On May 15th I did a tally of all the people I had individually witnessed in Bellevue Square, comers, goers, and stayers. Among my most interesting sightings was a drunken teenager making out with the Al Waxman statue, as well as a man sitting in the grass with a bottle of Vaseline and a single, disgusting Q-tip, which he inserted into his nostrils loaded with petroleum jelly. I also saw people getting each other off under blankets and a nudist who was ushered out of the park by police officers. To be precise, by the middle of May, Ingrid Fox had not been 4,233 people.I was so happy to have received an ARC of Bellevue Square (I have swooned over Michael Redhill's writing before), but having finished it, this is one of those times when I really wish I could read a few post-publication interviews with the author or find some professional reviews in order to gain context: I feel like I've missed something here, and as I found myself too busy to sit down to a decent read-through over the past few days, there is every chance that my brain just wasn't properly following along. Even so, I found this book to be so interesting: full of humour and menace and intrigue. I did learn in my internet trawling that this title is “the first panel of a projected triptych titled Modern Ghosts”, and I'm looking forward to whatever comes next in this project: Redhill is always worth reading. (I know I'm not supposed to quote from ARCs but I can't help myself and will add the caveat that these excerpts may not be in their final forms.)
Crazy is normal. I've been crazy before and I'll be crazy again. It's everyone's biggest secret: those times they wondered if they'd lost it and those times they knew they had. Memories of choking on tears, alone in a dorm room three time zones away from your parents. Driving way too fast after losing a job. Cheated on. And you must be crazy if you can't love the baby. But then, one day, you love the baby. There are so many books with crazy main characters, too. Don Quixote is not the only one. Ahab has borderline personality disorder; George Samsa, persecution mania. The Cat in the Hat is clearly batshit.Jean Mason owns a bookshop called Bookshop (I do subtlety in other areas of my life) in downtown Toronto, and one day, customers start mistaking her for someone else; insisting that she had just been in Kensington Market sporting different clothes and a shorter hairstyle. Jean becomes obsessed with finding her strange twin and she takes up an observation post in Bellevue Square; hoping this other, this Ingrid Fox, will show up in the park as she has apparently been wont to do. As Jean lies unconvincingly about her activities to her ex-cop husband and engages in increasingly bizarre behaviour in order to confront her doppelgänger, it becomes unclear whether she's putting herself in physical danger; unclear whether Ingrid Fox even exists. I don't want to say much more than that about the plot.
My experience of my life is the same as my experience with books: so vital when I'm present, forgotten afterwards. I can barely recall the names of the main characters in my favourite novels. I can feel some of their longings and I might still fear for them in a specific way, but I can't remember very much. I couldn't bring to mind the way Virginia Woolf wrote a sentence well enough to make even a feeble imitation. I can't hear her in my mind, nor the rhythms of any poems I have ever read. I don't recall, but for a very few significant exceptions, the most stirring lines from the most moving plays I have ever seen.In a way, I'm an ideal reader for Bellevue Square: I also work in a bookshop and enjoyed reading about Jean's exploits there; especially liked that she keeps books on conspiracy theories and fake science on an unreachable top shelf so customers have time to rethink their “life choices” as they hunt for a stepstool (ha!). As a particularly solipsistic adolescent, I liked everything in this book about the nature of consciousness; from Descartes to Heisenberg, ancestor simulation, revisiting the familiar idea of doppelgängers to learning about the Llorona; all right up my alley. I always appreciate when Canadian authors highlight Canadiana: I was probably lost by my mother in a Dominion as a child; I buy donuts from Tim's, with loonies; get my prescriptions at Shopper's. I found Jean's voice to be totally relatable even if I didn't always understand her actions, and I liked this feeling of "she's like me, but nothing like me". This all should have been a homerun for this ideal reader, but it wasn't quite. I found Bellevue Square to be consistently interesting, but I don't know if it added up to much; perhaps it will feel elevated in the context of the next two volumes in the Modern Ghosts series. Rounding up to four stars.
The 2017 Scotiabank Giller Prize Longlist:
David Chariandy: Brother
Rachel Cusk: Transit
David Demchuk: The Bone Mother
Joel Thomas Hynes: We'll All Be Burned in Our Beds Some Night
Andrée A. Michaud: Boundary
Josip Novakovich: Tumbleweed
Ed O'Loughlin: Minds of Winter
Zoey Leigh Peterson: Next Year, for Sure
Michael Redhill: Bellevue Square
Eden Robinson: Son of a Trickster
Deborah Willis: The Dark and other Love Stories
Michelle Winters: I Am a Truck
After finishing reading the longlist, I'll rank the shortlist (according to my own enjoyment only):
I Am a Truck
Minds of Winter
Son of a Trickster
Bellevue Square
Transit