electric chair." He delivered a beating to Carnera.

When Runyon was dying of throat cancer, his doctor asked Patrice to write a supportive letter to Runyon. Instead she wrote that she was now in love with a younger man.

Breslin

There are no footnotes or bibliography. Breslin relies instead on newspaper files and his own memory of stories he's heard over the years. At times he slips into the present tense, and tells it like a Runyon short story. It's incredible stuff -- Al Capone conducting an orchestra, Bugsy Siegel doing a screen test, Jack Dempsey slipping lead pipes into his gloves, Bat Masterson and Benito Mussolini writing for NYC papers.

At one point Runyon was the highest paid newspaper writer in the county. Several of his stories were made into movies. His most famous title is Guys and Dolls. He shares with several other literary greats the distinction of having contributed an adjective to the English language: Orwellian, Dickensian, Runyonesque. He had a liver "weak as a glass chin."

There are no pictures in the book. Here's one I found on the Web:

Insect Dreams

2010-06-17T09:27:00.039-04:00

The Half Life of Gregor Samsa

It turns out the protagonist of Kafka's Metamorphosis didn't die after all. He joined a freak show in Vienna where, as "the human roach," he reads from Rilke and holds seminars on Spengler. Such is his notoriety that Wittgenstein and novelist Robert Musil pay him a visit, and in America he inspires a dance craze.

In New York he meets composer Charles Ives, and provides the inspiration for the "Insect Sonata," which is performed on the piano with the use of a brick and a couple of two-by-fours. Gregor goes to work at Ives's insurance firm, where he specializes in risk management and develops a formula to gauge the probability of a person being kidnapped. The formula incorporates an Index of Suffering -- "an original contribution of Gregor's, now in standard use among economists."

(unemployment rate in percent)(inflation in percent)
S = ----------------------------------------------------------------
1 - (probabability of situation continuing another month)

He moves to Washington DC and takes up residence in a White House broom closet, working for the Dept. of Agriculture as an expert on entomological matters. The US is mired in the Great Depression, and Gregor, while studying grasshopper behaviour, discovers "smelltrons" and invents the Elektroantennograph and the Heuschreckekitzelapparat.

When war breaks out he meets Einstein and delivers his famous letter to FDR, then is reassigned to Los Alamos as a risk management consultant. He pals around with Feynman and Oppenheimer, and suggests the principle for the device used to trigger the atomic bomb.

By then Gregor's despair has deepened to an intolerable level; there's the wound in his back, FDR's dithering over the war, and the decision to continue the Manhattan Project even after Germany had abandoned its own efforts at an atomic bomb.

The book's humour, erudition, historical characters, and WW2 setting reminded me very much of Cryptonomicon and Gravity's Rainbow, but at 464 pages it is much shorter and not as convoluted. Interestingly, all three novels end explosively.

Viva la cucaracha!

The Lost City of Z

2010-06-06T19:03:00.035-04:00

A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon

Percy Fawcett was an English explorer who became obsessed with finding El Dorado in the Amazon forest. He led several expeditions in search of it, each time emerging virtually unscathed while those around him sickened and died, their minds deranged, their bodies oozing pus and maggots. Piranhas, vampire bats, malaria, xenophobic tribes armed with 6-foot poisonous arrows -- these were just a few of the dangers involved.

Thanks to an iron constitution, ruthless determination, and suicidal bravery, Fawcett became one of the most famous explorers of the early 20th century. He seemed absolutely invincible -- until 1925 when he shocked the world by vanishing without a trace. Party after party set out in search of him, but many of them also disappeared, which only deepened the mystery. As time wore on, cults sprang up worshipping Fawcett.

More recently New Yorker author David Grann joined the ranks of the obsessed and set off to solve the mystery. The result is this compulsively readable book, which cleverly (and somewhat disingenuously) dovetails Grann's own journey with the final Fawcett expedition.

At the end he delivers a surprising conclusion. Fawcett wasn't so crazy after all. Recent findings by anthropologists such as Anna Roosevelt and Michael Hecklenberger seem to indicate that advanced civilizations did exist in the Amazon. One site has been dubbed the "Stonehenge of the Amazon."

Literary Echoes

The Lost World - Conan Doyle knew Fawcett and is believed to have used him as a model for one of the characters.

Indiana Jones and the Seven Veils - Who better to find Fawcett than Indy?

A Handful of Dust - Fawcett's fate likely inspired the ending of this Evelyn Waugh novel.

Gringos - An end-of-the-world cult called the Magical Nucleus reminded me of a similar cult in this Charles Portis novel set in the Yucatan.

The Lost City of Zzz...

Brad Pitt is starring in the upcoming movie.

What sounds better? The lost city of Zee (Grann), or the lost city of Zed (Fawcett)?

There are interesting similarities between the lost expeditions of Fawcett and Franklin.

David Grann's website
Simon & Schuster book trailer

The Last Shot

2010-06-02T15:53:00.038-04:00

A Novella and Eleven Stories

When I was younger, I only wanted the quick hit of the short story, I had no patience for the novel's long haul. Now I'm a little older, though not necessarily wiser, and my preferences have reversed themselves. Now I want the big picture, not the snapshot.

That's one reason my favourite piece in this collection is the 66-page novella, "Gator Wrestling." It has all the ingredients I like -- humour, touches of weirdness and magic, expertly wielded language, plus an expansiveness that shorter stories don't usually have.

This is not to say that I didn't care for the other selections. For example, the book gets off to a wonderful start with "How to Write a Successful Short Story," which is also the title of a book the protagonist is reading. He relates his progress as he works on his first ever story -- "Holy schmoly! Unbelievable. Already I am up to page 10."

He tosses in the comments of his girlfriend Sasa, and shares some of the advice that Fink, the book's author, provides. Here's a sample opening sentence, which illustrates how to start off your story with a bang:

"Don't spit in that spot, honey," the sallow-faced killer said smoothly to his former beloved, rich old Mrs. Phelps, "for that is where you die."

Deep South

Three of the pieces in this collection are set in the southern US, and populated by white trash characters. In two of them, a blind grandfather does his best to cope with two young children left in his care by a wayward daughter.

The third is "Gator Wrestling," a rambling portrait of a backward town inhabited by characters with names like Ratliff, Struthers, A.C. Ducey, and Ganger Lee Coombs. They're generally a lazy, corrupt, inbred bunch who speak in a syrupy drawl, but at times achieve a dim-witted nobility:

Yawl is leaving out--

Damn fire! Yes, I'se left out the little boy gitting off the phone. He's wrote everything said by the Missippi Corporal down in his schoolbook neat as biscuits on a plate.

Iffn I wrote something down you'd think yawl was looking at frog legs jumping in a fry pan.

Somehow Rooke manages to make the story touching, humorous, and rather horrible at the same time.

Magical Elements

"Gator Wrestling," like several other stories in this collection, has a touch of magical realism.

"J.D." -- Salinger is confronted by one of his own characters.

"Magi Dogs" -- a dog takes up residence in a freshly completed painting.

"Lamplighter Bridegroom 360" -- a little girl and her father pull off an implausible bank robbery.

"Legend of the Flaming Moths" -- an entire village and its inhabitants are completely denuded by moths.

Get Rooked

The author was born in North Carolina but is now a Canadian citizen. He is amazingly prolific, and has won the GG for his novel Shakespeare's Dog.

Leon Rooke's website
Canada Also Reads: Jacob McArthur Mooney's defense of The Last Shot

Salvage King, Ya!

2010-05-23T14:35:00.077-04:00

A Herky-Jerky Picaresque

The opening quote from "Heart of Darkness" tells you this is not going to be your ordinary hockey story.

The book's protagonist "desired to have Kings meet him...on his return from some ghastly Nowhere, where he intended to accomplish great things."

Here the "ghastly Nowhere" is the horrific world of pro hockey, and the word "Kings" refers to both the LA Kings and the name of the salvage yard operated by our hero. To cement the connection with "Heart of Darkness," his fiancée is known only as "the Intended."

The second quote, from Eliot's "The Dry Salvages," announces a water motif, which is reinforced by the hockey player's ironic name, Drinkwater. He prefers booze. Water is something people drown in, like his grandfather, and a dead California surfer, and the ships and planes that sink beneath the waves before his very eyes.

Blindness is another motif. Drinkwater has a bad eye. His uncle wears an eyepatch. A player loses an eye to one of Drinkwater's shots on goal. A dead horse flies past in a tornado, eyes open. A shark is shot in the eye. "Out vile jelly," thinks Drinkwater. He sees but cannot resist the violence, hypocrisy, and decadence of pro hockey. He's unruly on and off the ice. He snorts cocaine, takes Antabuse to control his drinking, shuttles back and forth between the three women in his life, his Intended, his ex-wife, and a waitress known only as X.

The GM has a huge face, part meat, part vegetable. Count your fingers after shaking hands with him. This man wouldn't give you the parsley off his plate, he wouldn't give a worm to a blind robin, he'd sell a blind man a rat's asshole for a wedding ring.

But it's not just pro hockey. The game's ills are society's ills, and violence is everywhere. An ETA bomb blows up Drinkwater's packsack. His dentist commits murder. A bullet hole in his car signals the death of a young boy in a Disneyland parking lot. A Coast Guard ship capsizes, planes keep crashing around him -- a jetliner at LAX, a floatplane cartwheeling across a California inlet, another slamming into the lake in front of his house. He grabs a body but loses his grip. He swims down among the dead.

Drug use is epidemic. Everyone is using or selling. Farmboys, jocks at the local gymn. Coke snorted out of the Stanley Cup, off a model's belly. One of Drinkwater's friends wants him to smuggle in a small boatload. Bodies of addicts turn up in the lake in front of his house. Alberta is a giant quivering nostril. The whole planet is freebasing.

A Hockey Everyman

Drinkwater's played for the Pats, Broncos, Mudcats, Screaming Eagles, and LA Kings. He's played for Billings, Billington, and the Birmingham Bulls, for Kansas City and Salt Lake City, for Adirondack in the AHL, Peoria and Flint in the IHL. He's played the hookworm league, and semi-pro in Seattle, and for $100 a game in Saskatchewan. He's won the K-Mart Player of the Game in Omaha.

His face has been carved up by Bobby Clarke and Billy Smith. He's driven around with Gretzky in a gold Italian sport car. He's played poker with Harold Snepsts, lent smokes to Eddie Mio, sat drinking in the same bar as Chelios and Ludwig, Chris Nilan and John Kordic. He's been coached by Bep Guidolin, defended by Don Cherry.

He wears a knee brace and is "held together with velcro and tape." He keeps breaking his fingers and nose. He's punched a fan and a ref. He's been concussed, knifed in the thigh, defrauded by his agent. He's played the game since before helmets were mandatory.

The forward with Phoenix, an Oiler draft pick, comes at me, using me for a screen, and powers a slapshot right past my midsection. His shot breaks our goalie's stick. I ice the puck up high, ring the glass to get a whistle, to let Dobozy the redhead goalie pick out a new stick.

"He broke my stick," Dobozy complains, sounding offended, "my good stick."

"There, there, don't cry." I'm just glad the Phoenix guy didn't maim me with his slapshot, a howitzer, a cannon blasting by my gonads. He rang one off our goalie's mask; out cold. 120 MPH. Now: imagine that it's another game in Podunk that means nothing and it's YOUR head, your face on the line. The pruneface scouts at the end of the arena jot down the following brainstorm: "LACKS DESIRE." Fuck them. As if they have the market on desire.

Structure

Jarman is primarily a short story writer, and this, his only novel, is packaged in non-linear chunks. There's no complete game, season or conventional plot. It's all in pieces, like Drinkwater himself. Everything is flattened out, past and present and future rolled into one.

Because of the structure, most readers would not notice if a few of the 58 chapters were sent to the penalty box. They have titles like Kingdom Fucking Come, Sexual Nebraska, Hoarse Latitudes, The Land of No Odometers. Excerpts have appeared in 28 journals and one anthology.

Jarman's latest collection, My White Planet, contains an account of playing hockey in New Brunswick. It's called "A Nation Plays Chopsticks." Any hockey anthology without it is incomplete.

Defining the World

2010-05-16T12:08:00.034-04:00

The Extraordinary Story of Dr Johnson's Dictionary

The making of a dictionary hardly seems a fascinating topic, yet reading this book made me wonder if it's possible to write a dull volume about Samuel Johnson.

Defining the World by Henry Hitchings describes the herculean feat of creating the first comprehensive English dictionary, a task which Johnson completed almost single-handedly in nine years. (Its French counterpart occupied 40 scholars for 40 years.) One of the reasons for the dictionary's success was its inclusion of quotations to illustrate usage.

Defining the World is organized chronologically, while chapter titles are presented in alphabetical order using words from the dictionary, beginning with "Adventurous" and ending with "Zootomy." Johnson's methodology and the dictionary's subsequent influence are given, along with details on Johnson's life in 18th century England.

While a monumental achievement, the dictionary wasn't perfect, and Hitchings doesn't shy away from its mistakes and shortcomings. He notes absent words, as well as words whose meanings have altered over the years, or which have become quaint or are no longer in use, like pissburnt, jolthead, smellfeast, bedswerver, and looby. Some definitions (like the oft-quoted one for oats) have a delightful quirkiness that reveal as much about Johnson as the word itself.

But as Hitchings notes, "Johnson's finest definitions remind us that he was a poet." The dictionary is a work of art, one that can be browsed through for pleasure, not only for the enjoyment of Johnson's prose but also for its snapshot of 18th-century life. As Hitchings says, "it abounds with stories, arcane information, home truths, snippets of trivia, and lost myths. It is, in short, a treasure house."

The dictionary is available as a pair of downloads (Volume 1 and Volume 2), but if you're not interested in perusing an electronic edition, Hitchings's book is the next best thing.

Boswell's Life of Johnson

The Chess Garden

2010-05-10T17:24:00.003-04:00

Or The Twilight Letters of Gustav Uyterhoeven

In 1900, 77-year-old Dr. Uyterhoeven arrives on a fantastic island in the southern hemisphere. Its inhabitants are game pieces -- dice, dominoes, checkers, marbles, backgammon counters, and chess pieces. A mysterious conflict is taking place on the island, and the doctor is soon drawn into it.

His adventures are related in a series of letters sent home to the his wife in Ohio. Because he is so well-liked, her reading of them is a public event which takes place in Uyterhoeven's "chess garden," where he once gave chess lessons.

After the first three letters, the narrative is interrupted to provide details about Uyterhoeven himself. He was born in the Netherlands and became one of Europe's greatest pathologists in the latter part of the 19th century. A tragic event in his life sent him to South Africa, where he fell dangerously ill. After he was cured, he became enamoured of the works of the 18th-century mystic Swedenborg. This was a pivotal moment in his life, after which he and his wife moved to America.

The believability of his own life story provides a nice counterbalance to the fantastic events in the letters, and the easy grace of the writing sweeps the reader along. Gradually more is revealed about the nature of the doctor's trip, which takes place at the same time as the Boer War. It doesn't take long to understand that the events on the island are allegorical.

Some places on the island: Ludo, Macaroni, Shatranj, Chaturanga, Gwyddbyl, Bumbershoot, Chimeroo, the Chasm of Pulverizing Dice.

The World Without Us

2010-05-06T13:19:00.015-04:00

The most obvious aspect of this book, and one that has delighted sci-fi writers for years, is what would happen to our cities should the human race be decimated.

Generally, the structures which would last the longest are either underground or made of stone. Khufu after all has diminished only 30 feet in 4500 years, and the astonishing subterranean cities in the Cappadocia region of Turkey have been around since the dawn of history.

The Chunnel and the Moscow subway system would have a a good chance of lengthy survival, though they will eventually be flooded. In the case of the NYC subway system, that will only take a matter of days.

Monuments such as Mount Rushmore, the Statue of Liberty, and Hagia Sofia will survive, as well as ceramic objects and pennies that contain substantial amounts of copper (unlike the current ones). Even paper will last a relatively long time if not exposed to air and water.

Poisonous Legacy

Of course, less palatable monuments will also survive. Take nuclear waste. Now there's something that's going to be around for a long long time. How can we warn future generations about the locations where we've stored it? What kind of sign would last for 10,000 years, and would people understand it? In 10,000 years languages will morph into unrecognizable forms.

Then there's plastic. Approximately one billion tons have been produced and all of it is still around. It doesn't biodegrade. It weathers to bits but that only means an increase in the number of creatures that can swallow it, often to their detriment. The oceans are filling up with it. The North Pacific Gyre is an expanse almost the size of Africa, covered with floating garbage, most of which is plastic.

Then there's genetically modified food, POPs and PCBs, and other unsavoury items. Humanity, we are told, has become a force of nature.

What About the Animals?

The author covers the origins of humans, and who might replace us if we disappeared. (The primate with the second largest brain, he suggests -- baboons.)

He visits the theory that megafauna such as mammoths and mastodons were extirpated by prehistoric hunters, and mentions a plan to return elephants to North America. He provides details on more recent extinctions (the dodo, the moa, the passenger pigeon), and discusses the vast numbers of birds killed each year by flying into glass windows or frying themselves on power lines. One authority says one billion necks are broken annually in the US alone. Birds will definitely do better without us.

As for our pets, cats will survive but dogs won't. Neither will cockroaches in unheated apartments, nor all those creatures that live in or on us, such as lice and numerous kinds of bacteria.

The End

The author concludes the book by mentioning the Voluntary Human Extinction Project, and the Transhumanist movement, which involves uploading our minds into machines.

Then he heads off into space, tracking the interstellar vehicles we have sent aloft -- the Pioneers and Voyagers -- which will exit the solar system and likely keep on travelling long after we are gone. So too will electromagnetic signals from Earth, including TV shows. I Love Lucy will play to the rest of the galaxy until the signal is lost in the background noise of the universe.

Physically, this well-written and wide-ranging book ends with a 30-page bibliography and a 16-page index. But it is the 14 pages of acknowledgements that gives a better idea of its scope. The author visited Chernobyl, the Korean DMZ, East Africa, a primeval Polish forest, an isolated coral reef in the Pacific, the abandoned resort of Varosha on Cyprus, the petrochemical complex stretching from Houston to Galveston, the Ekati diamond mine in the Canadian Arctic, and other places.

The Good Soldier

2010-05-02T19:12:00.012-04:00

A Tale of Passion

The Good Soldier is considered one of the finest novels of the 20th century, and its trademark opening line -- "This is the saddest story I have ever heard" -- is all the more wonderful because our narrator is the best kind there is -- an unreliable one.

At first he rambles and contradicts himself and heads off on tangents that seem meaningless. He gives us pieces of a story that don't quite fit together. But when he finally settles into his narrative, secret after secret is revealed. Death, hypocrisy, adultery, blackmail, madness, more death, all expertly teased out by Ford Madox Ford through his pathetic narrator.

The story takes place in Europe before WW1. Edward Ashburnam and his wife Leonora are dear friends of John and Florence Dowell. The former are British, the latter American. Both couples are wealthy, and they meet often at Bad Nauheim in Germany, where Edward and Florence "take the waters" for their heart conditions.

There are many ironies here, none of which I'll reveal, except to say that in the introductory essay, Mark Van Doren called the book a comedy. If so, it is the kind that causes readers to shake their heads in disbelief rather than break out into laughter.

Ford Madox Ford was an influential editor, founding The Transatlantic Review and publishing many of the greatest writers of the day. He served in WW1, was part of the "Lost Generation" in Paris, and originated the Page 99 test.

From page 99:

I never quite knew, either, how she and Edward got rid of Jimmy. I fancy that fat and disreputable raven must have had his six golden front teeth knocked down his throat by Edward one morning whilst I had gone out to buy some flowers in the Rue de la Paix, leaving Florence and the flat in charge of those two. And serve him very right, is all that I can say.

Your Inner Fish

2010-05-01T07:29:00.012-04:00

A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body

Paleontologist Neil Shubin begins with a brief account of his role in discovering an ancient creature intermediate between a fish and a land animal. Its fossils were found on Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic in 2004, and the creature was given the Inuit name Tiktaalik.

Later, Shubin pays another visit to Canada, this time the fossil beds near Parrsboro, Nova Scotia, on the Bay of Fundy. There they found rare fossils of the tritheledont, a reptile whose teeth showed mammalian characteristics.

Shubin uses these events to anchor a description of how our anatomy contains links to more primitive creatures. For example: "Tiktaalik has a shoulder, elbow, and wrist composed of the same bones as an upper arm, forearm, and wrist in a human."

Following are a number of observations that I found interesting.

Human Embryos

1. They have four gill arches, which ultimately develop into jaws, ears, larynx and throat.

2. They have a notochord, which breaks up and forms the disks that cushion our vertebrae.

3. At an early stage in their development, their elbows and knees face the same direction, as do fish and amphibians.

4. Gonads are initially located high up in the body, as in fish.

Evolution

1. Two factors may have been involved in the evolution of bodies: predation, and the rise in atmospheric oxygen.

2. "The origin of mammals involved not only new patterns of chewing...but new ways of hearing... Bones originally used by reptiles to chew evolved in mammals to assist in hearing."

Genetics

Shubin also describes some of the Dr. Moreau-like tinkering that scientists have done in order to understand how genes work. Some of the genes he mentions are Noggin, Pax 6, and Sonic hedgehog.

1. Genes from the embryo of one animal (e.g. a mouse), when grafted to the embryo of another (e.g. a shark), can perform the same function. This leads to a conclusion such as: "all appendages, whether they are fins or limbs, are built by similar kinds of genes."

2. "Inject extra amounts of frog Noggin into a frog egg, and the frog will grow extra back structures, sometimes even a second head."

3. Turning on an "eyeless" gene can result in creatures growing eyes virtually anywhere on the body. For example, "they could use the mouse gene to trigger the formation of an extra fly eye anywhere: on the back, on a wing, near the mouth."

Trivia

1. Fish have no necks.

2. Tooth replacement in reptiles continues throughout their entire lives.

3. Some creatures, like single-celled microbes, have no body at all.

4. Some creatures have no anus, they expel waste through their mouth e.g. jellyfish and corals.

Yellowknife Book Trailer

2010-04-25T18:18:00.012-04:00

The Bird Artist

2010-04-23T17:52:00.012-04:00

This strangely magical love story moves with the slow grace of a Greek tragedy, drawing people to their fate almost against their will.

Set in Witless Bay, Newfoundland, the book is populated with people who are quirky, plain-spoken, and likable. They form a rustic backdrop to a plot that involves murder, adultery, shipwreck, and a disastrous arranged marriage.

Another Shipping News? No. The language is spare and gives the story the feel of an extended folktale. Helen has seen mermaids and mermen. Enoch talks to his daugther in Morse code, and drives the mail boat singing Beothuk songs. The birds that Fabian draws lend a wild and beautiful presence to the book:

...the owl spread a clipped wing like a magician's cape over the mouse, revealed it, covered it again.

The author's delight in odd names adds another layer of otherness: Orkney and Alaric Vas, Botho August, Lambert Charibon, Boas LaCotte, Odeon Sloo, Mekeel Dollard, Mari-Lyma Fsjikskdjal, Laslow Sprunt, Ole Worm. These are not typical Newfoundland names.

Author Howard Norman is an American fascinated by Canada. Some of his other books include The Northern Lights, The Museum Guard, and My Famous Evening.

The Northern Lights

2010-04-13T08:36:00.016-04:00

This is the second novel by Howard Norman that I've read, the other being The Museum Guard. Characters in both books come from damaged families. They develop odd quirks and wander through life in a slightly dazed state. The tone however is gentle and wistful rather than tortured or depressing.

The first half of The Northern Lights takes place in northern Manitoba. Teen protagonist Noah Krainik has a father who is mostly absent. Noah himself is mostly absent too, spending a good part of each year in a nearby Cree community, while an orphaned cousin named Charlotte keeps his mother company. Noah's best friend, Pelly Bay, has been abandoned by his parents and takes up riding a unicycle. Cree phrases are srpinkled throughout this part of the story. The Cree themselves are friendly but enigmatic.

Noah's mother is fascinated by the Biblical ark, but when she actually sees one on a northern lake, she realizes it is time to head south. She and Charlotte move to Toronto and buy a movie theatre called the Northern Lights.

When Noah arrives, he takes on managerial duties and hires a Cree projectionist named Levon, who moves his family into the projection room. Each night Levon goes out to hunt and trap urban wildlife. He has a very pragmatic take on the ark -- knowing it was going to be a long journey, the Biblical Noah stocked it with lots of eatables.

When The Northern Lights was published in 1987, some very large names appeared on the dust jacket: Louise Erdrich, Ursula Le Guin, Barry Lopez, Peter Matthiessen.

The author himself, in an new introduction, remarks that the book is "tonally autobiographical."

The Birth House

2010-04-10T07:25:00.012-04:00

Dora Rare lives in the village of Scots Bay, Nova Scotia, early in the 20th century. It's an isolated spot, but not immune to the great events of the day -- WW1, the Halifax Explosion, the Spanish flu.

Dora has the dark hair and complexion of a Mi'kmaq ancestor, and is the only daughter in five generations. She learns midwifery and herbal remedies from an old woman with Acadian roots and a reputation for witchery.

This brings her into conflict with "modern" medicine, represented by a doctor who tries to entice the women of Scots Bay to his pricey clinic in Canning. According to him "morning sickness is neurotic in nature, the pregnant woman's way of gaining attention from a husband who is uncomfortable with his wife's condition."

However, some of the remedies that Dora uses sound equally batty. "Bury the afterbirth with a scallop shell. Gives a woman at least a year before she gets with child again." She dispenses moon elixir, skullcap tincture, beaver brew.

What is certain is that the book is a delightful blend of romance and history, an earthy and semi-magical world of darning eggs, moss babies, sex tips, Butterick patterns, Beaumont Hamel, the sinking of the Lusitania. It's a time when women had names like Precious, Patience, and Experience. And it contains one of the most memorable characters in Canadian fiction, Dora's tutor, Miss B.

My only complaint is the number of unpleasant men in the story. Dora's husband Archer Bigelow is a worthless lout with an appetite for rough sex, Brady Ketch is a drunken brute, Dr. Thomas tries to pin a trumped-up murder charge on Dora, and the hypocritical Reverend Covert Norton gets in some extra-curricular boinking in (where else?) the church. They're an unusually nasty bunch.

Scots Bay

Ami McKay is a transplanted American who lives in Scots Bay, in a house that provided the inspiration for the novel. This tiny community is only 15 minutes away from our own home, and occasionally we head over there to walk along the beach. We also attended a reading the author gave in nearby Canning.

Chapters has declared The Birth House as one of the best books of the decade. Ami McKay's next novel, The Virgin Cure, is coming out in the fall.

Author's website Birth House website

Memory Babe

2010-04-02T13:52:00.018-04:00

The Navy Times Book of Submarines

2010-03-20T13:22:00.020-04:00

The boyish title suggests a picture book for teenagers, but the subtitle provides the necessary trim: A Political, Social and Military History.

The early days are pure steampunk, the first undersea boats being built by carpenters, wagon-makers and other inventors armed with a combination of naivety and cleverness.

These boats were often swamped while still on the surface, or went into uncontrollable dives. Yet the idea of submersible ships refused to go away, even when employed to little effect in the American Civil War.

When WWI began, their capabilities were downplayed, in part because their use was widely believed to be immoral. Then in September 1914, one antiquated German submarine sank three British cruisers in the space of 90 minutes, killing more British sailors "than were lost by Lord Nelson in all his battles put together." It suddenly became clear that "the smallest cheapest warship could now take on the battleship, head to head, and win."

The Allies eventually found convoys to be proof against submarines, but it was a stratagem that became less effective in WWII because of advances in technology. Now German submarines formed "wolf-packs" and had easy pickings for a while. In hindsight, if Germany had launched unrestricted attacks against merchant shipping much earlier than they did, England might have been subdued before the US entered the war.

In the Pacific, the Japanese employed not only midget submarines, but also the underwater equivalent of a Kamikaze attack -- manned torpedoes whose pilots were "locked in for a one-way voyage which was destined to last no more than five hours, no matter what."

The book was published in 1997, a year after the US nuclear-powered sub Seawolf had conducted its first sea trials. At the time it was considered to be the most powerful warship in the world.

I couldn't put this book down. It's scary, fascinating reading.

David Bushnell's Turtle, 1775

The hand-cranked Confederate submarine Hunley, 1864.

Website

We Keep a Light

2010-03-12T10:42:00.002-05:00

In 1929 Evelyn Richardson and her husband Morrill purchased a small island off the southern tip of Nova Scotia, and took over the job of tending the lighthouse there.

This was during the Great Depression when pay was poor and life was hard. There was no power, no telephone, no radio communications. Morrill was constantly at work, not just tending the light, but doing all the other jobs necessary to keep body and soul together. Evelyn pitched in when she could spare a moment from her homemaking tasks, which included home-schooling their three young children. They gardened and raised livestock and harvested Irish moss. When the war came along, their workload only increased.

Despite the hardships they loved their life on the island, and Evelyn's memoir, which won the GG in 1945, is a moving, heartfelt, and beautifully written testimony to the closeness of their family, and the pride and joy they experienced in their isolated life of endless toil. It reads like an idyl.

This book is a Canadian classic.

Evelyn Richardson Memorial Literary Prize

Every year this award for non-fiction is presented by the Writers' Federation of Nova Scotia. It's part of the annual Atlantic Book Awards.

North of 60

2010-03-06T10:59:00.016-05:00

From a long list of 60, eight books were shortlisted for the inaugural 2010 Canada Also Reads literary competition. Now it's time to vote. The poll closes March 15 at 1pm EST. The winner will announced on The Afterword on Tuesday, March 16.

John Mutford's defence
Steve's writing tips
Books and panellists
Longlist

Never been to Yellowknife?

Here are some great photos I stumbled upon today, at Canadian Mosaic and SkyscraperCity. Please don't be too intimated by all the ice and snow. As Northerners like to say, winter is not the only season there. They also get a couple months of bad skidooing.

Read More Canada

Alternatives to Canada Reads have been popping up all over the place. In addition to Canada Also Reads, there are:

Canada Reads Independently:
Moody Food by Ray Robertson
How Happy To Be by Katrina Onstad
Wild Geese by Martha Ostenso
Hair Hat by Carrie Snyder
Century by Ray Smith

Civilians Read:
The same books as Canada Reads, but championed by ordinary folks. With video replays.

Endless Possibilities

Bloggers love challenges. How about:

Canada ReReads
Canada Reads SF
Canada Bleeds
Canada Shrieks

What fun!

John Mutford Defends Yellowknife

2010-03-01T16:36:00.006-05:00

Canada Also Reads kicked off today with John Mutford's able defence of Yellowknife.

By Thursday, panellists defending all eight books will have been heard from, and voting will begin the following day, on Friday, March 5. On Monday, March 8, there'll be an online panel discussion with the writers and panellists.

In John, I couldn't have asked for a better champion. He lives in Yellowknife and is proprietor of the Book Mine Set. For three years he's hosted the Canadian Book Challenge, which asks readers to chow down on 13 Canadian books over the course of a year. Enthusiastic readers from as far away as India have signed up. I'm a member too, and it's given my reading an interesting new focus.

But that's not all you'll find at the Book Mine Set. There's also Saturday Word Play, Short Story Mondays, and the Great Wednesday Compare, in which readers are asked to choose between two prominent writers. Last week it was Louisa May Alcott and Thomas Hardy.

Blogging about books is a lot of fun, and John has created a great community of readers who pool their comments and share their love of books.

Why not join the fun?

King John of Canada

2010-02-24T08:26:00.035-05:00

Canada becomes a monarchy in this assured, smoothly written political fairy tale. The story takes place in the near future and serves up a lot of innocuous chuckles.

The Maritimes finally get a CFL team (the Halifax Privateers), and Toronto, fed up at last with the abuse heaped on it by the rest of the country, declares its intention to separate.

The monarchy is a joke at first, but gradually the king takes charge and becomes hugely popular. He establishes a new Thanksgiving tradition by replacing turkey with Canada goose. He gives an inspirational pep talk to Team Canada when it is down 4-2 in a gold medal game in the Olympics. (John, we need you in Vancouver.)

The king not only solves a number of vexing political issues, and but also turns Canada into a dominant world power. The country sets up an alternative to the United Nations, invades the Sudan, and becomes a haven for American immigrants as the US begins to implode.

Misc Observations

Only Canadians will pick up on everything in this book.

At some point the reader will have to decide how much of King John is a modern Utopia, and how much "A Modest Proposal."

For me the book was most fun when it was least serious. When Canada started flexing its muscles internationally, the political fairy tale became more like a political wet dream. But maybe that's the point.

King John of Canada was shortlisted for the 2008 Leacock Award for Humour.

Scott Gardiner is a very accomplished writer.

Marsport

2010-02-21T13:09:00.006-05:00

And warlike! He had not realized how bellicose they were. Now, whenever he saw a column trudging along, he imagined them as tiny Greek soldiers, marching off to overthrow a neighbouring city-state. Their exoskeletons provided ready-made helmets and cuirasses. Their swords were mandibles and stings, their spears sprays of formic acid. They were brave, merciless, without fear. Every battle was a Thermopylae. Their legions were everywhere. Perhaps even in space, and not as a science experiment aboard the Space Shuttle, but as stowaways on Mir. He imagined ant scientists launching their own rockets and sending ant astronauts into space. They'd be wearing white spacesuits with transparent bubbles around their heads. They wouldn't have to worry about cosmic rays. When humans finally reached Mars, they'd find anthills there...

Little Dorrit

2010-02-16T11:38:00.047-05:00

Not as popular as Dickens' other novels due to an undeserved reputation for being sombre. Undeserved, I say, because the book overflows with typical Dickensian humour and exuberance, while the storyline is much easier to follow than that of the last two Dickens I read, Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend.

In Book I (“Poverty”), Mr. Dorrit is confined to Marshalsea, the same debtor's prison that Dickens' father had been incarcerated in. He and his daughter, Little Dorrit (born in prison), are visited by Arthur Clennam, whose generosity includes discreet financial assistance.

In Book II (“Wealth”) Mr. Dorrit enjoys unexpected riches, while other people are suddenly ruined, including Clennam, who ends up in Mr. Dorrit's former room in Marshalsea. Now it is Little Dorrit who comes visiting.

Theme

Little Dorrit is about imprisonment. The book opens in Marseilles -- first in a jail, then behind walls where some travellers have been quarantined. The story moves on to London – first to an decrepit house where Arthur's mother has been confined to a wheelchair for years, then to the Marshalsea prison.

These visible forms of imprisonment are matched by self-imposed barriers. When Mr. Dorrit is set free, he remains trapped by his own pride and vanity. Arthur Clennam has been a prisoner in the family business for 20 years. Miss Wade is a “self-tormentor,” caged by her own bitterness and resentment. The Circumlocution Office is a bureaucratic fortress with the power to enslave the unwary in its labyrinthine coils.

Marriage can be a prison too. Mrs. Clennam's sterile morality divides her from her husband and sends him into exile, while the Merdles and the Sparklers are bound together in arid unions based entirely on money and appearances. Mrs. Flintwinch is so bullied by her husband that her life becomes a nightmare. All are marriages of convenience.

Memorable Characters

Mostly they are villains. Chief among them is an arrogrant cartoon Frenchman named Blandois, who overflows with extravagant speech and gestures. He snaps his fingers at everyone and cries out “Holy blue!” at the drop of a hat. Somehow Dickens manages to make him sinister and comic at the same time.

Flintwinch is Mrs. Clennam's servant turned business partner. He has a wry neck and twisted body, and moves like a “screw-machine that fell short of its grip.” His poor wife Affery is so bullied by him that she's forever throwing her apron over her head in fright.

Gowan is a careless fellow who excels at nothing except his own self-interest. His nonchalant and patronizing comments are superb, especially when he cloaks his disparaging remarks in words of praise.

Mrs. General is the companion that Mr. Dorrit hires for his two daughters while they are touring Europe. Her idea of genteel breeding is never to show an interest in anything unpleasant. To be genteel is to have an impervious, highly polished surface, and Dickens has great fun when he refers to her efforts at “varnishing” the two young ladies.

My favourite character is the collection agent Mr. Pancks, who is compared to a steam-tug, constantly puffing and snorting and towing away other people:

Mr. Pancks, who was always in a hurry, and who referred to a little dirty notebook which he kept beside him (perhaps containing the names of the defaulters he meant to look up by way of dessert), took in his victuals as if he were coaling; with a good deal of noise, and a good deal of dropping about, and a puff and a snort occasionally, as if he were nearly ready to steam away.

Gripes

Little Dorrit and Arthur Clennam are the least interesting characters in the book. Little Dorrit is selfless to the point of sainthood, while the bland Clennam is more of a plot device than a character, linking up the Clennams, the Dorrits, the Meagles, and others. Though he spent 20 years in China, he shows no evidence of it, returning without souvenirs, anecdotes, or mannerisms.

Another problem is the age difference between hero and heroine. Little Dorrit is 22, yet petite enough to be mistaken for a child. Clennam, who is 40, frets about his age and often addresses her as "My dear child." Their first embrace is described as that of a father embracing a daughter. Since this is a prelude to a sexual relationship, the whole thing strikes me as rather creepy.

(There is an interesting sidelight to this in Dickens' own life. He met Ellen Ternan in 1857, the year he completed Little Dorrit. He was 45, she 18. Soon afterward, he left his wife and conducted a lengthy affair with Ternan. While he didn't meet her early enough for their relationship to influence the book, it's an odd coincidence, almost as though he were imagining, and perhaps justifying, a future involvement with a woman young enough to be his daughter.)

Then there are the usual things that modern readers tend to roll their eyes at -- an unexpected legacy, an overwrought death scene, a secret twin, and an improbably melodramatic event. The latter, which is intended to mirror the financial collapse brought about by Merdle's swindles, is the sudden disintegration of Mrs. Clennam's house. Dickens sets it up beforehand in various ways, but it's no more convincing than the spontaneous combustion of Krook in Bleak House

And wait a minute, how does the paralyzed Mrs. Clennam survive the collapse of her house? Well, just before the house falls apart she miraculously regains the use of her limbs, leaping to her feet and rushing out to Marshalsea prison. But seriously, having been wheelchair-bound for years, it's unlikely she would have made it to the door, let alone down the stairs.

Finally, I mentioned earlier that the narrative is easy to follow. That's true, except for the denouement, when Dickens launches into a lengthy explanation of the book's backstory. It's so convoluted that the Penguin edition I read includes a precis of it in the appendix.

Canadian Connection

For several years Dickens managed a house for "fallen" women called Urania Cottage. One of the young women was Rhena Pollard, a headstrong girl with dark hair and dark eyes. She seems to have been the model for Tattycoram (an orphan taken on as a maid by the Meagleses). Pollard eventually came to Canada, where she married and settled down to a respectable life in Ontario.

Tattycoram is also the subject of a novel of the same name by Canadian author Audrey Thomas. Thomas has been nominated twice for the GG.

Mrs. Merdle's son, Edmund Sparkler, was born in "St. John's, New Brunswick."

Links

After reading the book I watched the recent and most excellent BBC production of Little Dorrit. It was interesting to see how the book was shaped for the screen. I urge you to see it. You can find out more at the following sites:

BBC Jane Austen's World

Here's a review of Jenny Hartley's Charles Dickens and the House of Fallen Women. The book discusses the role of Dickens in running Urania Cottage.

I also discovered that there is a Dickens World in England. Wouldn't that be fun to visit!

Yellowknife Makes Shortlist

2010-02-11T12:31:00.009-05:00

Yellowknife has made the short list for the National Post's Canada Also Reads event.

Thanks to fellow bloggers who were kind enough to pester the Post with emails of support, and especially to panellist and superblogger John Mutford, without whom Yellowknife would never have made the cut.

John sports some impressive credentials. His Canadian Book Challenge is now into its third year, and last year alone participants read over 1000 Canadian books.

The competition officially begins on March 1, when brief arguments from each panellist will be posted at the rate of two a day. On March 8 there will be a live chat. The winner will be declared after a public poll.

Yellowknife is available from the publisher's website as a $20 trade paperback or a free download.

Canada Also Reads Longlist
Canada Also Reads Shortlist
John Mutford's blog
3rd Canadian Book Challenge
Res Telluris

Scatttered Thoughts

Until it's published, the worth of a book remains hidden. You think it's good. You hope it's good. But you never know for sure until it's actually out there. And even then...

For me, that period of hope and indecision lasted 10 years, the length of time it took to write the book. Making the shortlist means that those 10 years weren't entirely wasted.

Still, praise and criticism should be taken with an equal amount of salt. One shouldn't believe too much in either.

Then there's the personal element. All writing is autobiographical to some extent. It can't be avoided. Publishing is a form of streaking.

Dark Banquet

2010-02-04T08:21:00.005-05:00

Blood and the Curious Lives of Blood-Feeding Creatures

The book is divided into three sections. The first deals with vampire bats, of which there are three -- Desmodus, Diphylla, and Diaemus. The latter feeds on birds and in the case of domestic poultry has learned how to mimic chick behaviour. Chickens are observed allowing bats to sup on their brood patch.

The second section deals with leeches, and includes an interesting history of their medical use, past and present.

The final section (bedbugs, ticks, and mites) is probably the most unnerving because it hits closest to home. Bedbugs have been making a resurgence in recent years, while the enigmatic Lyme disease (spread by ticks) can be hard to diagnose and impossible to cure if not caught early.

As a bonus, the author mentions a blood-sucking Amazonian catfish called the candiru, which normally feeds on the gills of other fish, but occasionally latches onto humans in places you don't want to think about.

The book does not cover mosquitoes, as they are not obligate blood-feeders.

There are wonderful line drawings throughout by Patricia J. Wynne.

Website

Gringos

2010-02-01T14:05:00.004-05:00

Imagine Indiana Jones down on his luck, living in a hotel room in the Yucatan peninsula. No longer dealing in stolen Mayan artifacts, he's scratching out a living as a scavenger and bounty hunter.

That's Jimmy Burns, a generous easy-going guy with many eccentric and largely ungrateful friends.

There's Doc Landin, a maverick archeologist who wants to make one last trip into the jungle so he can be buried with an Olmec figurine in his mouth. There's Rudy Kurle, a follower of von Daniken, who believes that "space dwarfs" civilized the Mayans. There's Refugio Bautista Osorio, who runs a trading post and salvage yard, and counts "his wealth in fifty-five gallon drums."

Burns makes a delivery to a dysfunctional archeological dig, travels into the jungle when Rudy goes missing, and encounters a band of hippies who are awaiting the end of the world at the "Inaccessible City of Dawn."

The book is peppered throughout with archeological lore, Spanish words and phrases, and convincing details of life in Mexico. It has more of an edge than his other books, which makes a fine counterpoint to the wryly comic observations. There is one misstep, though, and that's in a sudden burst of violence near the end. It's totally unnecessary.

My only other complaint is that Gringos is Portis's fifth and last novel.

The others are Norwood, True Grit, Dog of the South, and Masters of Atlantis.

Unofficial Charles Portis Website
Charles Portis Appreciation Society

The Palm-Wine Drinkard

2010-01-26T09:05:00.034-05:00

The Palm-Wine Drinkard and His Dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Deads' Town

The subtitle provides an accurate glimpse into this strange book, which describes an epic quest with mythic elements drawn from Yoruba folk tales.

The hero's name is "Father of gods who could do anything in this world." One day he sets out "to find out whereabouts was my tapster who had died." Thus begins a surreal journey through an African underworld.

Some of his adventures:

He rescues a beautiful woman from a "complete gentleman" with rented body parts.

After he marries her, the woman gives birth to a fully grown child from her thumb.

He turns himself into a canoe, which his wife paddles across a river.

They sell their "death" and lend out their "fear."

They are captured by a giant who tosses them into a bag.

When they finally arrive at the Deads' Town, the tapster gives them a magical egg. They return to the land of the living when the hero changes himself into a pebble and throws himself across a river. At home they put an end to a famine.

The journey is so phantasmagoric that the imperfect English becomes a key element. If the language were brushed up, the book would not be the same. Here's a typical passage:

His fingernails were long to about two feet, his head was bigger than his body ten times. He had a large mouth which was full of long teeth, these teeth were about one foot long and as thick as a cow's horns, his body was almost covered with black long hair like a horse's tail hair. He was very dirty.

Critical Analysis

Margaret Laurence notes that the book "has been compared to Orpheus in the underworld, to Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, to Dante, to the journey of Odyseus."

Gerald Moore says that all of the author's "heroes or heroines follow out one variant or another of the cycle of the heroic monomyth, Departure -- Initiation -- Return."

Chinua Achebe (in the first Equiano Memorial Lecture) calls Tutuola "the most moralistic of all Nigerian writers." The Palm-Wine Drinkard describes the consequences of inverting work and play, and though the events are grotesque and surreal, there are always boundaries to a monster's power. Thus:

...anarchy is held at bay and a traveller who who perseveres can progress from one completed task to the domain of another and in the end achieve the creative, moral purpose in the extra-ordinary but by no means arbitrary universe of Tutuola's story.

References

Margaret Laurence, "A Twofold Forest," in Long Drums and Cannons.

Gerald Moore, "Amos Tutuola: A Modern Visionary," in Seven African Writers.

Chinua Achebe, "Work and Play in Tutola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard," in Okike: An African Journal of New Writing, No. 14.

The Lyre of Orpheus

2010-01-19T12:10:00.028-05:00

This is the concluding novel in the Cornish trilogy.

Leapfrogging the middle book are several characters from The Rebel Angels, the most important being Simon Darcourt, and Arthur and Maria Cornish. The latter bankroll an unfinished opera by E.T.A. Hoffmann -- Arthur of Britain, or the Magnimous Cuckold -- and soon find the Arthurian legend reflected in their own lives.

Darcourt is the narrative glue that unites two plot lines. He writes the opera's libretto, and solves certain mysteries surrounding Francis Cornish (Arthur's uncle and the central figure in the middle book, What's Bred in the Bone).

A pair of characters new to the trilogy are doctoral student Hulda Schnakenburg, who is completing the music, and the composer-in-residence, Gunilla Dahl-Soot. Once their work is done and Darcourt's libretto completed, the opera company is assembled and preparations made for opening night.

Throughout it all Davies' comic touch is as sure as ever, especially in portraying the foibles and peccadilloes of actors, students, and professors. However, the portrayal of Arthurian archetypes is not entirely convincing, and the book gets a bit windy in spots, though Davies' prose is never less than urbane, his erudition never forced or heavy-handed.

With no engaging villain (as with Parlabane in Angels), Dahl-Soot is a welcome eccentric, as are Maria's mother (she gives another Tarot reading) and uncle Yerko (he puts together a claque for opening night). There is an especially fine scene involving drunken academics, but the real treat of the novel is the exhilarating account of opening night.

Names

One of the things I admire about Davies is his wonderful use of names. In Lyre he has to populate an entire opera company, a formidable task in itself. Some favourites:

Ogden Whistlecraft - poet
Mervyn Gwilt - lawyer
Dulcy Ringgold - costume designer
Gwen Larking - stage manager
Nutcombe Puckler - "Sir Dagonet"
Clara Intrepidi - "Morgan Le Fay"
Oliver Twentyman - "Merlin"
Ulick Carman - herald
Eden Wigglesworth - attendant
Dicky Plaunt - head carpenter
Otto Klafsky - concert-master
Claude Applegarth - New York critic

A minor character named Wally Crottel makes a brief appearance. His name harkens back to a monologue on excrement in Angels -- "the crotels of a hare." As the name suggests, he's a bit of a shit.

Quotes

"Lies keep the teeth white."

"You don't smell bad, for a man."

"A horse is always a sure card in an opera."

"...we shall add a little salt to the dreary porridge of our lives."

"That's what I like about you Canadians," said the doctor; "you are so ready to admit fault."

"Is there something ambiguous about Knockers?" said Hollier. "I'm sorry. I'm not very well up on the latest indecencies."

NY Times review

Canada Also Reads

2010-01-02T16:11:00.036-05:00

The good old Post is celebrating "unknown and under-appreciated books" by shadowing CBC's annual Canada Reads event.

They're calling it Canada Also Reads, and Yellowknife is on the long list. Pretty cool for a book from such a tiny publisher.

If you've read my book and liked it (and I know a few of you have), you could email a note of glowing (or even mild) praise to the Post, and suggest that it would be a shocking miscarriage of taste not to have Yellowknife on the short list.

The email addy is theafterword@nationalpost.com and the longlist is here.

If you haven't read the book, you can take a squint at the first chapter, or download the whole thing for free, at the publisher's website. (Shucks, you can even buy it there.)

Here's what a few reviewers have said about the book.

I was hooked...
Amy Reiswig, Danforth Review

...funny, energetic, eccentric...
John Mutford, Northern News Services

...a witty and, at times, absurd satire on Yellowknife and the north...
Jonquil Covello, Canadian Literature

...a clever, distinctly postmodern novel that pelts along at quite a pace.
Gillian Harding-Russell, Prairie Fire

When Zipp allows the unusual features of this region to unfold their own story, the novel is fascinating.
Aritha van Herk, Books in Canada

Consider me gobsmacked. What a terrific novel.
Corey Redekop, award-winning author of Shelf Monkey

The Ghost Map

2009-12-28T08:10:00.016-05:00

The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic -- And How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World

Most of this book is a medical thriller that explains how a physician named John Snow became convinced that cholera was spread by contaminated water. He was instrumental in containing the 1854 outbreak in London by demonstrating a correlation between the number of deaths and one particular water pump. The "ghost map" of the book's title refers to a map prepared by Snow to support his thesis.

At the time Snow's views were ridiculed in The Lancet because they did not agree with the prevailing theory, which was that disease was spread by "miasma," or foul smells. Today he is considered one of the fathers of epidemiology.

This part of the book is a swift and fascinating read.

City Planet

The author goes on to make a number of provocative observations about the world today. In the middle of the 19th century, rural populations outnumbered urban ones, and life was safer in the country than in the city. Today, those two trends have been reversed, and humans have become a predominantly urban species. Surprisingly, urban life is more environmentally friendly than rural life.

Our evolution into a planet of cities could be derailed by a number of threats, but chief among them is the chilling prospect of asymmetric warfare.

Sods, Soil, and Spades

2009-12-17T07:05:00.018-05:00

The Acadians at Grand Pre and Their Dykeland Legacy

Dykes in the Annapolis Valley hold back the world's highest tides, and were first built by the Acadians around 250 years ago, using only hands tools and oxen. After the Acadians were expelled in 1755, their places were taken by New England Planters, who maintained the dykes and built new ones. It wasn't until the middle of the 20th century that government finally assumed responsibility for the dykes.

They're fascinating structures, a sort of land art with cultural and historical significance. I spent some time this summer mapping, exploring and photographing them. Then, just last month, I was lucky enough to attend a talk given by the author, Sherman Bleakney, at a meeting of the Wolfville Historical Society. He's a trim white-haired gentleman who has been interested in dykes for decades, and brings to bear on the subject an orderly and penetrating enthusiasm. I made a point of speaking to him afterwards.

His book focuses on dykes in the Wolfville and Grand Pre area, but the information is relevant to dykes elsewhere in the Valley. It's packed with interesting details, and has given me a much better understanding of how they were built and maintained. Of the 88 illustrations, 17 are in colour.

Bleakney is a retired professor of biology at Acadia University, and a former curator of amphibians, reptiles and fish at the National Museum of Canada in Ottawa.

Of Mice and Men

2009-12-03T12:11:00.024-05:00

The Rebel Angels

2009-12-02T19:19:00.059-05:00

What a shitty book!

Professor Ozias Froats examines human excrement by the bucketful.

Clement Hollier is interested in Medieval Filth Therapy.

Maria Theotoky's mother uses horse dung to refurbish old violins.

John Parlabane bequeaths his arsehole to the university.

Urquhart MacVarish likes having ribbon shoved up his bum.

And here are a few pungent thoughts from the Reverend Simon Darcourt,
after visiting Ozy's lab:

I walked on toward Ploughwright, thinking about faeces. What a lot we had found out about the prehistoric past from the study of fossilized dung of long-vanished animals. A miraculous thing, really; a recovery of the past from what was carelessly rejected.

And in the Middle Ages, how concerned people who lived close to the world of nature were with faeces of animals. And what a variety of names they had for them: the Crotels of a Hare, the Friants of a Boar, the Spraints of an Otter, the Werderobe of a Badger, the Waggying of a Fox, the Fumets of a Deer.

Surely there might be some words for the material so near to the heart of Ozy Froats better than shit? What about the Problems of a President, the Backward Passes of a Footballer, the Deferrals of a Dean, the Odd Volumes of a Librarian, the Footnotes of a Ph.D., the Low Grades of a Freshman, the Anxieties of an Untenured Professer?

But The Rebel Angels is not just a satire of university life, it is also a morality play. The title refers to angels tossed out of heaven, not all of them "sore-headed egotists like Lucifer. Instead they gave mankind another push up the ladder, they came to earth and taught tongues, and healing and laws and hygiene..."

The profs at the College of St. John and the Holy Ghost are rebel angels, flawed but well-intentioned. They are also medievalists, either by training (Hollier, Darcourt, McVarish, Parlabane and Maria) or in spirit (Froats). Maria's mother is a gypsy who's practically living in the Middle Ages; she gives tarot readings and knows how to cast a curse and prepare a love philtre.

Parlabane is the villain of the piece, "as slippery-tongued, as entertaining, and sometimes as frightening as the Devil himself." He is also one of Davies's most engaging creations.

The urbane prose is a pleasure to read, and the humour has a superb Rabelaisian flavour.

"Roberta, have I ever shown you my penis-bone?"

Professor Burns, a zoologist, did not turn a hair. "Have you truly got one? I know they used to be common, but it's ages since I saw one."

Urky detached an object with a gold handle from his watch-chain and handed it to her. "Eighteenth century; very fine."

"Oh, what a beauty. Look, Professor Lamotte, it's the penis-bone of a raccoon; very popular as toothpicks in an earlier day. And tailors used them for ripping out basting. Very nice, Urky. But I'll bet you haven't got a kangaroo-scrotum tobacco pouch; my brother sent me one from Australia."

Professor Lamotte regarded the penis-bone with distaste. "Don't you find it disagreeable?" he said.

"I don't pick my teeth with it," said Urky, "I just show it to ladies on social occasions."

"You astonish me," said Lamotte.

The Rebel Angels is the first book in the Cornish Trilogy. The second is What's Bred in the Bone, the third The Lyre of Oprheus.

Theroux Interviewed

2009-11-30T19:04:00.015-05:00

On October 25th, Eleanor Wachtel interviewed Paul Theroux onstage during the International Festival of Authors in Toronto. The hour-long interview was broadcast yesterday on the CBC radio program Writers & Co. If you missed it, it's still available as a podcast.

Theroux turns out to be chatty and pleasant, not at all like the image of himself portrayed in his books, which is that of a rather caustic observer, well matched by the scowling face we see on the covers of his books.

That image, he says, is a persona, one that he's manufactured in both his fiction and his non-fiction. The protagonist in his newest novel, A Dead Hand, meets Theroux and describes him in unflattering terms.

His latest travel book is Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, in which he recreates the epic journey of The Great Railway Bazaar. This one is high on my shopping list.

The Professional

2009-11-27T06:59:00.021-05:00

Frank Hughes is a war vet and old friend of Doc Carroll. He's doing a magazine piece on Eddie Brown, a 29-year-old welterweight whom Doc has been managing for nine years.

He was Doc's fighter. It is what a painter does in his paintings so that you would know them, even without his signature, and what the writer does in his writings, if he is enough of a writer, so you know that no one in the whole world but he could have been the writer.

Eddie's not just a better boxer than the current champ, he's a decent hard-working guy. He's not a showboat. He's as mild-mannered as his training camp diet -- stewed prunes, dry toast, soft-boiled eggs. Everybody likes him, and now he's got a shot at the title.

The month-long training camp and the fight itself are seen through Frank's eyes. We meet an assortment of colourful characters:

Johnny Jay - Doc's pail man
Memphis Kid - Eddie's sparring partner
Barnum, Polo and Charlie Keener - managers
Penna, Schaeffer, Cardone and Booker Boyd - fighters

Only a few of them truly understand the sport of boxing, which is "just too intricate for the average person, fight fan or not, to comprehend." To Frank and Doc, the same seems true for just just about everything else in the world. "Dreadful" is Doc's favourite word.

Tough Prose

Frank and Doc live in hotels and do a lot of drinking and telling of stories -- about the war, about boxing and baseball. Like the time Doc opened his door and an enforcer named Razor Pete took a swipe at him with a knife. Doc drops him with a couple of punches, then politely lifts him to his feet and assists him to the elevator. He and Frank visit Razor Pete's boss, a gangster who wants a piece of Doc's fighter. The gangster compliments Frank's writing, Doc returns Pete's broken knife, and they have a friendly drink together and talk baseball.

Years later Frank bumps into Razor Pete, who is in poor health by then. He's asthmatic and has a bad heart. He offers profuse thanks for a glass of water.

It's a manly world where politeness is not a sign of weakness.

Hemingway

Poppa's influence is obvious from page one. The author, W.C. Heinz, met him during WW2, and when The Professional came out in 1958, Hemingway immediately cabled him from Cuba, saying: "This is the only good novel I've ever read about a fighter."

This edition includes a foreword by Elmore Leonard, who became acquainted with Heinz after he too wrote a congratulatory letter. Leonard mentions his own debt to Hemingway, and remarks that Heinz was "the all-important link, the next step" in his own development as a writer. The two met later when Heinz came out to Detroit to interview Gordie Howe, who lived a few blocks away from Leonard.

Heinz passed away just last year. He's been inducted in the Boxing Hall of Fame, and his "Death of a Racehorse" is considered one of the best sports pieces ever written. His collaboration with a physician resulted in the novel MASH, which appeared under the pseudonym Richard Hooker.

And the Champion Is...

After finishing this book I felt like watching a few boxing movies, and I did -- Million Dollar Baby, Hard Times with Charles Bronson, and my favourite, When We Were Kings, a documentary about the Ali-Foreman fight in Zaire. There's at least one similarity between between the title fight in this book and the "Rumble in the Jungle."

If you're a fan of Hemingway or Elmore Leonard, you'll enjoy The Professional.

House of Hate

2009-11-14T09:46:00.022-05:00

I've had this book for a while, purchased when I lived in St. John's and autographed by the author. First published in 1970, it's a semi-autobiographical novel about a dysfunctional Newfoundland family. The father, though hard-working and non-drinking, is a bitter parsimonious man unable to show affection for his family.

The opening three chapters sketch the hardscrabble background of Saul Stone and his wife, Gertrude, and how they came to settle in a mill town in western Newfoundland. The remaining chapters in Part One acquaint us with each of the children: Ank, Flinksy, Racer, Crawfie, Juju, and Fudge.

The sole member of the family to escape the mill town permanently is Juju, the narrator. When he returns for a visit in Part Two, we learn how poorly his siblings have fared as adults. His brothers, drunks all, have created miserable replicas of the original Stone family. Only his sister Flinksy, though an overweight glutton, has a spirit of generosity.

The colourful Irish-inflected dialogue is superb, and perhaps one reason why this book has been called "the great Newfoundland novel."

Percy Janes

The author grew up in Cornerbrook. Like Juju he enlisted in the navy, gained an education, and travelled widely. He served as writer-in-residence at MUN, which now houses his literary papers.

The Percy Janes Award is given annually for the best unpublished novel by a Newfoundland resident, and is worth a nifty $1500.

The Beats

2009-11-07T11:23:00.035-05:00

A Graphic History

A cool black-and-white history that exposes the failings and celebrates the accomplishments of the Beats.

Biographies of Kerouac, Ginzburg, and Burroughs take up the first half, drawn by Ed Piskor and written by Harvey Pekar (of American Splendor fame). Piskor's clean style is a good match for Pekar's treatment, which is gritty, unflinching, and packed with detail. Pekar himself appears in a few panels, directly addressing the reader.

The collaboration, though, is not perfect. Ginzburg, Burroughs, Cassidy, and others are easily recognizable, but Kerouac isn't, either as a handsome young man or a bloated wreck. In one panel he's shown writing with his left hand, in another with his right. And the thoughts and words of the characters are sometimes terribly banal.

Kerouac: This pie is terrific mom; what a gem you are.

Cassady (to Kerouac scaling a ladder): Take it easy, Jack, you might slip.

The last third of the book is the work of several artists and writers, and it is here the excitement of the Beats really comes through. The different styles and viewpoints are so invigorating I wanted to live in a pad and write poetry madly.

Beatnik Chicks, written by Joyce Brabner (Pekar's wife) and drawn by Summer McClinton, is one of the best pieces in the book. It's a potent refutation of the way Beats treated their women.

Other poets and artists covered: Slim Brundage, Gregory Corso, Robert Creeley, Jay deFeo, Diane di Palma, Robert Duncan, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, LeRoi Jones, Tuli Kupferberg (of The Fugs), Philip Lamantia, d.a. Levy, Michael McClure, Kenneth Patchen, Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen.

There are also a few general pieces: Art Beats, City Lights Bookshop, Jazz Poetry, and the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance.

Artist Links

The Pekar Project, Ed Piskor's Wizziwig

Gary Dumm, Mary Fleener, Jay Kinney, Peter Kuper, Jeffrey Lewis, Summer McClinton, Trina Robbins, Nick Thorkelson, Anne Timmons, Lance Tooks

Reviews Good & Bad

Boing Boing, Graphic Novel Reporter, New York Times

San Francisco Chronicle, Suite 101, The Oregonian

Descartes' Bones

2009-10-24T09:57:00.030-04:00

A Skeletal History of the Conflict between Faith and Reason

Descartes is:

a) the father of modern philosophy
b) the intellectual father of modern France
c) the author of one of the most influential books of all time
d) as peripatetic after death as before

Who would have guessed the last point? In 1650 Descartes died in Sweden, where his remains remained for 16 years until exhumed and returned to France. But upon opening the casket, the skull was discovered missing and the rest of the skeleton to be in poor condition. Many of the bones had dissolved into dust.

The unravelling of this mystery spans several centuries, and sounds as fantastic as a Dan Brown novel. When the skull was finally located, it was covered with graffiti -- a poem in Latin and the signatures of successive owners.

This part of the story reminded me of the bizarre travels of Einstein's brain, and the stuffing and mounting of Jeremy Bentham's body topped off with a wax head, which itself has wandered off on more than one occasion.

But no less fascinating is the role that Descartes' bones continued to play in advancing science. In telling this part of the tale, the author elucidates some aspects of the Enlightenment, drops in on the French Revolution, and spends time with Broca, Cuvier, and other famous figures. Phrenology, the Society of Mutual Autopsy, and the weight of Byron's brain are just some of the odder corners of science visited.

This is a great book. Check out its website.

The world's greatest assembly of scientists had reached a conclusion, one that rested not on an ideal of certainty but on the modern notion of probability. They had applied their doubts to the very head that had introduced doubt as a tool for advancing knowledge. And in the end they gave the head a nod.

Saints of Big Harbour

2009-10-04T18:43:00.030-04:00

Lynn Coady's prose is a magic carpet that speeds the reader smoothly through this 400-page coming-of-age story. It's set in the fictional Cape Breton community of Big Harbour, where most of the men are drunken louts.

The worst of the lot is Isadore Aucoin, a charismatic bully and self-pitying alcoholic. He tries to fill some of the gaps left by Guy Boucher's absent father. But what Guy wants most is a girlfriend, and he thinks he's found one in Corrine Fortune. Trouble is, she's a nutjob, and convinces herself, her brother Howard, and her best friend Pam Cormorant, that Guy is harassing her.

The self-absorbed Hugh Gillis strikes up a friendship of sorts with Howard. Both are recent high-school grads and bright enough to escape the limited opportunities of Big Harbour. Inexplicably they have chosen not to leave, despite being "bored to the point of wrath." Soon they begin trolling the streets looking for Guy and picking fights with strangers.

A dash of humour keeps the story from becoming too grim:

She necks at parties. Necking. Necking is weird. Everybody just necks with everybody. It doesn't really have anything to do with who you like and who you don't. It's just like trying everybody out -- taking them for a test drive.

"You watch your mouth!" Mackie screamed hysterically. "I'll fuckin kill ya next time I'll fuckin kill ya won't see me comin 'cause I'll fuckin kill ya."

If you could just call me a cab, ma'am, I'll be on my way. I don't need to come in, I don't want to bother you. Please. Just a cab. I know the number. Yes, look at me like I'm scum, that's fine. Loathing is good. I'm sure you don't want me on your step any longer than I want to be here. Could start vomiting, you never know. Not pleasant for either one of us. So. Please. A cab.

The book's title is an ironic reference to the inhabitants of Big Harbour, and to two rival hockey teams, the Big Harbour Giants and the Port Hull Saints. It's also a tip of the plaster hat to the statue of Saint Anne, which inspires a sad thought in Guy's mother -- religious statues avert their eyes downward out of embarrassment over the pathetic lives of the people around them.

Saints of Big Harbour was published to extravagant praise and selected as a Best Book of 2001 by The Globe and Mail.

Aqualung

2009-10-03T11:53:00.011-04:00

Walking home at night, the weight of the tank on my shoulder, I'm thinking about partial pressures, and residual nitrogen, and how your mouth resembles a second-stage regulator. All around me houses are hunched like wrecks at the bottom of the sea, lovers inside groping for each other like divers at 20 fathoms. Bottom time, you and I once referred to it with sly smiles, but that was long ago, and still there are months of decompression ahead of me. Now the raw winter wind slices at my eyes so I put on my mask and gaze up at the inverted sky, where an ocean of air ends in breathless space. Finally I arrive home, and swim inside through a gash in the hull.

Fiskadoro

2009-09-29T06:50:00.021-04:00

This is a post-holocaust tale published in 1985, just before the end of the Cold War. It's a mythopeic and hallucinatory work that questions the nature of reality, especially when memory fades and history is lost.

Fiskadoro is a 12-year-old boy living near Key West, now renamed Twicetown after being hit by two missiles carrying nuclear warheads. The warheads were duds.

Life is simple and uncouth, facilitated by the forgiving climate, the sea loaded with fish, and the debris of a pre-holocaust world. People use odd names, like Flying Man and King David Rat, and speak a mangled patois: "All I own do is gepback home."

Woven into the narrative are several journeys, the most important of which are the first two:

1. Fiskadoro, an Orpheus-like figure, is being taught how to how to play the clarinet by Mr. Cheung. He's captured by swamp-people who erase, among other things, his memory.

2. Mr. Cheung's grandmother was one of the last people to escape from Saigon before it fell to Communist forces. Now she is scarcely cognizant of her surroundings. Her long ordeal is described in detail.

3. Mr. Cheung himself travels to another island in pursuit of knowledge--a book that will explain the nuclear holocaust. He "believed in the importance of remembering."

4. Mr. Cheung's half-brother is "a famous, almost legendary figure" whose current name is Cassius Clay Sugar Ray. He recounts an odyssey to the mainland where he and his shipmates are captured by gamblers. He wants to obtain the drug used by the swamp-people to obliterate memories.

Fiskadoro is not a slice of sci-fi. It is a gritty surrealistic tale, closer to a novel like Fishboy by Mark Richard than McCarthy's The Road or Atwood's Oryx and Crake.

The author, Denis Johnson, is an award-winning poet and novelist. Some of his other novels are Already Dead, Recusitation of a Hanged Man, and Tree of Smoke.

Fiskadoro had nothing against the grandmother except that the whole time she sat there, every time, she smoked a long cigarillo backward, with the lit end resting in her mouth and the spit dripping down to darken the other end, the end she should have been smoking. Maybe this was how they smoked their cigarets in the old days...