Through Siberia by Accident

Dervla Murphy is a beer-swilling cigar-smoking travel writer with more than 20 books to her credit. She is also an eccentric Irish granny who prefers travelling by bike. She does not own a car, microwave, washing machine, computer, TV, or central heating.

The misfortunes she has suffered during her travels are many:

Afghanistan – broken ribs, scorpion bite
Albania – three attempted robberies
Cameroon – “triple tooth abscess”
Ethiopia – dislocated knee, robbed by bandits
India – heat stroke, mumps, brucellosis (brucellosis!)
Laos – torn tendon in right foot
Madagascar – gout, more broken ribs, Hep A
Nairobi-London flight – life threatening clot in leg
Pakistan - amoebic dysentery
Rumania – robbed by police, concussion, fractured coccyx, broken foot
South Africa – tick bite fever, shattered left arm
Zimbabwe - malaria

In 2002 she crossed the Russian Federation by the Baikal-Amur Mainline, her intention being to cycle through a portion of Siberia. In this she was prevented by a couple of injuries that occurred before her starting point was reached. Instead she continued to travel by train and boat in the Baikal and Sakha areas.

She extols the friendliness of Siberians, and falls under the spell of Lake Baikal and the Lena River. Her observations are intelligent, well-informed, and contain none of the usual whining often found in travel writing. She complains about toilet facilities only once. She is gutsy, pragmatic and open-minded.

My sole complaint is her continual fussing over pets. No incident is too trivial to report on:

As I drank, the pup farted – potent farts which at first provoked only laughter and comically expressed disgust. Then, as they increased in volume and frequency, filling the cabin with asphyxiating fumes, the consensus was that he should be exiled. Tears gathered in the little boy’s eyes. But I had finished my beer, and thawed, and was returning to the platform where the pup could sit on my lap because Baikal’s wind would disperse his wind. When I had found the most sheltered corner he gazed up at my face with a puzzled expression. No doubt I smelt wrong, foreign. Soon he struggled to be free, loudly relieved his bowels behind a milk churn and thereafter farted no more.

Murphy undertook this trip in 2002, when she was in her early 70s. A few years later she returned and completed it, the results being published as Silverland: A Winter Journey Beyond the Urals.

The Real World

A voice hisses in your ear: "If you're not at the table in two nano-seconds, you're dead meat."

You jump up from the computer and dash out of the room.  You can feel the floor vibrating behind you from your father's heavy tread.

He is a big man with round shoulders and a round back. At the table he hunches over his plate, his head bobbing as he eats.

You mother says, "What were you doing, dear?"

"Just goofing around on the computer."

She shakes her head in disapproval. "You spend entirely too much time on that thing, Donald. You're going to lose touch with reality."

You roll your eyes. If anyone's unreal, it's your parents. Sometimes it's almost as though they occupy a different universe, one which intersects yours only at the supper table.

Take your dad, for instance. Sets off every day briefcase in hand, crisp and alert, and 10 hours later returns home looking like he's been mugged. Who knows for sure where he goes or what he's been up to?

Your mother on the other hand might as well belong to another species. The stuff she does! Cleaning the bathroom, doing the laundry. Bizarre!

"Donald."

Maybe  they're not even your parents. Maybe they're aliens.

"Donald?"

From another dimension. And those aren't their real faces, they're masks. Latex masks they peel off every night before climbing into bed and--

"Donald!" hollers your father.

"Yes, dad?"

"Fer crissake, kid, your mother's talking to you."

"Oh, sorry. What is it, mom?"

"There's something your father and I want to tell you."

A horrible thought enters your mind. "Oh no, you're not pregnant, are you?"

She smiles and shakes her head. "How would you like to take a few days off school?"

Your eyes bug out in disbelief. "Seriously?"

"We thought it might be good for you and your father to spend some time together."

"What?"

You mother reaches out to reassure you. Her touch is cool and slimy. "At the office," she says

Your father seizes another lungfish from a platter and bites its head off. "Time you see what the real world is like," he grunts.

Descartes

The Life and Times of a Genius

One of my favourite biographies is a life of Pepys by Claire Tomalin. Pepys lived in the 17th century and was a child during the English Civil War, of which Tomalin said something quite remarkable: the intellectual revolution accompanying it was so profound that it is difficult to understand how people thought before it occurred.

That remark was much in my mind as I read this new biography of Descartes, who also lived in the 17th century. It was a time when religion and science were closely linked, and science itself based upon the discoveries of the ancient Greeks, filtered through centuries of Scholastic thought.

People believed the sun revolved around the earth, and that angels, humans, and animals were linked in a “great chain of being.” There were four elements in the universe (earth, air, fire, and water), and four humours in the body (blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile), the balancing of which was necessary to maintain good health. Vying with this traditional approach to knowledge was “a heady mixture of notions, beliefs and practices from cabalistic, occult, astrological, alchemical, hermetic and magical sources.”

Into this array of the hidebound and the bizarre stepped Descartes, whose great contribution to science was the assumption that "the natural world can be examined and understood as a system of matter in motion obeying natural laws, without the need for any invocation of supernatural forces or agencies."

He proposed to do this by jettisoning the past and starting anew, basing all science on what could be known for certain – hence his starting point, Cogito ergo sum. He promulgated this approach in his famous Discourse on Method, and applied it in his own investigation of the natural world, which included the grinding of his own lenses and the dissection of cadavers.

His Life

Descartes lived a rather adventurous life for an intellectual barely five feet tall. He spent several years wandering about the continent when it was embroiled in the Thirty Years War (1614-1648), which began as a religious conflict and devastated central Europe. He was, for a period, a mercenary, first joining the Protestant army of the Prince of Orange, and then the Catholic army of Maximilian of Bavaria. He was with the latter at the Battle of the White Mountain (near Prague) where the Protestant forces of Frederick of the Palatinate were routed. [Other sources have also placed him at the infamous siege of La Rochelle, where Cardinal Richelieu starved to death 20,000 Huguenots.]

The author of this bio, A.C. Grayling, has an interesting theory for why Descartes so often turned up in contentious areas in Europe. He may have been a Jesuit intelligence agent. Descartes was educated by Jesuits, who in turn encouraged the Habsburg rulers of the Holy Roman Empire to reclaim Catholic territories lost to Protestant forces during the Reformation.

If true, it may explain why Descartes spent the remaining portion of his life in the Protestant Netherlands. His pro-Habsburg Jesuit interests would not have endeared him to France, which had reasons of its own for opposing Habsburg ambitions. The need for caution was further underlined when in 1633 Galileo was tried for heresy by the Inquisition, and required to remain under house arrest for the remainder of his life. Descartes immediately abandoned plans to publish his masterwork, Le Monde, and changed residences frequently.

Whether or not Descartes was a spy, it was a good time to be in the Netherlands, which was not only wealthy and tolerant, but also enjoying the Dutch Golden Age. Descartes wrote all of his major works there, and shared with Rembrandt the patronage of Christiaan Huygens's father. It was there he met Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia, with whom he struck up a close intellectual relationship.

When he finally did venture back to France, he supped with Thomas Hobbes and met Blaise Pascal, who showed him the calculating machine he had made (“the first ever computer, based on the technology of knitting machines”). Improbably his life came to an end in Sweden, where he was enticed by Queen Christina to serve as her personal tutor.

Grayling points out several ironies here. Princess Elizabeth was the daughter of Frederick, the Elector Palatine, whom Descartes helped to overthrow at the Battle of the White Mountain. Christina of Sweden was her cousin, and daughter of the great Gustavus Adolphus, who brought Sweden into the Thirty Years War on the Protestant side. Christina was instrumental in ending the war, and after Descartes died she abdicated and converted to Catholicism.

His Legacy

Many of Descartes’s scientific notions were wrong. Indeed, some of them sound as unlikely as other crackpot ideas of the time. He believed that the pineal gland was the seat of the soul, that the motion of the planets is explained by vortices in a universal fluid, and that vision results from "pressure on the eye" by that fluid.

Despite these missteps, Descartes is today considered the “Father of Modern Philosophy.” Among other achievements he discovered the law of refraction and created analytic geometry, which is taught in high schools today. His Discourse on Method is one of the seminal texts of the modern world. After four centuries the book is still in print and taught in universities around the world.

King of Russia

A Year in the Russian Super League

Dave King coached Canada’s national team for nine years, followed by stints with Calgary, Columbus and Montreal in the NHL. Later while coaching in Europe he was courted by Metallurg Magnitogorsk of the Russian Super League, which includes such fabled teams as Central Red Army and Moscow Dynamo.

In taking the job King became the first Canadian to coach in the league, and led Metallurg to their most successful season ever. They finished first overall with only five regular season losses in 51 games. They also won the Spengler Cup, a five-team mid-season tournament played in Davos, Switzerland. However, they fared less well in the league playoffs. They were hit with a lot of injuries and went out in the semi-finals, losing 3 games to 1, all their losses being in overtime.

Nineteen-year-old Evgeny Malkin was the star of the team, and King has a lot of good things to say about him. When the team played in Finland for the Tampere Cup, Malkin did “such dazzling things with the puck that the fans just stood up and applauded.” But it’s not just his natural skills that make him a great player. “Sometimes Russian players can be extremely dour. Malkin smiles all the time. He seems to enjoy practice. He loves to compete. He plays the game with tempo. He’s unselfish.” Eric Lindros played for King as a nineteen-year-old, and King ranks Malkin ahead of Lindros at that age.

At the start of the season King thinks the team needs more grit, and convinces the management to bring in a couple of warhorses, ex-Leafs Dmitri Yushkevich and Igor Korolev. It was a smart move, as both players made major contributions to the team. King is particularly complimentary about Yushkevich, who with a bad knee is “as close to a one-legged player as you can get.” His great heart makes up for this deficiency. During one game he's hit in the face with a puck. King says:

I didn’t think I’d see him for a while, but the next day, who’s there at practice? It’s Yushkevich -– and he looked like hell. If little kids on the street had seen him they would have run the other way. He looked like a character in a horror movie, with all those scars of his and now his face all lopsided.

Likewise Korolev. In the playoffs he’s cut by a skate and receives 23 stitches. “It was so bad that our doctor was practically throwing up.” Korolev refuses to stay out of the game and comes back “with a great big patch over his eye, blood all over his sweater and his face.”

Observations about Russian Hockey

Before the season begins a Russian Orthodox priest enters the dressing room and sprinkles the players with holy water.

Not only must teams travel vast distances for league play, but Metallurg's pre-season training took place in the Swiss Alps, and included an exhibition tournament in Finland, while mid-season dry-land training was located in Dubai.

For top-level players the Russian Super League is as lucrative as the NHL. Yet on some teams players went unpaid for months.

The amount of physical training is phenomenal. King says:

I’m no doctor, but we don’t have nearly as many groin strains here [as in the NHL] and I’m wondering if that has something to do with the tremendous strength the Russian players develop in their quadriceps... To a man, the leg strength of a Russian player will amaze you. The quadriceps muscles, which deliver so much power to the stride, are huge on virtually every one of them. Right from the time they turn eight or nine years old, they do an immense amount of work to build up their leg strength.

Also the whole approach to coaching is different:

The players rarely complain or give you any emotional reaction... I blame it on the fact that, starting at young age, coaches confront players one-on-one on the bench, in the dressing-room, or on the ice, scolding them harshly for mistakes. They rarely do it privately, so in order to cope the players simply don’t react. They absorb the comments and show their strength to their teammates by wearing a blank expression. I’ve seen grown men coaching young ten- or eleven-year-olds go nose-to-nose with a youngster, ranting and raving almost incoherently -– and the young player simply takes the medicine...

King decided to stay for the 2006-2007 season, but many of his top players had moved on, including Yushkevich and Malkin, who is now with the Pittsburgh Penguins. After just eight games King was fired. His record was 3-4-1.

Anti-Matter Cookies

Whenever my home is invaded by hungry space mutants, I'm ready at the door with a plate of freshly baked quantum snacks. Otherwise they'd start disintegrating the furniture! How do I manage it? Here's what to do.

1. As soon as the little darlings arrive, lock yourself into the kitchen, gather together any radioactive scraps you have on hand, and collide them in a blender until you've produced one cupful of assorted glueballs, semi-sweet quarks, and weak-vector bosons. Add nine cups of dark matter and half-a-teaspoon of Big Bang baking soda.

2. Mix all the ingredients together, form into vibrating strings, and place on a cookie sheet. Set your microwave at 10(12)K and cook for a fraction of a second, then let cool for 10-20 thousand million years.

3. Next, using N-dimensional space, loop back in time so you are waiting at the door with cookies in hand. When the kiddies show up -- their noses runny, their pockets bulging with wormholes and strange attractors -- you'll be rewarded by shrieks of delight.

4. Once the little tykes have gorged themselves, you can send them waddling back out into phase space where they can happily wreck the cosmos and rebuild it as many times as they want before bedtime.

Fatal Passage

The Untold Story of John Rae, the Arctic Adventurer Who Discovered the Fate of Franklin

Author Ken McGoogan claims that John Rae solved the two most celebrated Arctic mysteries of the 19th century – the fate of Franklin and the discovery of the Northwest Passage. Yet he was deprived of those distinctions by the conniving of Lady Franklin and the short-sightedness of historians.

Rae was awarded the prize for being the first to bring back news of the Franklin expedition’s fate, yet historians have generally credited Leopold McClintock with that discovery. They also have agreed that Franklin and his men found the Northwest Passage -– “forging the last link with their lives,” as Franklin’s old friend and travelling companion, Sir John Richardson, put it. The problem is, that passage is not navigable. It was Rae who discovered that King William Land is not joined to Boothia Peninsula. The strait that separates them, and which now bears his name, was used by the first ships to navigate the Northwest Passage, Roald Amundsen’s Gjoa, and the RCMP's St. Roch.

Rae was, says McGoogan, “a post-colonial figure in a colonial age,” a person that we in the 21st century find more palatable than Franklin and his ilk. Not only was Rae endowed with almost superhuman endurance (he once snowshoed 75 miles in a single day), but he favoured living off the land, and employed native clothing and survival techniques. This was in direct opposition to the methods employed by the British Admiralty, which sent out expensive unwieldy expeditions, and frowned upon “going native.” Furthermore, Rae was a superb hunter who supplied the majority of the meat for his men on all his expeditions. He also esteemed the native men he travelled with, and defended them against English prejudice, as typified by Charles Dickens, who savaged the Inuit in Household Words.

Fatal Passage also upsets another cherished apple cart in portraying Lady Franklin as spiteful and manipulative. She “orchestrated the beatification of her dead husband,” which McGoogan terms an “historic fraud." He is the first, I believe, to describe Lady Franklin in such unflattering terms. Before then she had been portrayed as a saintly figure -- a model of wifely devotion, indomitable in her crusade to coerce the British Admiralty in not abandoning the search for Franklin.

Fatal Passage, then, is an ably written and well researched page-turner about a remarkable man. My only complaint is the Epilogue, in which the author inserts himself into the story by describing his own voyage to Boothia Peninsula to place a plaque in honour of John Rae. Rudy Wiebe did something similar in his Franklin-inspired novel, A Discovery of Strangers, when in the Acknowledgments he described building a cairn to house a record of his own canoe trip in the NWT.

While I find such actions self-aggrandizing, they do attest to the never-waning appeal of the Franklin mythos. Today, 150 years after Franklin disappeared, people are still looking for him. New books appear every year about Franklin or some of his buddies. Here are a representative few that have appeared since the turn of the century.

2000 - Ice Blink: The Tragic Fate of Sir John Franklin’s Lost Polar Expedition by Scott Cookson (botulism blamed for the expedition's failure)

2001 - The Franklin Conspiracy: Coverup, Betrayal, and the Astonishing Secret Behind the Lost Arctic Expedition by Jeffrey Blair Latta (weird history)

2002 - Deadly Winter: The Life of Sir John Franklin by Martyn Beardsley (biography)

2003 - Franklin’s Passage by David Solway (poetry)

2004 - The Arctic Fox: Francis Leopold McClintock, Discoverer of the Fate of Franklin by David Murphy (biography)

2005 - Lady Franklin’s Revenge: A True Story of Ambition, Obsession and the Remaking of Arctic History by Ken McGoogan (biography)

2006 - Captain Francis Crozier: Last Man Standing? by Michael Smith (biography)

2007 - The Terror by Dan Simmons (horror)

2008 - Tracing the Connected Narrative: Arctic Exploration in British Print Culture, 1818-1860 by Janice Cavell (history)

Rae's Arctic Journeys

1846-47 – Rae and 10 men left York Factory and travelled by boat to Repulse Bay, then explored the base of the Gulf of Boothia from Fury and Hecla Strait to the east shore of Boothia Peninsula. Unknown to anyone at the time, Franklin’s ships were beset on the other side of Boothia.

1848 – Rae and Richardson formed one of the search parties sent out to search for Franklin. They travelled down the Mackenzie River, then east along the Arctic coast to the Coppermine River, and wintered at Fort Confidence on Great Bear Lake. Rae spent 1849 in Fort Simpson, then returned to Fort Confidence in 1850 in preparation for another search for Franklin.

1851 – Rae left Fort Confidence and travelled the southern expanse of Victoria Island, and the bottom of Coronation Gulf as far as the Kent Peninsula. On the east shore of Victoria, he found a few pieces of wood that likely came from Franklin’s ships. Once again he was maddeningly close to Franklin. Three times he attempted to cross Victoria Strait to King William Island, but was prevented by the same ice jam that had beset Franklin’s ships.

1853-54 – Rae retraced much of his first expedition on behalf of the HBC, in an attempt to discover the final link in the Northwest Passage. This time he travelled to the west side of Boothia Peninsula, meeting Inuit from whom he purchased artifacts belonging to Franklin and his men, and recording stories about their demise.

Websites: Ken McGoogan, The Fate of Franklin

Masters of Atlantis

This is a comic novel about some loopy characters who create a secret society based upon a document obtained from a con man. In a typical passage, a chap named Golescu (his name supposedly means "not many camels") demonstrates his skills:

See, not only is Golescu writing with both hands but he is also looking at you and conversing with you at the same time in a most natural way. Hello, good morning, how are you? Good morning, Captain, how are you today, very fine, thank you. And here is Golescu still writing and at the same time having his joke on the telephone. Hello, yes, good morning, this is the Naval Observatory but no, I am very sorry, I do not know the time. Nine-thirty, ten, who knows? Good morning, that is a beautiful dog, sir, can I know his name, please?

My only reservation is that the characters are so completely batty that after a while they seem no more real than a Saturday morning cartoon. More moments like the one in which a member of the Gnomon Society is grilled by a Senate Committee, and appears more level-headed than his questioners, could have lifted the book to the level of greatness.

Another snippet:

"Tell me, how is Mr. Bates?" "He's in a nursing home." "You're not serious." "His back was hurting and so they pulled all his teeth." "Doing fairly well now?" "His back still hurts. He can't eat anything." "But coming around nicely? Getting proper care?" "They don't turn him over often enough." "He's bedfast?" "Not exactly." "Gets up every day and puts on his clothes?" "Not altogether, no. Not every day." "Off his feed, you say." "No, he stays hungry. He just can't chew anything." "But his color's good?" "Not real good." "But otherwise fit? Has all his faculties? Takes an interest in community affairs?" "Not much, no."

Will I read more Charles Portis? Absolutely.

What's Bred in the Bone

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Author

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

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

The Deptford Trilogy
Fifth Business
The Manticore
World of Wonders

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

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

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

Shelf Monkey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Riding the Iron Rooster

By Train Through China

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"We can always fool a foreigner."