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The Space Between Us: Six Metres of Pavement in a Toronto Suburb

11/11/2019

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[A bit of a milestone here – book number 300 of my Reading the World voyage! Only 19 more to go….]

I’m sure, being honest, every parent or custodian of a toddler has experienced moments of lapsed focus while caring for their little ones.


Distractions are all around. A ring tone, the doorbell, a hectic schedule, and the next thing you know, your charge has shovelled sand into their mouths, are teetering precariously on the top step, has sprained an ankle jumping into a shallow pool (that was my lapse!) or worse.


When it comes to toddler care, distractions happen. In most cases, thankfully, tragedy is averted. Scolding themselves, parents pledge to keep a closer eye and then move on.

But what happens when tragedy isn't averted, and the guilt-ridden parent can't move on? This is the subject of Farzana Doctor's excruciatingly honest, yet matter of fact second novel, Six Metres of Pavement.

Life was good for new father and husband Ismail Boxwala until one warm summer morning in Toronto when, through a change in routine, he inadvertently forgot Zubi, his snoozing 18-month-old, strapped into her car seat. After hours in the baking sun, the vehicle's interior becomes superheated. Zubi suffers heat stroke and perishes.


This single moment of inattention all but destroys Ismail's life. Overwhelmed by causing Zubi's death, 20 years on
,
Ismail has experienced only a "complicated, incomplete healing." Resolution finally begins when Ismail has two chance encounters, one with the newly widowed Celia Sousa, the other with Fatima Khan, a university student caught in the throes of domestic turmoil. In restoring themselves, this unlikely threesome must start to face their pasts, their emotional issues.

To Doctor's credit, the characters come across as genuine, to the point of mundanity despite each one’s traumatic past and present. Ismail Boxwala is an alcoholic, middle-aged engineer working for the City of Toronto. The once budding family man now spends his days filled with regret, slogging despondently between work, home, and the neighbourhood bar. Then he meets Celia, the Portuguese widow who’s moved in across the street. Celia suffers from her own tragedy: she lost her husband and then found out he’d gambled away all their money. At 50, she realizes she’s lost herself as well; relegated to mourning black and living under sufferance in her married daughter’s converted basement.


Ismail and Celia’s problems begin to disappear as soon as they finally connect, after spying on each other for almost a year. Celia trades in her black widow’s garb for sexy colours and says goodbye to the hallucinations she’s been having of her dead husband. Likewise, Ismail stops frequenting his local bar. “He didn’t step foot into the Merry Pint once and he didn’t miss it,” Doctor writes. “Instead, he courted Celia.”


When he takes the young and troubled Fatima Khan under his wing – she having been disowned by her parents for coming out as gay in an article in her college magazine, bringing ‘shame’ on them – the strange, ramshackle but somehow workable family-type unit is complete.


Unfortunately, Doctor’s simplistic take on the nature of addiction and how people recover from tragedy is hackneyed and, in many cases doesn’t ring true. There is a strangely muted feel to the narrative – especially filtered through that of the rather staid, but good-natured Ishmail. Whilst it may reflect his emotional numbness through trauma it is strangely distancing, like seeing the world from behind dim glass.


The novel’s other glaring flaw is its conspicuously inapt diction. There’s overdressed prose and distracting metaphor aplenty: spring doesn’t start, it “asserts itself”; Ismail and his ex-wife “choke on their own unexpressed words”; sex is “an egalitarian round of strip poker.”


​In the last 100 pages, Doctor takes each of the novel’s loose ends and rather conveniently ties them up in their various unconventional ways. Whilst I am not against resolutions in novels, the ending feels just too perfect, too tidy, too impossible. With it, Doctor betrays the power and potential of her own premise.
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Cold Hands: Freezing Weather and Chilling Events in the Saskatchewan Snow

11/4/2019

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Cold Hands opens in present-day Florida, our narrator clearly a haunted man, forced to relive his horrors in writing by his therapist, because "it might help if I could stand to write it all down". He's scarred, grey-haired, exhausted – and then we shift to the snowy plains of Saskatchewan, Canada, two years earlier.

Donnie wants to be a screenwriter but actually writes fawning film reviews for the local paper, run by his wife, Sammy. They are rich, complacent, happy, but their son, Walt, is upset because their dog is lost. "We'll start with the dog," Donnie tells us, and we do: Herby is found in the snow, utterly eviscerated, and the tension ratchets up to screaming point from there, as snow and menace and murder gather outside their perfect home.

Donnie's first-person narrative is, rather obviously, scattered with literary asides: he has read Updike and Ballard, has learned – we are told in case we haven't got "the message" – about "ironic distance" and the "unreliable narrator". This is to make the contrast with the interspersed story of young Donnie, uneducated, dirt poor, and part, as a child growing up in Scotland, of something Very, Very Bad. Is the past he thought he'd left behind catching up with him? Well, yes, in the tradition of many a good thriller, it just might be. The Henry VI quote used as an epigraph – "if I digged up thy forefathers' graves, and hung their rotten coffins up in chains, it could not slake mine ire, nor ease my heart" – is very apt here.

Niven knows how to write a haunting, suspenseful and disturbing story. His big "reveal" is not the most surprising however, and his writing and metaphors  are occasionally rather clunky (Walt's "mittens dangled on strings from his sleeves, hung men, ghost hands echoing the real ones").

Ultimately though, for me, the change of gear in Cold Hands – from psychological study in guilt and paranoia to all-out violence – is too abrupt; as if Niven got to a point where he’d exhausted the notions of past and reinvention, and so decided instead to go full-on bonkers with the second half of the novel.

There are wilfully sadistic scenes here, with Donnie’s desperation to protect his family against impossible odds reminiscent of the equally disturbing Austrian movie Funny Games… and it is here that the Canadian wilderness comes into its own, as the characters find themselves playing out the denouement in a remote cabin, in the middle of a night-time blizzard that even helicopters struggle to reach…

All in all an okay thriller if you like that sort of thing, that plays out as expected. Trainspotting author and fellow Scot Irvine Welsh, declared it to be the "most cleverly constructed and incendiary thriller" he's ever read in the publisher's blurb. Really? I think Welsh must have imbibed some of the substances his protagonists are so fond of when he wrote that…

Right now, I push on eastwards, to Toronto in the Ontario Province. This is a stark contract to the remote wilderness settings previously explored, being the most populous city in Canada at nearly three million (indeed it is often mistaken for Canada’s capital, which is actually Ottowa).

Rather than a pricey three days bus/train trip I get a direct flight from Regina straight to Toronto in just three hours. I shall spend my time in Toronto courtesy of the novel Six Metres of Pavement by Farzana Doctor, winner of the 2012 LAMBDA Literary Award for Best Lesbian Fiction and of the 2011 Rainbow Awards. A sense of the novel can be found in this Library Thing review:

“Six Metres of Pavement tells the story of divorced Ismail Boxwala, who continues to struggle with the role he played in his daughter's accidental death two decades ago. He drinks too much, and is largely isolated from his community. Slowly, he regains happiness through two women: Fatima, a young woman shunned by her family because of her sexual orientation, and Celia, a widow who moves in with her daughter across the street. This is a story about friendship and chosen families.”

It sounds like an interesting and poignant set of character studies. We shall see…
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One Man’s Search for Peace Amongst Old Flames, New Friends and an Antique Cello… 'Bow Grip' is A Heart-Warming Tale from Icy Alberta.

11/3/2019

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Ivan E. Coyote is acclaimed as one of North America's most engaging storytellers; her honest, down-to-earth tales, many of which are based on personal experience, are compelling for their simple human truths.
 
Bow Grip, Ivan's long-awaited first novel, is a poignant story about love and loneliness, and the long road one must travel between them. Joey is a good-hearted fortysomething mechanic from small-town Drumheller (population 8,000) in Alberta, whose wife has recently left him for another woman. When a stranger named James approaches his shop and agrees to purchase a beat-up blue Volvo in exchange for a beautiful, hand-crafted cello, Joey sees it as an opportunity to finally make some overdue changes in his life (and stave off his mother's threats to put him on Prozac if we doesn't find a hobby)..
 
But some troubling suspicions about James, and a desire to close the door on his failed marriage, compels Joey to hit the road and travel to Calgary, the big city by the Bow River, with the cello in tow.

His wife and her new partner live there and he has some belongings to drop off for her – all very civilised but we sense a certain sense of restraint and hurt here, of hankering for lost past, lost love – that culminates in a panic attack at their bohemian apartment and necessitates a longer stay whilst he recuperates.

He stations himself at a rundown motel, where he struggles to learn how to play the cello. His interactions with the fellow flotsam and jetsam of the motel tenants form a human core of this novel - strangers with their own complicated pasts - an older gay man, a single mother struggling to make ends meet - become confidants, as does a brash young goth trained in classical cello who takes on his tuition and the sister of the taciturn James, whose own pain is finally revealed.

With a certain understated narrative flow, Bow Grip is about one man's existential rite of passage - trying to keep the ghosts of personal history at bay with a heart that's as big as the endless Canadian prairie sky. If ends are left loose and the resolution seems ambiguous that can be forgiven of this debut novelist who writes with a big heart herself.
 
From a warm heart to Cold Hands now , as I venture further east by train then bus through the Prairie Provinces, over the border into Saskatchewan province. Cold Hands is a dark psychological thriller by Scottish writer John Niven; a cautionary tale of how the past always catches up with, no matter how far we run, as we carry it inside us.

If a recent Guardian review is to be credited: “there are patches of Cold Hands that are almost impossible to get through, they are so disturbing. It's the kind of book to read at high speed, biting your nails, desperate to reach the end and extricate yourself from the horrifying situations in which the characters have found themselves,” then we are in for a truly freezing excursion into the Canadian wilderness!
 

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

10/28/2019

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

10/25/2019

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‘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.

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Canada - A Quick Geography Lesson

10/22/2019

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

10/18/2019

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“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! 

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Hawaii: Paradise Lost in the Fiftieth State

10/13/2019

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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…

 
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Hollywood Flop:  Bret Easton Ellis’ ‘Imperial Bedrooms’ fails to measure up…

9/25/2019

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I wanted to like this book, I really did. As part of the 80s generation “Less Than Zero” by Bret Easton Ellis was required reading. If you didn’t like it, you were condemned as a cultural leper, or worse missing the irony – a fate worse than social death.

And it starts well enough, with an interesting metafictional twist: “They had made a movie about us,” Bret Easton Ellis’s new book begins, and of course, they did. The movie, it should go without saying, is the film version of “Less Than Zero,” Ellis’s headline-­grabbing 1985 debut. Neither the book nor the movie is named, but titles aren’t necessary, for here are the old familiar names: Blair, Julian, Trent — and Clay, the narrator of that novel and this one, “Imperial Bedrooms,” which takes up their stories a quarter of a century on. So there’s a neat, postmodern, self-­referential beginning, with Clay, the cool observer of his own actions and feelings — or lack of them — observing himself being observed, an acknowledgement that his version of the story may be only one of many.

So what happened to all these people? You could make a cynical argument that sequels are written for the most banal of reasons, to continue a franchise or revive interest in a flagging brand - the “Star Wars” effect. But when authors create memorable characters it’s usually because they can’t help themselves. Imaginary people become lodged in the creator’s consciousness; it can be hard to get them to leave. At any event, Ellis’s work has always been stitched with cross-reference and self-­reference, threaded through with a sense that the boundary between fantasy and reality is disturbingly fragile. It’s what makes his work, at its best (e.g. “Lunar Park”}, so striking. I can well believe this nostalgic ‘whatever happened to…?’ fascination sparked off “Imperial Bedrooms.”

But tragically the resulting novel falls flat. For what starts off neat swiftly becomes pat, lazy and effortful all at once. There is a story here, of sorts. “The real Julian Wells didn’t die in a cherry-red convertible, overdosing on a highway in Joshua Tree while a choir soared over the soundtrack. The real Julian Wells was murdered over 20 years later, his body dumped behind an abandoned apartment building in Los Feliz after he had been tortured to death at another location.” So it’s quite a conventional story, really: Who killed Julian Wells? That’s the thin narrative path the novel wanders. As in “Less Than Zero,” Clay has come home at Christmastime. He is now a screenwriter, back in Los Angeles to oversee the casting of a movie he’s written. “This is the official reason why I’m in L.A. But, really, coming back to the city is an excuse to escape New York and whatever had happened to me there that fall.”

That “whatever” is an echo of the weirdly unexplained nothingness that made “Less Than Zero” such a startling, powerful book. Ellis’s first novel has that “Catcher in the Rye,” “Bell Jar” trick, the ability to make something from nothing, to let a willed lack of emotion stand in for emotion. It reveals the void at the heart of a culture obsessed by surface — a culture that in the intervening years has become the norm. It was Ellis’s gift, or curse, to know that it would. There are no mobile phones in “Less Than Zero,” and the Betamax machine is a thrilling new technology. But young Clay’s Christmas break back home in Los Angeles now seems like a premonition of the emptiness that is almost inescapable today: online, on television, on your iPhone. The violence at the end of “Less Than Zero” is shocking; and it shocks Clay, too, though the most he can muster is “I don’t think it’s right.”

Nothing can shock Clay 25 years later. Does that surprise you? Are you, indeed, surprised that Julian ends up dead? No, neither was I. Julian trying to wheedle money out of Clay to pay for an abortion in “Less Than Zero” becomes Julian who owes money to Blair (“Well, 70 grand, but for him that’s a lot of money”). Nobody changes, not really. Rip, Clay’s dealer, has had a lot of plastic surgery: “His face is unnaturally smooth, redone in such a way that the eyes are shocked open with perpetual surprise; it’s a face mimicking a face, and it looks agonized. The lips are too thick. The skin’s orange. The hair is dyed yellow and carefully gelled. He looks like he’s been quickly dipped in acid; things fell off, skin was removed. It’s almost defiantly grotesque.” Like Martin Amis, Ellis still has a flair for such perfect, surreal description. But, again like Amis, he can struggle to set it in an effective context. The plot — the trajectory toward Julian’s death, Clay’s obsession with a girl who may or may not be called Rain Turner, the threatening texts he receives from blocked numbers that say things like “I’m watching you” — is a clunking plot, more distracting than engaging...

“Imperial Bedrooms” is more violent than “Less Than Zero.” It goes without saying, I suppose, that’s it’s not as violent as “American Psycho,” but it is infused with the same toxicity. Toward the end of the novel, Clay buys himself a boy and a girl: “The girl was impossibly beautiful — the Bible Belt, Memphis — and the boy was from Australia and had modelled for Abercrombie & Fitch.” He does terrible things to them, and makes them do terrible things to each other. Why? Maybe because, as Clay himself admits, “I never liked anyone and I’m afraid of people.” Didn’t we know that already? The reader has to wonder what Ellis is trying to prove. That people numbed by the poison of a society based solely on money, fame and beauty are capable of practically anything? If that’s not news to us it’s thanks, in large part, to Bret Easton Ellis. But what purpose can simple repetition serve?

We, the modern audience for novels like this, have gotten over being shocked. There’s nothing left. From “A Clockwork Orange” to “A Serbian Film,” and with “American Psycho” along the way, we’ve seen it all. We too have been poisoned, so that when we see pictures from Syria or from Manus Island, they appal us, perhaps, but not for long. They are part of the landscape: they are what we expect to see, and we blunt ourselves to their power in order to survive as feeling human beings. That’s not a call for a return to the past — but a skilled novelist, one who wants to examine the way we live and why, needs to move the conversation forward. The obligation is even greater if he’s returning to a world he’s depicted before.

“History repeats the old conceits, the glib replies, the same defeats,” runs one of this novel’s epigraphs, a line from Elvis Costello. So it may, but fiction doesn’t have to: that’s the point. Let’s hope Ellis figures that out if he ventures into fiction again...

From a series of recent books involving moral, cultural and emotional isolation; I travel now to a location that is literally isolated – the 50th State of America, lying 2400km from the US mainland and spread over 1200km of islands, this is of course Hawaii. However, the next book on my travel – also called “Hawai’I” by Mark Panek – deals more with a sense of community, albeit an often corrupt and morally dubious one in terms of leadership – in the face of Japanese businessmen, Samoan gangs and haole (white) tourists… a large novel but one I am looking forward to, despite the 6 hour flight from Los Angeles to Kahului, on the island of Maui.
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You Can't Go Home Again: a search for identity from the Paiute prairies to the harsh lights of Las Vegas

9/17/2019

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Hector Hidalgo is a young Mexican boxer who wants to turn professional. Only “Hector Hidalgo” doesn’t exist – he’s the persona of Horace Hopper, a 21-year-old ranch hand born to a Paiute father and an Irish mother who is desperate to escape his own stifling sense of failure. The trouble with reinventing oneself is that it involves leaving other people behind, and US novelist and musician Willy Vlautin’s fifth novel, ‘Don’t Skip Out On Me’, is a meditation on loneliness, in both the outer landscapes and the inner self.

Horace lives in Nevada on the Reese ranch, having been taken in as a teenager by Mr Reese and his wife, now in their 70s. Mr Reese wants Horace to take over the ranch but Horace feels unworthy of such trust, gnawed at by his mother’s abandonment of him, aged 12, to his Irish grandmother, who is sketched with Vlautin’s typical blunt strokes as a woman who “drank Coors light on ice from 11am until she fell asleep on the couch at nine, who chain-smoked cigarettes, who ate only frozen dinners, and who was scared of Indians, blacks and Mexicans”.

Sensitive Horace winds up “lonely and different and lost”, and it is the damage loneliness can wreak that the novel delineates so well. He witnesses the squalor that men can descend into when they are robbed of intimacy, forgetting to care for themselves and others, in the form of one of the Reese shepherds. We also sense an emptiness in Horace, who remembers unhappy events and is aware of his own uncomfortable feelings but seems to lack the ability to fully articulate them. Intriguingly, he keeps a “Log of Bad Dreams”, but sadly we are never allowed into that inner world.

Horace travels to Tucson to train as a boxer, but his lack of faith in himself threatens to derail his plans. Later, it becomes clear that Horace may be in with a chance, but despite this, to his surprise if not ours, “it seemed the closer he was to what he wanted, the more lost he became. The sinking feeling that had plagued him his entire life wasn’t going away.”

Horace’s goal may sound unachievable but it doesn’t feel that way because Vlautin is writing about ordinary people in clean, spare language. He viscerally communicates the pain and damage to the body after a fight, although this matters less than it might because the book is about identity not boxing, and it is Mr Reese, with his shining, quiet decency, who has real emotional clout. Horace’s grandmother’s callous prediction for him – “Maybe he’ll end up the town drunk … You never can tell with Indians” – is met by Mr Reese with: “Well, hopefully we’ll be an asset to the boy.”

Vlautin is big on incidental surface detail: we are told what music Horace is listening to and given detailed shopping lists and relentless menus – plates are “heaped with shrimp, cilantro, cucumber, peppers, tomatoes, onion, avocado and hot sauce”. “His favourite food besides fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy was Italian food: spaghetti, lasagne, pizza and ravioli.” This barrage of information sits oddly with an important moment in which Horace’s trust is betrayed and all we are told is that he “couldn’t believe what he had seen”.

More surprising is Mr Reese’s sudden revelation that Horace has “taught me a lot of things” and “he can get you inspired”. We do not need force-feeding to grasp that food is taking the place of love and maybe a certain self-sabotage in gorging on junk food when he should be training; we require more evidence of this ethereal young man’s apparent ability to inspire, for the drawback of Mr Reese being so finely crafted is that Horace, unavoidably perhaps, seems underdeveloped. He is attached to a self-help book on how to be a champion, but while this device adds welcome humour to what is otherwise an unremittingly bleak tale, it does not make Horace inspirational; it simply makes us feel for him more.

‘Don’t Skip Out on Me’ shines a light on the broken-down and the drifters; it is a bruising yet surprisingly tender study of the need for human connection, and the way that urban landscapes can be more isolating than any wilderness. As Horace loses himself in the city, submerging his loneliness in a deluge of TV and mac and cheese, he becomes in real danger of disappearing from his own life. As the working ranches of the Reeses’ generation die out, as wells have to be dug ever deeper to find water, a question hovers in the background: if we cast ourselves adrift from the land and nature, what then will be our anchor?

Horace’s search for identity and meaning amid the white noise of urban life feels like a curiously relevant tale for us all. The grim conclusion to such questions, in the end, become a little too unrelenting to the reader, and I left the book with an equal mix of satisfaction at a good novel but relief at walking away from this grim world.
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Next up I take the 4 hours flight from Tucson to California; where I meet – reacquaint? – with the author/narrator of a book published to great acclaim and controversy in the mid-1980s: ‘Less Than Zero’. This hedonistic tale of amoral college students in West Coast America by Bret Easton Ellis (later to write the notorious ‘American Psycho’) cemented the Generation X genre and, as young college student myself at the time, I loved it. This sequel, ‘Imperial Bedrooms,’ reacquaints us with these now middle-aged protagonists and, in a meta-fictional twist, with the older author himself. I have purposely stayed away from write-ups on this and am intrigued to see how time has cast its dice for my former acquaintances…

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