Wednesday 26 September 2018

An Ocean of Minutes


Polly finds herself pinching the pads of her fingers, one by one. This Saturdays-in-September idea is suddenly sickening. It is like a plan a mother would make to keep from losing her children on a subway. It's a plan able to withstand early-closing doors and a snarl of stairways, not the ocean of minutes that twelve years holds. But uselessly, her mind has gone blank. Strange, random thoughts wander into the empty space. Is it dinner time? She is entering a world where the notion of something as normal as dinner time does not exist.

When I was just a chapter into An Ocean of Minutes, my daughter asked me what the book was about and I was able to answer: It's 1981 and there's a devastating flu pandemic wiping out the population. Polly's partner, Frank, is sure to die, but since time travel has been invented in the future (there's a weak explanation for why people can be sent back to September of 1981 but not to six months earlier so the flu can be prevented), Polly has been able to sign on as an indentured servant – about to be sent to 1993 – in exchange for Frank's life-saving treatment in the present. With a time and place arranged where they will eventually meet, what could go wrong? As soon as I finished explaining this, I asked my daughter, “With just this information, what do you think would be a satisfying ending? That Polly overcomes a bunch of obstacles in the future but eventually finds Frank? Or that she overcomes obstacles but has lost him forever?” We agreed that the book must eventually be about more than just that, and then my daughter pretty much guessed how it turns out, but what I'm still unconvinced of is if this book really is about more than this basic plot. In the end, the writing was fine and some big ideas were gestured at, but I still wanted the more.

Just as the invention of air travel had made it easy to go, but no easier to leave, the invention of time travel made time easy to pass, but no easier to endure.
Polly and Frank are from Buffalo, but since they happened to have found themselves quarantined while vacationing in Texas, it's to a future Galveston that Polly is sent. It turns out that she was only given this opportunity because Polly has rare skills that are desperately required in the future: those of a furniture restorer. Apparently, after the flu (which killed off 90% of the population), the USA split into two countries – the United States in the north (which has all the military and industry) and America in the south (which has oil reserves and rundown resorts) – and because the rich northerners need places to vacation, Polly's skills are employed to clean pillows and recane chairs in a bizarro, moldering south; a place where Hispanic women are warehoused in shipping containers and shuttled to exercise bike farms in order to spend their days generating “clean energy” for those liberal northerners who love green living. Right away, Polly realises that she had been sent to the wrong year (1998), and as an indentured servant in a low-tech dystopia, she doesn't have a lot of rights or freedoms or access to information: she sold her time in order to save Frank's life, but at every turn, she's prevented from finding him again. As I said, there's some gestures about big ideas – about nationalism, class and belonging – but they didn't really go anywhere; this is more love story than social study; and it's a strangely uncompelling love story.
But what could she do? She looked up. She kept laughing in the evening light, which is what people do when monstrous epiphanies surface in their minds. You cannot put life on hold to have a moment of grief, so every second, half the people in the world are split in two. This is what they mean by life goes on, and the worst is that you go along with it too.
I don't think that author Thea Lim got much out of the sci-fi potential of her concept, and with her MFA from the University of Houston, her writing style is much the same as every other MFA I tend to complain about; all sizzle no steak. I was simply left wanting more from this.




I read An Ocean of Minutes because it was nominated for the Giller Prize (Canada's richest literary award, meant to promote Canadian authors), so right from the start, I was miffed that Thea Lim (born in the US, raised in Singapore, now living in Toronto) even qualified for the prize. (The lack of anything even vaguely related to Canada didn't help.)



The 2018 Scotiabank Giller Prize Longlist: 

Paige Cooper: Zolitude
Patrick DeWitt: French Exit
Esi Edugyan: Washington Black
Sheila Heti: Motherhood
Emma Hooper: Our Homesick Songs
Tanya Tagaq: Split Tooth
Kim Thúy: Vi
Joshua Whitehead: Jonny Appleseed


*Won by Washington Black (but I would have given it to Songs for the Cold of Heart)

Tuesday 25 September 2018

Tunesday : I'm So Glad


I'm So Glad
(Hamilton, J) Performed by Carol Burnett

I'm so glad we had this time together
Just to have a laugh, or sing a song.
Seems we just got started
and before you know it
Comes the time we have
to say, 'So long.'

There's a time you put
aside for dreamin',
And a time for things you have to do.
The time I like the best
is in the evening -
I can spend a moment here with you.

When the time comes
that I'm feelin lonely,
And I'm feelin' ohooooo - so blue,
I just sit back and think of you, only,
And the Happiness still comes through.

That's why I'm glad we
had this time together,
'Cause it makes me feel like I belong.
Seems we just got started
and before you know it
Comes the time we have
to say, 'So long.'




It was months ago that I read that Carol Burnett would be bringing her live show (An Evening of Laughter and Reflection) to the local theatre, and when I told Dave about it, he said we had to go; get front row if we could. So when the tickets went on sale, I did, indeed, reserve us front row seats and the show was last night: what a thrill it was to have been so close to one of our favourite living legends. It would not be a blasphemy to say that I watched her show religiously growing up, Dave says it was the same at his house, and Carol Burnett might now be eighty-five, but she's still quick with the comebacks, engaging with her storytelling, and gracious with her fans. Just a fantastic show.

Dave and I knew that it would be a Q&A format, and over dinner beforehand, I asked him if he had thought of any good questions. He told me of a few ideas - he was sincerely interested to know if Carol had any insight into why no one is putting on primetime variety shows anymore - but when he raised his hand to ask a question, even I was surprised by what Dave came up with. Once he had the microphone in his hand, Dave said, "Growing up and watching your show, the Q&A segment was always my favourite part. And I'm sure I'm not the only boy who watched and was jealous of the time a boy in the audience asked you for, and received, a kiss on stage. So, I was wondering if I could get a kiss?" The audience started clapping, and I was laughing like an idiot, and Carol said, "Sure...if there was a way to get you up here..." and Dave leapt to his feet and vaulted up onto the stage. Now, they made two announcements prior to the show that photography wouldn't be allowed, and Dave asked the third question of the night (way too early to be asked to leave for breaking rules), and I didn't know that he was going to pull a stunt anyway, so I have no pictures of this, but the exchange went like:

Hi, what's your name?
Dave.
(Huskier voice) And what's your sign?
(Coyly teasing) Guess.
They laugh together, and with hands held, they kiss each others' cheeks to loud cheers and clapping. Dave neatly jumps down from the stage and returns to his seat.

This is the second time Dave has been called up onto this stage (he was chosen to be in an improv thing with Jim Belushi and other Chicago Second City alums a few years ago), and we have sat this close to many, many other famous comedians (everyone from Lily Tomlin, to a duet of Tim Conway and Harvey Korman, to Bob Newhart), but Dave picks this as his favourite memory of all.

As for the rest of the evening: Carol showed some video clips from her TV show, told stories, and took questions. The best questions were people just asking her to tell stories they had heard before, and this was my favourite (someone asked if she and Lucille Ball remained friends after being in some movie together):

I was in an off-Broadway show, early in my career, and on the second night of the run, I was told that Lucy was in the audience. She was my idol, and I told everyone that I was more nervous performing with Lucy in the audience than I had been for the critics the night before. But after the show, Lucy came back to my dressing room - it was small and not very impressive and the couch had a spring sticking out of it, so when Lucy went to sit there, I said, "Watch the..." and she said, "Yeah, I see it" (in a flawless no-nonsense Lucille Ball impression) - and Lucy told me that I had done a great job and that if I ever needed anything from her, don't hesitate to ask.

So a few years later, CBS offered me a Primetime special, but only if I could get a big name to costar with me. The producer said, "There must be someone you know", and I said, "Well, there is Lucille Ball", and the producer said, "Get her on the phone", and I said, "But I don't want to presume..", and the producer said, "Get her on the phone!" So, I call Lucy and say, "Listen, there's this thing at CBS...", and Lucy said, "When do you need me, kid?" (Same flawless no-nonsense Lucille Ball impression).

The week that we were rehearsing the special, I was nervous and excited, and although there were some things in the script that I had problems with, I didn't know how to make myself heard. So during a lunch break one day, Lucy says we should go to this diner to eat. And she throws back a couple of whisky sours and says to me, "You know, kid, when I was married to the Cuban, he used to do everything for me. He'd vet the scripts, and watch production, make sure everything ran smoothly. But when I started The Lucille Ball Show, I didn't have him around anymore. And the first couple of scripts they gave me, I thought, 'These are really not very good', but I didn't know how to tell anybody that; I had never had to tell anybody that before. So I went home on the weekend and looked the scripts over and I just decided, 'No, I'm not going to do it like this', and when I went back to work on the Monday, I told them what was wrong and what kind of changes I'd need and when I'd want them by." Then Lucy put back another whisky sour and said, "And they later told me that that's when they decided to add an 's' to the end of my last name." 

The whole show was like that - funny and intimate and incredible to watch from the front row - and, of course, Carol ended by singing her theme song over some clips of her favourite moments. 

That's why I'm glad we
had this time together

Monday 24 September 2018

Small Great Things


On the day before classes were supposed to start, Mama took me out to dinner. “You're destined to do small great things,” she told me. “Just like Dr. King said.” She was referring to one of her favorite quotes: If I cannot do great things, I can do small things in a great way.


To begin, the barest of plot synopsis: The white supremacist parents of a newborn son insist that no African-Americans in the hospital be permitted to touch their baby, and when a black nurse finds herself alone with the boy as he goes into distress, she must decide whether the instructions from her supervisor to respect the parents wishes or her nurse's Nightingale Oath should take precedence. When complications arise and a lawsuit ensues, the upper-middle class white public defender who takes on the nurse's case is forced to confront her own unacknowledged privilege as a form of passive racism. 

I had never read a Jodi Picoult novel before (I was turned off when my daughters [young teens at the time] complained to me how manipulatively melodramatic they found the movie My Sister's Keeper to be), but Small Great Things is a book club pick and I wasn't unhappy to see what the massively popular Picoult is like for myself. Upon finishing what I ultimately found to be a manipulatively melodramatic, not to mention cheesy and predictable, book, I am put in mind of two stories: A coworker happened to be talking about Jodi Picoult and she mentioned that she (who has three children on the Autism Spectrum) once read a Picoult book about a family dealing with an autistic child, and she said to me, “I shook my head the whole time, recognising that this couldn't have been written by someone who has actually lived with autism. It was all regurgitated research, no insight.” My second story: Many years ago, I was reading a book, and when my mother-in-law asked what it was about, I replied, “The relocation of Japanese-Americans to internment camps during WWII. It's really good.” She told me that she had read a similar novel by Danielle Steel, and that I'd probably like that even better. I snobbishly replied that since my book was written by a descendant of Japanese-Americans who had actually been interred, it's probably more authentic. And my MIL replied, “Yes, but my book was written by Danielle Steel.” So to my point: Small Great Things is a broad examination of race relations in America, and despite the story rotating through three points-of-view (the racist father, the do-gooder lawyer, and the accused nurse), the nurse, Ruth, feels like the main character; and this really did not feel like Picoult's story to tell. On the other hand, as with my mother-in-law appreciating the history that she gets from Danielle Steel novels, I can see how having a massively popular author take up an important social issue can move a necessary conversation forward. And my main point, I suppose: If I thought this book was better written, I probably wouldn't be questioning if Picoult had left her lane on this one; it's all regurgitated research, no insight.

An ironic aside to myself: Not only does Ruth dismiss a white coworker's assessment of her situation (“I want to ask Corinne when she was last Black, because then and only then would she have the right”), but the lawyer, Kennedy, tries to school one of her coworkers on why a white man submitting poetry to literary magazines under a Japanese pseudonym is wrong, “Because it's a lie. He's a white insurance adjuster who co-opted someone else's culture so he could get fifteen minutes of fame.” Meaning, Picoult understands why this might not be her story to tell, but with admittedly good intentions, she plowed ahead anyway. Of the three POVs, I only believed in the authenticity of the lawyer's (the white supremacists don't really deserve nuance, but when they're not being monstrously evil, Picoult tries to insert some background motivations), and I couldn't help but think how much better I would have liked this book if it had been solely from Kennedy's (which is Picoult's own) perspective; Ruth still could have had her speeches:

Did you ever think our misfortune is directly related to your good fortune? Maybe the house your parents bought was on the market because the sellers didn't want my mama in the neighborhood. Maybe the good grades that eventually led you to law school were possible because your mama didn't have to work eighteen hours a day, and was there to read to you at night, or make sure you did your homework. How often do you remind yourself how lucky you are that you own your house, because you were able to build up equity through generations in a way families of color can't? How often do you open your mouth at work and think how awesome it is that no one's thinking you're speaking for everyone with the same skin color you have? How hard is it for you to find the greeting card for your baby's birthday with a picture of a child that has the same color skin as her? How many times have you seen a painting of Jesus that looks like you? Prejudice goes both ways, you know. There are people who suffer from it, and there are people who profit from it.
Even so, there would still have been some over-the-top sentences that jolted me out of the story:
She falters, then gather up the weeds of her thoughts and offers me the saddest, truest bouquet.
Small Great Things is stuffed with stereotypes, straw men, and manufactured melodrama: this is not my type of book. And yet, I acknowledge all of the reviews from people who were deeply affected by Ruth's plight: readers who were forced to confront their own privilege and passive racism, and that's a good thing, right? I was recently sent an ARC of Picoult's next novel (A Spark of Light), and I don't think I'll read it; but I am looking forward to book club.



Friday 21 September 2018

The White Darkness


I reckon I lost about three miles' distance today from snaking around, head permanently bowed to read the compass, just my shuffling skis to look at for nine hours. Anyway, I'm back on track and now happy I can part a straight line, even through another day of the white darkness.

~ Radio broadcast by Henry Worsley, two weeks into a solo transantarctic crossing

Author David Grann is known for spinning fascinating narrative nonfiction (as with Killers of the Flower Moon and The Lost City of Z), and frequent readers of his essays in The New Yorker might well assume that whatever is intriguing Grann at the moment will eventually be spun into a tale that will intrigue them, too. Even so, I found The White Darkness to be a little thin – at only 140 pages, including dozens of beautiful full page photographs, I really don't think that Grann made full use of what is, in fact, a potentially spellbinding tale. (And, in fact, I don't know that the book much improves upon Grann's original article on Worsley's story in The New Yorker.) The pictures in this slim volume, however, are admittedly stunning.

The format of the story is well chosen – We begin with Henry Worsley as he struggles to do what no one has done before: cross the continent of Antarctica by his own power, with no outside help, no prearranged food caches along the way, or even a cup of tea at the South Pole station that he passes en route. As his body weakens and his stomach cramps, Worsley must consider the lessons of the two earliest South Pole explorers who have fascinated him all of his life: Sir Ernest Shackleton, who turned back when a couple days short of the South Pole in order to get his men home safely; and Captain Robert Scott, who eventually did reach the Pole, and died alongside his crew on the return trip. The question Worsley must answer for himself: Is it truly better to be a live donkey than a dead lion?

The book then goes over a very brief history of Antarctic exploration, followed by a very brief history of Henry Worsley's life: he was always intrigued by tales of South Pole exploration, was fascinated to learn that he is distantly related to one of Shackleton's crew, joined the British army and did two tours with the SAS. When one of Shackleton's descendants reached out to ask Worsley if he'd like to join him and another early explorer's descendant to attempt to complete the trek to the South Pole at the centenary of their ancestors' failed attempt, Worsley jumped at the chance. The book covers that trip, a later polar trek that Worsley joins, and eventually, after Worsley ages out of the army at 55 and promises his family that his dream of a solo Antarctic crossing would be the last time he ever left them, we rejoin the story from the beginning: trudging along with Worsley as he skis and hikes and tows his sledge, avoiding crevasses, and making his solitary way through the mind- and muscle-numbing white darkness.

There's plenty of meat here for a full-length book, and I feel like Grann sold the story short; I do not feel fulfilled by this. Naturally, I kept reading to learn of Worsley's fate, but I would have happily stayed in this icebound world for quite a while longer.




Thursday 20 September 2018

Mary Cyr


“I have been guilty all my life,” Mary Cyr said. “But I am no longer guilty – I will not be guilty anymore. You see, I saw more and much deeper than other people, so I was often accused of their crimes, but now I will be free.”

I have to start by saying that I am a longtime David Adams Richards fan – I've read plenty more of his books than my Goodreads account would show – and with Mary Cyr he once again proves himself to be a writer of maturity, gravity, and unrivalled (for a Canadian public figure) iconoclasm. This wasn't a book to read quickly, and once again, Richards uses frequent coincidence to prove that we are fated towards tragedy, so I can understand its weakish reception on the Goodreads site. As for me, I savoured this read, beginning to breathtaking end.

It was all very strange how it happened, but in this world, nothing in fact was more natural. It seemed all very devious, but in this world, nothing was devious. It seemed very unbecoming, but in this world what was unbecoming? One knows that in this world, from the Peloponnesian Wars on, no deviousness was left unused.
Mary Cyr opens with the title character sitting in a Mexican prison, apparently charged with the murder of a young boy. When the local authorities realised that Mary was a member of the billionaire Canadian family that was part owner of the town's coal mine that recently collapsed, they felt the need to charge her with something, and even though it would seem that no one really believes that she killed this Victor, everyone from the local criminal element to the politically ambitious find it expeditious to pin the crime on her. Mary's old friend (and main character from Richards' last novel, Principles to Live By), retired police detective John Delano, is sent down to Mexico by her family to secure her release, and between their conversations and Delano's private ruminations, Mary's sad life is laid bare. The format of Mary Cyr can be challenging: Divided into fourteen parts, the first makes reference to events and people from Mary's life without much explanation. But as the novel goes along, these events and people are revisited and explained in greater detail, and every time you think you understand how something was for her, some new detail is layered on in a later part that shifts that understanding. Too, as the narrative proceeds, greater insight is given into the motivations of the local Mexican people, and it becomes obvious that events have been set in motion that will be nigh impossible to stop. As for the character of Mary: it was strange that this unloved orphan cousin from the unimportant branch of one of the Maritimes' richest families was described by her aunt as not quite normal after a childhood blow to the head, and yet both Delano and the omniscient narrator refer to her as insightful and brilliant – all while Mary herself speaks with strange verbal tics, makes impulsive and self-destructive decisions, and rarely has acted in her own self interest. I liked the strangeness of her character – and not least of all because being from a super-rich family (which made its money the old-fashioned – but now denigrated – ways; through forestry, oil, and mines), every personal tragedy in Mary's life has been open to public, mean-spirited criticism; culminating in a global newspaper/internet schadenfreude over her current situation. What hope for Mary?

As in previous novels, Richards makes many literary references here (incorporating Calvino, Dostoevsky, Shakespeare), and he once again makes many references to the Canadian literati: taking a swipe at Michael Ondaatje, apparently referencing Alistair MacLeod as “a Percy rock of a man who bagpipes his way along the crags of Cape Breton”, and denigrating himself as “the Miramichi writer who she liked but who she could never read ”(on a more positive note, Mary does refer to Jack Hodgins – whose Broken Ground I have read and reviewed – as a great, grand person). Richards keeps to the Canadiana by referencing pipeline squabbles, former prime ministers, Lord Beaverbrook, and the CBC; and he keeps this story related to his own world with appearances by John Delano, Markus Paul, and the River of the Broken-Hearted. This is a writer of maturity and confidence, and as for the iconoclasm, it's sure to provoke the progressives in Ottawa:

• Those who yelled loudest against her when they had the chance did not now utter a word to ask forgiveness for themselves. They were very quiet now. The Cyr pipeline that had been damaged by those who drove to the pipeline in cars that used oil, and slept in houses that needed it, and wore clothes that contained it, now issued not one statement about her. The university profs as well who spoke of progress – and said that the Cyr empire was one of failure and disaster, sitting in buildings some of which were donated by Cyr money – did not now come back to reinvestigate themselves.

• The great fortune for Nigel was that people who had very well-known CBC Radio talk shows never looked beyond the fashionable way to take the moral higher ground by pretending concern over the Cyr dynasty. In fact Nigel's whole life and the lives of his colleagues had been filled with misguided ambition and misplaced admiration. And this is what allowed them to protest their tenure, to go on strike while their students at the university, who had paid their money, were hostage to their demands; to look miffed when people did not see their worth, to become parasites on First Nations causes that would gain them attention, and to prey on the naïveté and idealism of the young.

• It was the beginning of her war against conformity – but of a very specialized sort of war – a kind of clandestine one. One where she was the silent observer of the disastrous world. That is, from then on, she distrusted women as much as men – she disliked their easy acceptance of role-playing, of bogus sisterhood and victimhood that university courses not only taught but encouraged – found them just as shameful in their pettiness and malevolence toward those who were cast aside...But she knew too how men used women like these, pandered to them in politics and literature in the way middle class had to always coddle their own. And she hated the men for their lies every bit as much. She hated those who used the First Nations as well, for they formed the same kind of manufactured pieties. She realized listening to First Nations leaders speak that too many of them expected this and needed it, so both they and whites could use the tragedy of the past to embellish their pretenses – and if you stared them in the face and told them so, told them that their victimhood was now obscenely corporate, they would counter with the plight of those reserves they themselves had never been to, and declare you a racist.
I am pleased that since his last novel, David Adams Richards has been appointed to the Canadian Senate; I like the idea of this contrary voice having its place in the Red Chamber. I am also not surprised that, for likely this very reason, such a fine novel was overlooked for the Giller Prize this year. This challenging read certainly pays off in the end.




As for the "swipe at Michael Ondaatje", I was intrigued enough by the passage to quote it here:

   She had studied on her own the battle for Hong Kong.   
   After the fall of Hong Kong the Canadians were marched off to concentration camps. They witnessed beheadings on the side of the road.
   Men drank their own piss, ate their own shit. Thirteen million Chinese were slaughtered by the Japanese between 1937 and 1939. It was something never mentioned in a book she read called 
The English Patient.   
   She read Vanderflutin's book as well. Vanderflutin's book, in the style of the day, in this post-colonial world, often mentioned the sins of the English against the First Nations – but, she discovered, didn't much mention his Dutch, or how they left the Natives, which they themselves tyrannized in the Far East, to the Japanese when they fled en masse to Rotterdam.  
    And of course in those two books racism was prevalent but prescribed as a condition of only certain English-speaking peoples. And certainly could not be prescribed to any Dutchman, or man of colour.   
   Yes, bravery, that's the ticket.

Tuesday 18 September 2018

Tunesday : Science Fiction / Double Feature


Science Fiction / Double Feature
(Written by Richard O'Brien, from Rocky Horror Picture Show)

Michael Rennie was ill
The Day the Earth Stood Still
But he told us where we stand
And Flash Gordon was there
In silver underwear
Claude Rains was The Invisible Man
Then something went wrong
For Fay Wray and King Kong
They got caught in a celluloid jam
Then at a deadly pace
It Came From Outer Space
And this is how the message ran...

Science fiction (ooh ooh ooh) double feature
Doctor X (ooh ooh ooh) will build a creature
See androids fighting (ooh ooh ooh) Brad and Janet
Anne Francis stars in (ooh ooh ooh) Forbidden Planet
Wo oh oh oh oh oh
At the late night, double feature, picture show

I knew Leo G. Carroll
Was over a barrel
When Tarantula took to the hills
And I really got hot
When I saw Janette Scott
Fight a Triffid that spits poison and kills
Dana Andrews said prunes
Gave him the runes
And passing them used lots of skills
But When Worlds Collide
Said George Pal to his bride
I'm gonna give you some terrible thrills

Science fiction (ooh ooh ooh) double feature
Doctor X (ooh ooh ooh) will build a creature
See androids fighting (ooh ooh ooh) Brad and Janet
Anne Francis stars in (ooh ooh ooh) Forbidden Planet
Wo oh oh oh oh oh
At the late night, double feature, picture show
I wanna go - Oh oh oh oh
To the late night, double feature, picture show
By R.K.O. - Wo oh oh oh
To the late night, double feature, picture show
In the back row - Oh oh oh oh
To the late night, double feature, picture show



Last week we went to see a couple more shows at the Stratford Festival - a double feature as it were - and as this song served as the intro to our day of theatre, it'll serve as my intro here with no deeper meaning intended (and, yes, I could have used a more upbeat tune, but I really was looking forward to stressing the "double feature" aspect.) I should start the whole thing off by noting that Rocky Horror, the movie, is a huge favourite with the rest of my family (when discussing it over dinner later, I was totally shot down when I said, "Can we at least agree that the movie itself - without the fun audience participation - is garbage?") This love leads to this kind of dressup fandom (too bad Mal's fishnets don't show up in the bad cellphone picture; she looked pretty cute):


So, to put it mildly, they were all totally pumped to see the stage show, and I am always totally pumped to go anywhere with my whole family; and what could be more fun than singing and dancing and catcalling along? We thought the show was a whole lot of fun, but to me there was one exception: There were plants in the audience, and some of the things that they yelled out to interrupt the narrator were pretty vulgar. I understand it's an adult show, I'm only mostly a prude when it comes to entertainment, but I was brought out of the fun experience too many times not to mention it. (And, yes, the crude interruptions got their laughs, but I found it pretty lowbrow for Stratford.)


And after a lovely meal (at which I was yelled down for calling the Rocky Horror movie "garbage"), we returned to the Avon to see Coriolanus; and it was a marvel of setting and stagecraft. Coriolanus is one of the few Shakespeares that I hadn't seen performed before, had never even read it, but having now seen it in this production, I can't imagine it being done any other way. The set was a mix of hard objects and video projections, making it seamless to constantly transition between "a war camp in the countryside" and "a public place in Rome" (I can't begin to imagine how that is achieved quickly enough in a traditional staging). Even the way that the screens in the front of the stage would turn to black and slowly narrow down on the one character left weeping on the stage (for instance) was so cinematic and so impactful that you have to wonder, "Why has no one done this before?" From having some of the conversations be inside the studio of a talk radio program, to some monologues being one-sided cellphone conversations, to a moving scenery screen (like in old timey movies) showing a car driving off into exile, the director (Robert Lepage) just found every bit of meaning and sense in a lesser-loved Shakespeare play and he made art out of it. And all of that is, obviously, just the backdrop to stellar performances by the whole cast - but we had to conclude that it was probably Lepage who found the meaning for the actors to hang their craft upon. Total knockout show. Back to a highbrow experience.

And that, as we drove home near midnight, made for the most engaging of conversations; discussing with the whole family our late night, double feature, picture show.

Saturday 15 September 2018

The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock


It is the size of an infant, and like an infant its ribcage is delicate and pathetic beneath its parchment skin, and its head is large, and its fists are drawn up to its face. But this is as far as the comparison may be extended. For no infant has such fearful claws, and no infant such a snarl, with such sharp fangs in it. And no infant's torso ends in the tail of a fish.

The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock starts with a bang: A merchant in 1770s England who has been worrying that one of his ships is long overdue finally hears word from its captain – it would appear that the man sold the ship in order to buy a mermaid from some Japanese fishermen; a cargo that the captain believes will be the making of his boss' fortune. Mr. Hancock is distressed to learn of the unauthorised deal, and most especially when he discovers just what this “mermaid” looks like. Feeling as though he has no choice but to make the best of it, Hancock agrees to display his curiosity for public inspection, and when the public goes wild with interest, Hancock's fortunes elevate him to the highest strata of society; a height from which the meek and lonely businessman begins to believe that he, too, might deserve some of the finer things in life; including love. With such a beginning, a lightly ironic British tone, and a fine attention to period details, I thought that author Imogen Hermes Gower was setting me up for a thrilling story – but it all kind of fell flat for me in the end. The plot was less interesting than I expected, the characters had incomprehensible motivations, and at nearly five hundred pages, it took far too long to not quite tie everything up. 

Here he is, sorry Jonah Hancock: a husband without a wife; a father without a son; paterfamilias of a she-house ruled by little maids, and whose years of faithful work have accrued no fortune to compare to what a freak goblin can bring him.
Having lost his wife and stillborn son in the birthing room, Hancock now devotes himself to his business concerns; allowing a young niece and a novice maid to run his household (all overseen by his hectoring sister when she visits). When the sensation of his mermaid reaches the ears of London's premiere bawdy-house madam, Hancock is invited to rent out the mermaid for her use; and when Hancock attends a party at her establishment, he is horrified to witness the debauched orgy to which his “betters” (mainly Members of Parliament) descend. I must admit: I was not expecting an orgy. Hancock's storyline seems mainly concerned with the notions of class and power; how wealth might buy respect and security, but maybe not happiness.
Which are you, then? A beautiful siren or a malevolent little beast?
In an alternating storyline, Angelica Neal is a courtesan – recently returned to London after the Duke who had been supporting her died without making provisions for her in his will – and as the madam (of London's premiere bawdy-house) who trained Angelica attempts to lure her back under her control, Angelica looks around for a better situation: she's no common whore, and maybe she deserves love, too. Angelica does attend the madam's mermaid party – at which she is meant to entertain Mr. Hancock – and while she's not much taken with the dowdy businessman, he is smitten (and as the book's title includes a Mrs. Hancock, it's no surprise when she eventually turns to him for rescue). Angelica's storyline is focused on the limited options available to poor girls at the time – one could only be a maid or a whore if one's family couldn't afford a marriage price – and even once Angelica is settled into a respectable situation, she can't shed public perception of who she is:
You are helpless. You are kept. You go where you find yourself best supported, as you always have; perhaps you mistake this for independence, but you are still a whore.
This whole middle part of the book was quite boring to me, but an event takes place about three quarters through which perked up my interest again: the tone changes completely, and while I was relieved by this change, it suddenly felt like a different book (and then didn't ultimately live up to this new promise). I didn't like the storyline about the racism faced by the young dark-skinned courtesan (which came from, and then went, nowhere), didn't like the constant infighting amongst the women (of every house) trying to build themselves up by tearing each other down, and didn't think the author had anything authentic to say about Hancock's particular struggles as a man in this world. Even so, I did appreciate the rich period details and smiled every now and then at the book's tone:
It happens that a man named Mr. Brierly is one day caught in flagrante with his horse-boy, or some say with his horse, but either way such prurient interest in the dealings of strangers has no place in this story. It only signifies at all because after this Mr. Brierly hanged himself, the extent of his debts was revealed, and his widow put his house and all its contents up for sale for a very reasonable price.
The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock has made for some buzz for first time novelist, Imogen Hermes Gowar; I'm not convinced that it's been earned with this effort.


Wednesday 12 September 2018

The Tattooist of Auschwitz

He takes in the hundreds of new prisoners who are gathered there. Boys, young men, terror etched on each of their faces. Holding on to each other. Hugging themselves. SS and dogs shepherd them like lambs to the slaughter. They obey. Whether they live or die this day is about to be decided. Lale stops following Pepan and stands frozen. Pepan doubles back and guides him to some small tables with tattooing equipment. Those who have passed selection are guided into a line in front of their table. They will be marked. Other new arrivals – the old, infirm, no skills identified – are walking dead.

As I understand it: Heather Morris started her career as a screenwriter, and when Holocaust survivor Lale Sokolov approached her with his story, her first instinct was to make a film out of it. But when Lale died before getting into all the nitty gritty, Morris decided, instead, to fictionalise the parts they never talked about; deciding that Lale's incredible tale needed to be told, one way or the other. Unfortunately, great stories don't ipso facto make great novels, and in Morris' novice hands, The Tattoist of Auschwitz just isn't a satisfying book. I remember the narrator in The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry listing off all of the types of novels that he doesn't like, and among them are “literary fiction about the Holocaust...nonfiction only, please”, and beyond any notion of cultural (or, in this case, tragical) appropriation by authors who simply weren't there, I have to agree that only documentary makes for respectful witnessing by nonparticipants. (This short video clip of Lale being interviewed by the author is more powerful than anything in the book's pages.) Nevertheless, I imagine this book will be a big seller and a book club favourite.

All of this is unfortunate because Lale's tale is incredible; the sort of narrative that if it was a movie script, you'd never believe the details. Arriving as a prisoner at Auschwitz in 1942, the young man immediately made a few friends with his optimistic we'll-get-through-whatever-this-is attitude, and when he soon fell deathly ill with Typhus, those friends cared for him. This somehow caught the attention of the camp's tattooist, Pepan – with death all around, sharing resources and risking the ire of the SS was rare; Pepan reckoned that Lale must be a “special one” – and when Lale recovered, he was offered the job of tattoo assistant. Lale didn't really want to take the repugnant role, but he soon saw its benefits: extra rations, days off work when there were no new prisoners transported in, a single room to himself. And with these few freedoms, Lale was able to start a smuggling ring: getting the women who sorted POW's possessions to palm some jewels that Lale then traded to outsiders for food and medicine, which he then shared with as many prisoners as possible. Throughout the story, whenever Lale seems at a moment of greatest danger, someone that he was able to help along the way steps forward to save him; he truly was a “special one” (and while you'd never believe these plot twists in a movie script, any survivor's story in hindsight seems like a strange mix of luck, fate, and coincidence). And yet, this is also a love story: while tattooing a number on one of the thousands of young women who came his way, this former playboy was struck by love at first sight. While in the beginning Lale was determined to survive Auschwitz out of stubbornness and a thirst for vengeance, the eventual need to see Gita safely through the war became his prime motivation:

It is a Sunday when he sees her. He recognizes her at once. They walk toward each other, Lale on his own, she with a group of girls, all with shaven heads, all wearing the same plain clothing. There is nothing to distinguish her except those eyes. Black – no, brown. The darkest brown he's ever seen. For the second time, they peer into each other's souls. Lale's heart skips a beat. The gaze lingers.
Most of the story is told from Lale's POV, a few scenes from Gita's, and there is a moment near the end where the two converge; and while the scene itself is straightup Nicholas Sparks – you would not believe this in a movie – I admit I was gasping and teary. That still doesn't make this a great book; the banality of evil is not captured by banal writing:
That night Lale tries to wash the dried blood from his shirt with water from a puddle. He partially succeeds, but then decides that a stain will be an appropriate reminder of the day he met Mengele. A doctor who will cause more pain than he eases, Lale suspects; whose very existence threatens in ways Lale doesn't want to contemplate. Yes, a stain must remain to remind Lale of the new danger that has entered his life. He must always be wary of this man whose soul is colder than his scalpel.
The worst thing is that I can totally imagine a tearjerker movie being made of this book, which in my mind removes the story even further from an act of witnessing horror to a purely commercial venture. The story is amazing (there is so much more to explore about Lale's fears of being seen as a Nazi collaborator in his role as Tätowierer; despite his efforts to help as many prisoners as possible), but this book is not up to the material, and the whole project just rubs me the wrong way.