At Swim-Two-Birds

Craziest novel I've ever read. First published in 1939, it's on Time Magazine's list of 100 greatest novels. My Penguin edition refers to it as an "experimental blend of satire, fantasy and farce."

On the back cover are blurbs from James Joyce and Dylan Thomas. The latter says, "This is just the book to give your sister if she's a loud, dirty, boozy girl."

The central character, Dermot Trellis, is an Irish lout who spends most of his time in bed. He is writing a tale in which "there will be no hero, nothing but villains." Celebrating the "birth" of one of his characters, he informs the press that credit is due in part to another author, William Tracy, a writer of Westerns.

Soon several other Tracy-inspired characters appear, cowpunchers brandishing shooting-irons on the streets of Dublin. They fall in with some characters from Irish mythology, including Finn MacCool, mad King Sweeney, a type of devil called a Pooka, and a Good Fairy.

Events in Trellis's life are interspersed with extracts from the story he's writing. The extracts grow longer, and the characters become fractious after the author seduces one of them and brings into existence "offspring of the quasi-illusory type." Eventually they drug Trellis, beat the crap out of him, and take control of the novel.

The writing is humorous, erudite, and fey. The vocabulary is prodigious, and there are snippets of Latin, Greek, and Irish Gaelic. The narrative is destabilized by intentionally bad poetry and many authorial asides, including synopses for "the benefit of new readers."

As one character explains, "It's the sort of queer stuff they look for in a story nowadays."

Captain Francis Crozier

Last Man Standing?

In YK part of my job involved visits to a massive government warehouse that held everything from beer to kayaks. One day I stumbled across a forgotten flat of small blue volumes published by the GNWT.

Second-in-Command by May Fluhmann summarized in brief chapters the life of Francis Crozier, who was second-in-command on Franklin's last voyage. The book was a genuine work of scholarship, for Fluhmann had access to Crozier's correspondence from 1828 to 1845. But the volume had a slightly amateurish air, and I doubt it was ever widely available or attracted much notice.

Now there's been a resurgence of interest in Crozier. Dan Simmons made him the central figure in his novel, The Terror, which came out in 2007. And in the previous year Michael Smith published a more complete, more polished biography, which cites May Fluhmann as one of its sources.

Smith's book of necessity covers much familiar ground. For me, the most interesting part was Crozier's role in a four-year Antarctic expedition, of which he was second-in-command under his close friend James Clark Ross. According to Smith, both men were so unnerved by the voyage that afterward they were never quite the same. Ross began drinking heavily, and Crozier subsided into a depression from which he never recovered.

A second reason for Crozier's depression was his failure to win the hand of Sophy Cracroft. His "uncertain state of mind" caused him to "stand aside from the leadership battle" for what was to become Franklin's last expedition, even though he was the most experienced officer available and the logical choice for the position.

After Franklin was given the job, Crozier did a volte-face and agreed to act as second-in-command. Smith suggests that Crozier did so in the hope of gaining favour with Sophy, who was Franklin's niece and Lady Franklin's constant companion.

Soon Crozier began to rue his decision. Franklin had not been North in 17 years. Worse, Crozier had no hand in selecting the crews, a task that was given to Fitzjames, who was third-in-command but with no Arctic experience. Crozier turfed two of the men selected by Fitzjames as being "perfectly useless either at their trade or anything else."

Smith describes Crozier's last letter to Ross as "the dark, brooding missive of a troubled man harbouring major doubts about the dangerous undertaking which lay ahead." Many are the ironies, mysteries, and tantalizing possibilities surrounding that doomed voyage. According to Inuit oral history, Crozier was one of the last survivors. Indeed, it has even been suggested that he lived among the Inuit for many years afterward.

The two ships, Erebus and Terror, have never been found.

Nikolski

Beyond the uttering of superlatives, this is not an easy book to write about briefly. It’s a knotty postmodern tale in which a bookstore clerk in Montreal refers to his unborn self as “an imperceptible comma in an as yet unwritten novel.”

Later he acquires a “three-headed book” composed of fragments from three separate works that are as self-referential as the toy compass he wears around his neck. As he himself says, “I refrain from specifying that my compass did not point north but toward Nikolski—the story is already convoluted enough, thank you.”

Proof occurs on the last page when the reader cannot help but exclaim, “WHAT!” and immediately start flipping happily through the pages again. Happily, because the writing is playful and imaginative, full of marine imagery that is apt and entertaining: a high school career counselor named Mr. Barrier, a poissonnerie that sells sea horses in Cajun sauce, a cloud of phosphorescent plankton swirling around a street light.

In short, this is a nautical yarn set on dry land with three strange fish as protagonists. Noah, who never knew his father, was raised on the prairies by his aboriginal mother. They led a nomadic existence, living in a trailer with ancestral ghosts. Noah leaves for Montreal to study archeology, and falls under the influence of a prof who specializes in trash.

Joyce, who was abandoned by her mother, grew up in Tete-a-la-Baleine. She is a descendant of Acadian buccaneers and niece of Jonas Doucet, father of Noah and the aforementioned bookclerk. Joyce runs away to Montreal, takes up dumpster diving, and fulfills a childlhood dream of becoming a pirate.

Noah's and Joyce's stories are told in the third person and alternate throughout the book, while (in a brilliant conceit) the nameless bookclerk's story surfaces haphazardly and is told in the first person.

There are many more plot elements, most but not all neatly dovetailed together. The tantalizing loose ends simply add to the manifold pleasures of this book.

But enough already. (Though if you'd like to know more, I recommend this review.)

Nikolski was first published in Quebec in 2005 and won a slew of awards. In 2007 it was translated into English by Lazer Lederhendler. It’s a beautifully designed book, right down to the typographic fish used to indicate section breaks. The cover is gorgeous.

Another Whopper

Nikolski reminded me of another postmodern fish story that I read recently, Gould’s Book of Fish by Richard Flanagan. You can read my review here.

Doctor Sax

After finishing Ray Robertson's What Happened Later, I realized I had not read anything by Kerouac in far too long, and so picked up this book long mouldering on a shelf.

But at the back of my mind was a judgment rendered by a snooty prof in my grad school days. Would I find Kerouac a passing fancy, a faded juvenile attraction?

Not so! The book is a joyous paean to innocent youth, a mad inspired jazz solo of words. Listen:

Merrimac comes swooping down from a north of eternities, falls pissing over locks, cracks and froths on rocks, bloth, and rolls frawing to the kale, calmed in dewpile stone holes slaty sharp (we dove off, cut our feet, summer afternoon stinky hookies), rocks full of ugly old suckers not fit to eat, and crap from sewage, and dyes, and you swallowed mouthfuls of the chokeful water...

Doctor Sax is an imaginary figure from Kerouac's youth, modelled after The Shadow, clad in cape and slouch hat. He lurks only at the edges of the narrative until the final chapters, where he steps into the foreground to battle the Snake of the World.

It is only at this point that the book loses its way, turning into pure pulpish fantasy, no longer anchored in the real world of Kerouac's hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts.

Faust Part Three

From Ann Charters's biography I learned that Doctor Sax was Kerouac's favorite book. He wrote it in 1952, five years before On the Road was published. He was staying with William Burroughs in Mexico at the time, high on weed and writing in the bathroom. The book took him three weeks to complete.

Ah, the dilemma of Kerouac. How to reconcile the dashing figure of his autobiographical novels with the pathetic bloated drunk he became. How to admire the books and not be seduced by the lifestyle they celebrate. Reading Doctor Sax made me realize that this is what Robertson's book is about.

Faust Part Three is the subtitle of Doctor Sax and hints at the awful truth -- Kerouac sold his soul to the devil for literary immortality.

More Kerouac

Just last year was the 50th anniversary of the publication of On the Road and a new edition, subtitled The Original Scroll, was released. It restores the book to its original uncut version.

Another treasure is The Jack Kerouac Collection, three CDs of Kerouac reading his work, sometimes to the accompaniment of piano and sax. Kerouac's voice is perfectly matched to his material, and makes evident the jazzy scat rhythms of the prose. Gad, the man even sings!

What Happened Later

Kerouac's sequel to On the Road was going to be called What Happened Later. Author Ray Robertson has claimed that title for this dual-threaded story of Kerouac's last road trip and the coming-of-age of "Ray Robertson" in Chatham, Ontario.

Young "Ray" grows up worshipping a pair of handsome counter-culture heroes, Jack Kerouac and Jim Morrison of The Doors. They rebelled against the same stifling middle- and working-class existence that "Ray" finds himself shackled to.

Unfortunately "Ray" can't find a copy of On the Road anywhere. All he can do while planning his escape is listen to The Doors, and vicariously experience the lives of his two heroes through a pair of biographies, Jack's Book and No One Here Gets Out Alive.

Author Ray Robertson does a fine job portraying the family that "Ray" grows up in. Seen through the latter's eyes, they live a trite and dull existence. But through the reader's eyes, the family is a sweet idyll, especially when juxtaposed with what really happened later to Kerouac, who (like Morrison) turned into a bloated drunk.

While "Ray" seeks to escape his roots, Jack is trying to return to them, but the road trip to Riviere-du-Loup to investigate his Quebecois origins is a drunken disaster, nothing at all like the heroic journey related in On the Road. Yet part of What Happened Later's attraction is the homage Robertson pays to Kerouac:

Plus, riding shotgun across the country and back with brand new best pal Cassidy at the wheel gabbing his golden Okie patter from dusk to dawn and Jack realizing Oh my God, this is what literature is supposed to sound like -- one man simply telling another man the simple humiliations and agonies and always-too-late epiphanies that add up to his and everybody else's life -- and not a sack of tricky tropes to be toted out and professionally employed in order to expertly con the reader into imagining a pretty little Book Club approved daydream.

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