Black Robe meets ABC's Lost

by Ted Langlais

A Review of Elle by Douglas Glover

Whether it has been intentional or not, the Governor-General’s award for literature has, with few exceptions, been awarded to the best Canadian novel of the year that says something about Canada, rather than the best literary achievement. For years, this meant buying the award winner meant getting some kind of history lesson, not necessarily an enjoyable read. Thankfully, however, the past few years have seen a trend toward fiction that is actually quite readable, enjoyable, and memorable.

Douglas Glover’s Elle, while still using Canadian history and folklore as its focus, provides a reasonably enjoyable romp. The language is clever, the narrator’s voice is wittily poetic, and Glover knows when to cut a scene before it becomes dull. At just over two hundred pages, Glover’s novel is the perfect length for his subject matter. Not so short that you feel you are getting ripped off if you buy it, but not so long that your eyes water with boredom before you are half way through.

The story deals with the legend of Marguerite de Roberval, a young French woman left stranded on an island in the St. Lawrence River in 1542. According to the novel, Marguerite is thrown off of a French vessel for having sexual relations with her lover and is, along with her servant, abandoned on an island somewhere near the mouth of the river.

She soon discovers that she is pregnant, but it is a pregnancy that is doomed from the beginning as the neither the woman nor the servant have the necessary survival skills to find nutrition and sustenance on this island. Marguerite soon finds herself alone, starving and delirious until a Native Canadian saves her with his indigenous knowledge of the territory. He helps her survive the winter, heals her spirit by having sex with her even if he does find her thoroughly ugly, and eventually leaves her to her own devices.

She escapes the island after the long winter, crazed with malnutrition and intellectual starvation. She is cared for first by an old woman and then by a fishing tribe before finding a means of travelling back to France.

As is typical with such works, Elle is a story of self-discovery, of finding one’s true self in the struggle for survival, learning to be one with the land and the surroundings; absorbing wisdom from the native culture.

Where Elle differs is in its language, voice and exploration of the feminine. Glover’s descriptions of traditional Native Canadian legends read more like Burroughs’s LSD induced hallucinations than respectfully dreary recounting of folklore. Still, his depiction of the landscape captures Canada’s mystical and deadly beauty.

And his heroine is decidedly contemporary.

In one of Virgina Woolf’s essays, she discusses how men never write about women except with regards to how the men relate to them. Glover does his best to contradict this and is almost successful. His protagonist emerges as a completely unique and interesting character in her own right. The novel reflects her mental as well as physical isolation from the masculine world. She is, in many ways, caught out of time as many intelligent women of her day most likely were.

Of course, I’m sure that my old Canadian Fiction professor up in Montreal would disagree with my interpretation of the character and claim that Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro are the only two living Canadian authors who could depict this woman in the way she should be portrayed. Nevertheless, Elle is a truly engaging and absorbing work.

Vikram Lall's Memoirs

by Ted Langlais

A Review of The In-Between World of Vikram Lall by MG Vassanji

The opening paragraph of The In-Between World of Vikram Lall, has the title character claim he has been labelled “one of Africa’s most corrupt men”. We get the impression thereafter that the novel is being written as a treatise to help clear his name and prove to the reader that he is not guilty of whatever horrors he has been accused of, or at least justify his actions to us.

The structure of the novel presents us with Vikram writing his memoirs near a small town in Ontario. Each chapter of the Kenyan-based narrative returns to the present where we are given glimpses into what the present holds for Mr. Lall and teasing references about the fates of the characters in his past.

He leads the reader through nearly three periods of Lall’s life before learning the true nature of his guilt. We begin with his young childhood during the beginning of Elizabeth II’s reign. Vic and his sister Deepa, both of Indian descent become lifelong friends with Njoroge, an indigenous Kenyan, as well as the ill-fated children of white Europeans. His father is a fanatic of English culture, even though he doesn’t know very much about it; his uncle is a leftist supporter of the guerrillas fighting against the colonial rule who will be responsible for an early tragedy in Vic’s life; his mother takes great pride in her familial roots, a pride which will condemn her children to a life of obligation and duty rather than happiness and passion.

With the basis of Vic’s early life laid out, he then takes us to his early twenties and finally through to his career in the Kenyan government where we eventually learn what it is that has earned him his infamous reputation.

Despite Vassanji’s Kenyan heritage, he is first and foremost a Canadian writer, and as such, his hero’s act of villainy is not as visible nor as grotesque as we are led to believe throughout the novel. Perhaps it is the influence of Hollywood’s horrific depictions of historic events in this age of Abu Ghraib torture, and genocides that plague African nations that makes this novel so effective. When we finally learn the extent of Vikram Lall’s villainy, it is almost laughable how tame it is compared to what we were expecting. That is, until we examine the implications behind his actions and realise that, although he has not held the dagger that has killed a thousand men, he has certainly written the cheque that bought it.

Make no mistake; Vikram Lall is a criminal, no matter how easily he is able to write the ends that justify the means. The best villains are always those who never believe that they are truly evil. The structure of Vassanji’s first person narrative, while not being overtly original, still holds the power over the reader in the rhythms and innocence of Lall’s voice. We become trusting and affectionate toward the protagonist against our better judgement.

Vic continues to believe, truly believe, that he has been caught between worlds. Between the Europeans and the Africans in colonial Kenya, between his duties to his business and his duties to his family, between is loyalty to his father and to his mother. He also holds the conviction that the crimes he has committed were done to him, that he was simply following through on the circumstances that had been laid out before him and that he had no alternative; his life could not have been lived any other way. He falls into a job with the new government, then as aid to the Kenyan leader, and ultimately into a business that thrives on the corruption of the country’s political structure.

This sense of things happening to him, rather than being in charge of his own life, is the secret to understanding the character of Vikram Lall. As we race toward the final pages and learn about his state of mind, and his unfaltering belief in his own innocence, we come to wonder what Vic has left out. What has he not told us?

In the end, it matters not how we judge Vikram Lall but how the character judges himself. And it is this certainty that his life has been one of circumstance, lived in-between the desires and wishes of others, rather than living it for himself and taking matters into his own hands once in a while, which provides a framework for understanding the novel’s shocking and unforeseen conclusion.

Vernon Goddamned Little

A Review of Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre

For the most part, I don’t have a problem with appropriation of voice in fiction. If you are a white Caucasian lesbian, you should feel free to write a novel from the perspective of an African American straight male in the fifties. Provided you do it believably and appropriate to the subject matter and tone of the novel that you are writing. If you can’t meet these criteria, then it is perhaps better if you toss away your novel idea and start something new that fits your talent and vision.

Likewise, if you are writing a satire and using humour to attack an aspect of society then that humour should be sophisticated and subtle enough to rise above the raunchy blue-collar humour in which most of us indulge during drunken conversation in a bar room. It helps if you also have a knowledge of the subject matter so that your satire is appropriate and attacking something truly worthy of criticism.

Vernon God Little does none of this. It is base without redemption; attacks the easiest, most obvious stereotypically criticised aspects of American culture; and its narrator’s voice is nothing like any teenaged Texan in the Lone Star state.

How the novel won the Man-Booker Prize for 2003 is beyond me and I’m sure there are a lot of writers from last year’s long list that have used a few of Vernon Goddamned Little’s blasphemes after finishing the novel.

The book opens following a Colombine style massacre at a High School in the uneventful Texan municipality of Martirio. Vernon Gregory Little, although not on school grounds at the time of the massacre, is convicted in the eyes of the public because he was a friend of the victim. As the citizens of Martirio condemn and deride Vernon publicly, they proceed to cash in on the disaster by selling more types of tie-in memorabilia than George Lucas could devise.

Vernon himself is innocent. He claims he was not even on campus at the time and there is the evidence to prove it: fecal remains from when he relieved himself in a junkyard at the time the massacre was taking place. Why he wasn’t on campus and what he was doing is not explained until the end of the novel, but we do learn that it involves a gun that Vernon feels will incriminate him.

This is the one aspect of the character that Pierre gets right, the confusion and uncertainty of the teenage mind. In fact, thanks to Pierre’s manipulation of events, it seems that Vernon is perfectly justified in his mistrust of adults. His mother is wrapped up in her personal affairs including the desire to purchase a new refrigerator for the house. Also, she begins an affair with Eulalio Ledesma, known as Lally, who claims to be a CNN reporter but is actually a layman trying to find fame and fortune by cashing in on the school killings. He pretends to be Vernon’s friend to his face, but is really making plans to have him prosecuted and executed on national television.

Vernon just can’t get a break from the adult world. Even the psychiatrist assigned to his case turns out to be a child molester and the college student whom he’s had a crush on for years ultimately sells him out in exchange for her own brand of fame and fortune.
The problem with all this is that it comes across as completely contrived. Vernon doesn’t get a break because the author doesn’t let him, not because it comes naturally to the story. The novel goes too far over the top in its effort to make fun of things that have already been joked about in the media for years. The jail scenes become a television reality program, with entire pages pulled from any number Science Fiction pulp stories. The trip to Mexico seems to come straight out of a Robert Rodriguez movie. The dialogue is derivative of South Park with a British slant to the expressions rather than the Texan one that it should have.

Unfortunately, South Park has more intelligent and relevant satire, as well as funnier dialogue.

How this novel was ever chosen as the Booker Prize winner for 2003, I have no idea.

A discussion of this review can be held at the ScribeCentral.com Discussion Forums at CanadianFiction.com.

When Tall Shadows Fall

A Tonepoem
by Jerry Vilhotti

Almost all the Greek gods thought that Elysium was not
located in the Underworld but on Gaea's earth in such playing pastures
called " Youse Bums", "Aolean Winds" , "Where Polo Horses Frolic",
"Ruth's House" and "The Green Monster" where Zeus found his beloved Bambino
only to have him sold away for a Broadway play entitled "Moodanda
Nanette" that so angered the great god, beaner of his father Kronus, that he
put a curse on the Beantowners not allowing them to win another World
Serious in many years in this thing stolen from mortals who once dyed
their bodies blue.

"So tell me Prometheus, liver-pecked one, this writer, who is
depicting us watching this thing below our feet and for the first time is
going for the Bloodsox, what does he mean when he says: 'Most everyone
will accept a lie as a truth if given half-truths so fooling all the
people all the time if done a bit at a time'?"

"Depends, Your Penetrater One, on how you define dumb? Einstein
said: 'two things are infinite the universe and humanity's stupidity and
I'm not sure about the universe'. If one calls great crimes against
humanity and says it's good and has countless ways to justify it - will
not that lie become truth? For instance, if one steals land from a
people and calls them just stupid heathen scalpers and leaves out the fact
he taught them to scalp and to boot gave them small-pox laden blankets
as gifts for them to die in and then begins the process of ridiculing
them in cartoon fashion and then makes them menacing creatures at the
ready to rape all his roving-eyed women and then lastly renders them as a
totally disgusting thing - he has successfully dismissed them from the
human race! Look at that one head cave dweller having his third limb
carrier who is supposed to be the best limbswinger in the club-mortal
lineup has him bunt instead of going for a big scoring round!"

While the god who gave humanity fire was speaking two other gods
betting against each other almost drove a pitcher insane after he
fashioned a sack on whack and after awhile found himself on third sack -
unaccustomed to such unknown territory - was attacked in each ear with one
god telling him to go when the earthchewer was sculpted as the other
god was shouting that he should stay put and hug the rye sack; so
confused the mound mortal was that he kept going back and forth until
mercifully a pellet-holder tagged him for a getout which prevented a possible
avalanche of pentagon dents to happen; beginning the end of the bird's
comeback flight.

It was then - since Zeus acquiesced and allowed the incident to
happen - all the Greek gods watching from their mountain perch knew that
the hex "Babe's Curse" the omnipotent one had placed on the Beantowners
was finally done away with and the green monster mortals would win a
World Serious that was alluding them since Zeus's great Babe had been
with them many many years before. Now the poor fanatics who loved pain
could sigh a sigh of relief. Their tall shadows had fallen.

END