Reading the World
A Global Journey Through Literature
  • Home
  • Blog
  • MEDIA
  • Rules

Magical, mystical but ultimately muddled: ‘Night Moves’ keeps the reader in the dark…

10/28/2019

0 Comments

 
Richard Van Camp is a rare native Dogrib Dene Canadian storyteller who is one of the few to write about the magic, medicine and mundanity of the Canadian North. In his latest book ‘Night Moves’ many of these stories are interwoven with some of Van Camp’s previous works.

Recurring characters feed into a larger meta-story, a vast project Van Camp admits he hasn’t fully fleshed out yet. And to be honest, it shows. Episodes bounce around in past and future, reflecting perhaps Van Camp’s love of comic books, offering multiple points to delve into character arcs. But Van Camp’s real drive is to be more ambitious. He wants to be “the Stephen King of world indigenous literature…

“It is this galaxy that’s waiting to unfold. All these characters are part of something bigger, and what it is, I haven’t quite figured it out yet.”


I can’t help wishing he’d figured it out before putting pen to paper here…

There are positives, the first half of the book is curious and engaging; the ambiguity and sense of ‘otherness’ working to Van Camp’s prose style in a way that echoes Ben Okri. Also, before the book falls off a cliff in subsequent stories, the smaller nods to northern life really connect. Characters point with their lips. One receives a “northern baptism” — a first stolen bike — though there are many types of northern baptisms, Van Camp notes. Two stories allude to a moose’s Bible, the arrangement of leaves used in divination ceremonies to ask questions of the Creator, all this sense of timeless mysticism is overlaid with a more modern
frontier-type mentality…

Ronny, the narrator of the opening short story, “bornagirl,” remarks on the denizens of Fort Smith (aka Fort Simmer) in the Northwest Territories, the “Métis capital of the north,” “They say Fort Smith is home to the rough and ruthless and the tough and toothless”. Readers of Van Camp’s previous works will likely recall the roughness and toughness of his usually teenage and young adult characters, depicted in the rather hard-shell exteriors they put on to mask their insecurities, weaknesses, frailties, and even human decencies. To term it macho posturing would be inaccurate, as often female characters succumb to such poses. Perhaps it’s merely adolescent angst, unmercifully turned up a few degrees (ironically) in the frigid Northwest. Of course, beyond the harsh, yet often beautiful, landscape are the brutal realities that filter into a number of Van Camp’s adult works: violence, sexual abuse, and self-hatred.

In “bornagirl,” a tough opening to this collection, the narrating Ronny confesses his role in the physical abuse of a transgender Brian; in “Blood Rides the Wind,” Bear (another first-person narrator) returns to Fort Simmer a week early ostensibly for his final year of school, but he is actually seeking revenge for the sexual molestation of his cousin Wendy; and in “Because of What I Did,” Flinch (aka Radar) is the threatening bear of a man (sometimes called “The Finisher”) who is troubled by his own capacity for violence. Yet each of these stories holds some redemption for the narrating protagonist, as Ronny faces his own misunderstandings about his own sexual longings, Bear finds a way to avoid being the Dogrib “ninja” he reluctantly set out to be, and Flinch helps rescue a girl from Lester who used “black medicine” to bewitch her into replacing his deceased wife.

Most, but not all, of the eleven stories have first-person narrators, but not all of them exclusively feature teenage characters. One of the strangest, more mysterious stories, “Skull.Full.Of.Rust,” is the lone second-person narrative. It involves a young man who, due to his special talent or gift, becomes one of the “Sniffers” for the CIA, looping state enemy’s minds into a constantly repeating hell, or elimating their memories all together. Mystery abounds in “I Double Dogrib Dare You,” in which Valentina is a “witch” (or is she a “Holy Woman”?) who returns to Fort Simmer for her twentieth anniversary high school reunion but hasn’t aged a day since (or since a photo was taken of her in 1921). Despite the ambiguity of these two stories, they are unsettling, yet oddly satisfying.

As is the case with most short story collections. 'Night Moves' is a mixed bag. Crow is a sort of medicine woman in the previously mentioned “Because of What I Did” who is tasked with, among other things, bringing the young woman Lester has abducted back into reality. But for some reason, Van Camp follows that with a “story” entitled “Crow” that offers one and a half pages of first-person Crow observations. It serves to a certain extent as a coda to the preceding story, but there is not really enough there to term it a separately titled story. “Crow” seems a tossed-off fragment.

On the one hand, this tendency is a side effect of Van Camp's style, which incorporates oral-history techniques. In many stories, like the post-apocalyptic Wheetago War, this approach works exceptionally well.

"We are the new Dene. I see this every day. I was born after the twinning of the sun and in the haunted way of the Dog People... I sometimes wake up a girl; I sometimes wake up a boy." What's happening here? What was "the twinning of the sun?" It doesn't matter. The resulting confusion enhances the chaotic experience of this ruined world, immersing the reader.

On the other hand, and in other stories, his approach weakens the material, since Van Camp doesn't commit to it. When he is more heavily drawing on European literary models, the confusion undermines his otherwise considerable strengths and leads him towards clichés and lazy prose. The overlong ”If only tonight…” – whilst gaining my approval by being named after a song by The Cure – takes this stilted approach to an almost embarrassing extreme. It is an attempt at eroticism in a drunken evening between two couples (one having just had a miscarriage, the other woman having been left by her husband upon diagnosis with breast cancer), which appears to be veering towards the sexual. However, not only is the situation clumsy but the language, rather than seductive, is blunt and mannered; graphic description of fantasy substituted for nuance. I’m not sure what Van Camp is aiming for here, but his writing suddenly becomes stilted and forced, the end result being about as erotic as a brick…

Van Camp's failings are a genuine shame since there appears to be nobody else writing about this area and this experience. Van Camp is often cited as the world's first published Dogrib author; but that doesn’t make him a great writer by default.

Like this collection, Van Camp seems more to me to be a work in progress… there is talent here, but at the moment it is lost in the wilderness.

So, with a sense of disappointment and not a little bemusement, I head south, crossing by train into Alberta; a province itself but in regional terms one of three provinces that make up the southern Prairie Provinces. Whilst I’ll be visiting the city of Calvary on this trip, I first make my way to the rather more modest town of Drumheller, population 8000, to make the acquaintance of Joey Cooper; a fortysomething mechanic, divorcee and wannabe cello-player in Ivan E Coyote’s celebrated novel ‘Bow Grip’.
Picture
0 Comments

A Stationary Life in Vancouver: Looking for Meaning in Aisle 3

10/25/2019

0 Comments

 
‘The Gum Thief’ is classic Douglas Coupland, the man who coined the term Generation X for the disenfranchised post-War baby-boomers of the tail-end of the twentieth century. His characters are young and disaffected – they have opted out of modern life because, well, if modern life is cloning, carbon footprints and "Sno-Kone cellulite", what kind of sane person would opt in? "Just because you've been born and made it through high school doesn't mean society can't still abort you," says Bethany, the teen-goth and co-protagonist, contemplating the rejects in her workplace – a carbon copy Vancouver, British Columbia, branch of international brand Staples, home of office stationary.

But don't think that this is a novel about how modern life is rubbish, and we're all going to cop out and live our lives through SnapChat instead. It is much more hopeful, more touching and more Couplandesque than that. When Bethany writes those words, it is actually Roger – her middle-aged dropout colleague – writing in her voice. This is a novel so postmodern that it has disappeared up its own irony and come out on the other side.

In anyone else's hands, it could read like an environmental treatise by Extinction Rebellion translated by a teenage dropout after 17 vodka Red Bulls. But Coupland's skill is in his love of the ridiculous, like a schoolboy whose words make him giggle. His books are essentially pointless. But, ironically, their very point lies in demonstrating modern life’s pointlessness. If R. D. Laing had ever got around to writing a novel I suspect it would be very similar to this…

Essentially, Roger is an "aisle associate" embracing alcoholism, contemplating the scientific theory that humans are evolving into two separate species (successful ones and superstore staff) and writing in his breaks. When Bethany finds his notebook and jottings "by Bethany", she writes back, and an unlikely unspoken friendship develops. "You're walking around these aisles imagining yourself into me," she writes, and he is – but not in a pervy way. Instead, they are each other's muse, and each other's salvation.

Roger is also writing a novel (Glove Pond), which begins "Gloria and Steve were being drunk and witty" and includes some gloriously stupid lines. But when two of the characters turn out to be writers working on books set in stationery stores, you begin to lose track of which way is up. Who is the author? Does Bethany exist? Does she really think all Brits live in Hampstead and subsist on pre-packaged sandwiches? The occasional interjections in the notebook in the form of transcribed letters by Dee Dee, Bethany’s mother, and Joan, Roger highly estranged ex-wife, serve to clarify the narrative and muddy the waters in equal measure. The enclosed critique of Roger's book by a patronising creative-writing teacher, is a also nice touch. Its tone, he says, is too "smug".

Coupland's novel is anything but smug. Readers will either love or hate his glib style-switching and self-referencing, but there are lines that couldn't fail to move the most hardened Coupland-phobe. Bethany, dumped by her boyfriend, says: "I remember in elementary class walking home once, and this car ran into a cherry tree and all its petals fell at once. That's me right now."

When the loser colleagues in Staples find Roger's notebook they torment him but are a little impressed. "It's weird seeing your everyday reality... turned into a book," says Shawn. "Suddenly it's not stupid and dreamless any more, it becomes different." Our outrage at this and pity at Roger’s humiliation and isolation here (Bethany is on an ill-advised trip to London), surprise us somewhat in our sympathy and empathy for Roger, making his ascent from loser alcoholic to narrative hero of sorts complete – he is a failure in many ways but he is, ultimately, trying to be true to himself in the face of a narcissistic and uncaring society.

​Perhaps there is hope for the Staples Generation, after all.

Picture
0 Comments

Canada - A Quick Geography Lesson

10/22/2019

0 Comments

 
In my last post I mentioned that I was still debating how to fairly split up Canada into regions for my journey - this is, after all, the fourth largest country in the world!

The country itself is split up into thirteen political regions - ten provinces and three territories - which form the overall Commonwealth of Canada, in a similar vein to Australia. However, thirteen is no small amount, and as with Russian, US and China I have instead decided to use the five regions, essentially blocks of provinces, that Canada is often divided into, geographically, culturally and politically - rather than the smaller and more numerous states.

These are broadly, from the east to the west; British Columbia, the Prairie Provinces, the vast North - the greatest landlass of the five regions but the lowest populated, largely by indigenous Canadian - first nations, Inuit and Metis. Then comes Ontario, the franophone Quebec, and finally the Atlantic Provinces. I have landed in Vancouver courtesy of Douglas Copeland's 'The Gum Thief' (review soon) and shall zig-zag across Canada's regions - stopping off twice in the largest regions - the Prairie Provinces (Saskatchewan and Alberta) and the North (Northwest Territories and then, as a final stop; Nunavet; which will take me neatly near to the coast of Greenland as I leave Canada). Make sense? If not, don't worry, take a look at the map below, sit back, and just enjoy the journey....
Picture
0 Comments

Alaskan Awakening: the Wild Within and the Wild Without in the Last American Frontier

10/18/2019

0 Comments

 
“I learned in school that blood has a memory. It carries information that makes you who you are. That’s how my brother and me ended up with so much in common, we both carried inside us the things our parents’ blood remembered. Sharing what’s in the blood, that’s as close as you can be to another person.”

Novel, mystery, thriller tinged with a touch of horror: The Wild Inside is all of these. In her first book, Jamey Bradbury carefully balances genres to craft an intriguing drama set against the backdrop of the Iditarod (an annual long-distance sled dog race run in early March from Anchorage to Nome, entirely within Alaska) and the Alaskan wilderness. The bleak Alaskan tundra, and the subtle hints at the werewolf tradition in this final stop in the USA makes an interesting counterpoint to the bleak Siberian wastelands and folklore of my arrival in Russia back in 2010 with Victor Pelevin’s, Sacred Book of the Werewolf. Whilst the two books aren’t comparable, they underline the proximity of this isolated American state to its vast neighbour and political opponent, just 3 miles (4.8km) away at their nearest point. It is also a poignant reminder of how, nearly a decade after I stepped onto Russian soil, my round the world odyssey is nearing a close. But time for reminiscences later…

This novel focusses on seventeen-year-old Tracy Sue Petrikoff, who is a little rough around the edges to put it mildly. A natural born trapper and hunter raised in the Alaskan wilderness, Tracy Petrikoff spends her days tracking animals and running with her dogs in the remote forests surrounding her family’s home. Though she feels safe in this untamed land, Tracy still follows her late mother’s rules: Never Lose Sight of the House. Never Come Home with Dirty Hands. And, above all else, Never Make a Person Bleed. Her mother having died, her father, in an effort to control her after she is expelled for attacking a classmate, grounds Tracy, forbidding her from doing everything she loves: caring for their sled dogs, going out into the woods, hunting — and racing in the Iditarod.

For Tracy, this is a life-threatening sentence. Driven by an unrelenting hunger and facilitated by a feral skill at trapping, she doesn’t just crave being outdoors, she needs it.
“I had learned pretty quick that a couple days without going into the woods put me out of sorts…If I went too long without hunting, my belly ached something awful and my muscles went all trembly. I felt weak.”

Tracy has inherited these characteristics from her mother, whose death is shrouded in mystery. Their relationship is integral to the book as Bradbury discretely pieces together mother and daughter to reveal a supernatural trait that binds and burdens them:

“Some learning, I had got from books…The other kind of learning, you drink it in, too. It’s warm and it spreads through you, wakes up your muscles and sharpens your mind, and you can see clearly, not just with your eyes but with your whole self, and then you know what you didn’t before. How a squirrel plans its route from branch to branch. How a mouse will hear you before it ever sees you. How a snowshoe hare knows to run in a zigzag, not in a straight line, to confuse its predator.”

When her father isn’t watching, Tracy breaks for the woods to check her traps and is suddenly attacked by a stranger. Though she escapes, the stranger stumbles into the yard of their home a few days later, bleeding heavily from stab wounds.

Haunted by what she might have done, Tracy returns to the clearing where she was attacked and discovers a pack left behind containing enough money to enter the Iditarod. So begins a series of events that unravels Tracy’s life.

In steps Jesse, a boy about Tracy’s age, looking for work and bearing his own secrets. At first, Tracy is suspicious of him, seeing him as an intruder until she pries Jesse’s history from him and uncovers a connection between them - the stranger. As Tracy and Jesse’s affection for one another grows, Tracy’s fear of the stranger develops into obsession, leading to a tragic misjudgement.

Tracy’s actions may shock, anger, even repulse. The theme of blood is recurrent here interlinking her feral need of animal blood - preferably as it dies - of things needing to be kept to herself alone. The blood motif carries through to her own development into womanhood, her first menstruation coming with fear, confusion on her part, and embarrassment on her widowed father’s; a progression underlined by her qualification from the junior to the adult Iditarod that year – and of course her growing feelings for Jesse. A nod to the Angela Carter/Neil Jordan film “The Company of Wolves” perhaps? In the end, though, she is just a young girl aching for her mother. She searches her memory, recalling conversations and conjuring her image, trying to understand what her mother gave to her:

“I didn’t know I was crying till a sob wrenched itself from me. I covered my face and wept, aching for her. Aching after her. She was just a few feet from me, close enough for me to ask her anything, but I didn’t have no more questions. I only wanted to tell her to stay.”

What does it mean to be wild? This question pulsates throughout The Wild Inside as tension builds and the plot twists and gyrates to an unpredictable ending. Narrated primarily in first person by Tracy, Bradbury chooses to let the story unfold through dialogue between the characters while leaving some details to the reader’s imagination.

There is barely any physical description of the characters outside of “Scott and me both with Mom’s dark hair, Dad’s brown eyes.” Brief descriptions of the landscape paint a black-and-white picture of Alaska, adding a sinister tone to the book.

Bradbury’s prose shines brightest when describing the exhilaration Tracy feels when she becomes part of someone or something she is close to:

“I took Su [one of her dogs] in and bounded down the snowy trail, and the delight that flooded my body was complete and overwhelming, pure, undiluted happiness. I felt the tug of the harness and saw no other dogs in front of me, felt the whole team watching as I led. I bolted my food, barely tasting it, and I scratched at my own ears, and I napped in front of the woodstove and in piles of my brothers and sisters and teammates. I watched white snow fall across the black-and-grey world and the frigid air sent a shot of electricity through me, and I howled, the only way to give voice to my want.”

Those anticipating an adventure novel about the Iditarod will have to find it elsewhere – and Jack London this is not. But those who thrive on the unexpected won’t be disappointed. The Wild Inside is a compelling mystery and suspense-filled thriller that, in getting inside the isolated and feral mind of Tracy give us a glimpse into the character of Alaska itself…

I now leave the US of A (just in time some might say!) and continue onward into it’s massive northern cousin, Canada, similar in size to the US (the fourth largest country in the world by landmass) yet with only 10% of the US population. As with other massive countries, in deference to its size, I shall be reading a selection of books set across Canada. I am currently debating whether to go with regions or provinces and will update on the outcome very soon! 

Picture
0 Comments

Hawaii: Paradise Lost in the Fiftieth State

10/13/2019

0 Comments

 
This book by Mark Panek is a sweeping epic tale about the modern Hawai‘i that islanders live in, the one they call their home, the one that is getting harder to live in every day, one that many of them scrape by in to survive.
 
Hawai‘i takes place in the political vacuum of a recently deceased, nine-term United States Senator. With the formerly entrenched system of good-ol-boy mainland US sinecure up in the air, and Hawai‘i becoming a place where their best and brightest are forced to leave in order to thrive; and a collection of local characters who remain - on convergent paths aiming to improve their lot and their vision of Hawai‘i’s future.
 
The story is told primarily from the perspective of these characters—Russell Lee, a Hawaiian state senate president; Kekoa Meyer, a smart, middle-aged Hawaiian thug; Makana Irving-Kekumu, a Hawaiian studies professor and activist; and Sean Hayashi, a young real-estate developer. These four unique individuals from vastly different backgrounds, who all have great personal ambition, in essence ultimately want the same thing despite their conflicting views on how to get there and the impact it will have.
 
The crux of the story revolves around the potential development of a resort-like property near Kahuku by a billionaire Chinese casino mogul. Lee, who is racked by gambling debts, goes “all-in” with the project to cover his obligations and serve as his launching pad to the Governor’s office. The rest of the main cast provide varying outlooks of the support, opposition, backdoor politics and cutthroat competition involved in a potential billion-dollar real-estate deal and legislative gamble that could potentially change the face of Hawai‘i. Local gang leader forms an interesting counterpoint to Lee – equally opportunistic and ruthless in his own way; covering his actions with a veneer of Hawai-ian community credentials (just a Lee talks up the Chinese deal in terms of financial and cultural benefits to Hawai-i).
 
This is the kind of book that, despite its size, once picked up is difficult to put down. The story and all its complementary pieces are so enthralling—full of insider deals, backstabbing, and genuine local-boy moments that are described brilliantly by Panek. One of the things this book does really well, and in some ways sadistically so, is the scathing undressing of people living in and visiting Hawai‘i. Whether it’s the prissy Niu Valley religious girl with a kinky secret; the union-protected local-Japanese state-worker-lifer; or some trust-fund, Reyn Spooner Aloha shirt wearing California haole; the observations are plentiful, brutally honest, and viciously humorous in their meticulous portrayal. Maybe they are a bit stereotypical, and it’s all in the eye of the beholder, but they’re so accurate in the minute details that you can’t help but smirk, even if it’s describing you.

There is also a deep cast of well-fleshed supporting characters, and the book works extremely well when all of these people interact with one another, slowly discovering each others’ strengths, weaknesses and desires. Ambitious in scope, Hawai‘i takes on a wide-range of people, social structures and topics, either directly or through keen commentary. From the power of the Mormon influence in Hawai’i, to the mainland millionaires who raise property values on their second-or-third Hawai‘i homes, to the UH football obsession that blinds them from the sinister plots happening in their own backyard, to Hawaiian rights activists who forgo success and money to take principled yet doomed stands against developments, Panek skillfully brings the many troubled facets of New Hawai‘i together into a coherent and thrilling story.
 
Mark Panek  has often been to compared to Tom Wolfe in his depiction of corporate a/immorality (note ‘Bonfire of the Vanities’) and indeed here Panek has truly crafted an epic tale painting Hawai‘i as a flawed Eden, a paradise with scars dug deep into the land. The book is unafraid to dig into the scabs, re-open the wounds, and show the colour of the blood inside. It’s a story encompassing power, revealing the racial tensions, socioeconomic disparity, outsider influences, and local-boy politics that control the land they live on.
 
As such, I am much more minded to compare his writing to James Elroy – in the way in which Elroy brings together seemingly impossibly complex plot arcs with characters who may or may not be fictional to show us the seedy side of the American Dream (note ‘American Tabloid’ and ‘The Cold Six Thousand’).
 
That said, this is not a novel without flaws. Panek sets himself up with a narrative of characters with wildly different agendas, leading to interspersed plot lines that keep pushing forward in a complex but never confusing power play. Yet, for a 580 page work the pay off is a little too flat: after a dramatic build up regarding the all-important passing of a contentious Gambling bill to allow a massive development occur and propel Lee to the Governorship, we are left with a handful of pages that tie up some loose ends, ignore others and leave some hanging – all narrated by a bit player in the rest of the novel. The final scene, against this too-convenient ending, loses what should have been the ultimate denouement of the novel – political, social, economic and personal.

Ultimately though a well written, thoughtful and affecting novel that, whilst focusing on the denigration of Hawai’s paradise and it’s indigenous people by global corporate forces, is a parable of a new form of colonisation happening across the globe – from aborigines, to native Americans, from Inuit to disenfranchised local communities everywhere…  
 
In leaving arguably the most isolated state in the USA, I take the six-hour non-stop flight from Honolulu to Alaska – another contender for the most isolated state: also separated from the US (by land), but also from the global tourist developments plaguing Hawai’i. Having read the first few chapters of the book ‘The Wild Inside’ by Jamey Bradbury, one gets a sense of the Alaskan wilderness as the end of the world, untouched by the dubious attentions of globalisation…

 
Picture
0 Comments

    Author

    Reading the World: A Global Journey through Literature

    Archives

    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    December 2017
    November 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    June 2015
    May 2015
    March 2015
    December 2014
    September 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    November 2012

    Categories

    All
    2012
    2013
    2014
    2015
    2018
    2019
    Africa
    Asia
    China
    General
    USA

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.