Tunesday : Perfect World

Perfect World

(Hartley, D / Sting) Performed by Tom Jones

There are despots and dictators

There are blue bloods with intellects of fleas

There are kings and petty tyrants

Who are so lacking in refinements

They'd be better suited swinging from the trees

He was born and raised to rule

No one has ever been this cool

In a thousand years of aristocracy

An enigma and a mystery

In Meso American History

The quintessence of perfection that is he

He's the sovereign lord of the nation

He's the hippest dude in creation

He's a hep cat in the emperor's new clothes

Years of such selective breeding

Generations have been leading

To this miracle of life that we all know

What's his name?

Kuzco, Kuzco, Kuzco... (Ad libs)

He's the sovereign lord of the nation

He's the hippest cat in creation

He's the alpha, the omega, a to z

And this perfect world will spin

Around his every little whim

'Cos this perfect world begins and ends with him

What's his name?

Kuzco, Kuzco, Kuzco... (Ad libs)

You'd be the coolest dude in the nation

Or the hippest cat in creation

But if you ain't got friends then nothing's worth the fuss

A perfect world will come to be

When everybody here can see

That a perfect world begins and ends

That a perfect world begins and ends with us

What's his name?

Kuzco, Kuzco, Kuzco... (Ad libs)

Kuzco, Kuzco, Kuzco

As I wrote last week, Dave and I are in Peru right now, and as I didn't think I'd be blogging from here, this is the song I cued up for this week's Tunesday: nothing insightful, just a wish that this world I've long wanted to visit is as perfect as I'd hoped.

I'll just note that Kennedy and I watched The Emperor's New Groove last week -- in a tongue-in-cheek attempt at cultural awareness, but even if it couldn't possibly serve that purpose, I always liked this movie anyway -- and in an even less apropos attempt to become prepared for our trip, we followed it up with The Road to El Dorado (Kennedy claims to love that movie, but I find it a little dumb). I promised her we could watch Alive after her Dad and I get back home; uneaten.

I don't even remember now what it was I was looking for while we were watching The Emperor's New Groove, but I searched the movie on Wikipedia and discovered some interesting facts about the music. This movie was apparently intended to be in the more serious vein of The Lion King (complete with a similarly ambitious pop soundtrack), but after the failure of a string of serious movies (Pocahontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame), Disney decided to rework everything on Emperor, from the storyline, to the voice actors, to the music.

Three interesting facts about the music: 

• Sting agreed to be a part of the project if his wife, Trudie Styler, a documentarian, could film the entire animated-movie-making process. Her resulting film, The Sweatbox, so perfectly captured the stress and strife surrounding the numerous rewrites -- the power struggles between those executives who acted as "nerdy bullies" and those animators who cringed before them -- that Disney, who retained the rights to Styler's film, quickly buried it.

• After he presented the theme song, Perfect World, Disney asked Sting to perform it himself for the movie. He demurred, saying they should get someone more young and hip, so they went with Tom Jones -- who is fifteen years older than Sting. (Yet, I can't imagine anyone else singing this song.)

• In the original happy ending for Emperor, in order to spare Pacha's village, Kuzco decided to raze a nearby rain forest for his summer home. When a horrified Sting -- who has spent his entire adult life advocating for the rain forests and those indigenous peoples who live there -- first heard of this rewrite, he threatened to remove himself and his music from the movie. Of course they did another rewrite, but just how nutty were these Disney execs if they didn't foresee this conflict? Why would they have gone with razing a rain forest even if Sting hadn't been attached to the project?

That's all for this week; not my usual Tunesday post, but after all, this is not a usual week for me.

Nostalgia

New memories in new bodies. New lives. That's the ideal, though we are still far from it. The body may creak and wobble; memory develop a crack or hole. In the leaked memory syndrome, or Nostalgia, thoughts burrow from a previous life into the conscious mind, threatening to pull the sufferer into an internal abyss.

Nostalgia isn't a book that improves on reconsideration: when I finished it yesterday, I thought it had been pretty good – a nice and insightful bit of futurism that might serve as a warning about the direction we seem to be heading in – but the longer I've thought about it, the less impressive or original it feels. It was just all right. (And note: I'm quoting from an ARC here; passages might not be in their final form.)

In this imagined future, human bodies can be regenerated with new parts; essentially making people immortal. What can't be regenerated, however, are human brains, and as a result, memory remains finite and not large enough to store the events of several lifetimes. The fix is simple: whenever a person chooses to regenerate the body, the brain is wiped and only the childhood/adolescent memories remain; as a further upgrade, experts ensure these are happy and fulfilling memories; what difference does it make if they're probably nothing like the truth? Sometimes, however, a person will suffer from LMS (Leaked Memory Syndrome, known colloquially as Nostalgia) and the true memories that burble to the surface in drips can turn to a flood that leads to madness and death. Enter our protagonist, Dr. Frank Sina, an expert in plugging leaks. When a new patient seeks Sina's help – and he both takes root in the doctor's mind and attracts the attention of the supposedly benevolent Department – a mild mystery/thriller plot begins. 

Onto this plot are grafted various scenes in which people discuss the advantages, but mostly the problems, of this society – there is an ever-growing class divide as only the rich can afford to regenerate, evangelicals become “pro-death” as they urge people to stop avoiding natural death and Judgment Day, how much power are we willing to give to a government that is in control of implanting memory – but the biggest divide is between those who have regenerated many times (known as GNs, for new-generation, like Dr Sina) and those who are on their first lives (known as G0s or BabyGens): if the older generation refuses to die and transfer their wealth and jobs, how are those on their first lives meant to survive?

While you, the elderly elite, find ways to prolong your existence with new organs and new lives and monopolize the world's resources, what about us young people? When do we get a chance? Youth unemployment is reaching thirty percent! I don't mind telling you that I cannot find a job – and the woman I love – a young woman, not a reconstituted senior citizen – lives with an elderly man – sells her services just to be able to survive! What gives people like you the right to more life than others? Why can't you just say, I've had enough! Let others live!

In another wrinkle (that takes way too long to finally reveal the details of what is going on behind the “Long Border” and why), the meltdown of four CANDU reactors some four decades in the past has made much of eastern Africa a radiation zone, incapable of growing food or providing fresh water for its people. While the rest of the world has begrudgingly airdropped supplies for all these years, they have also built and enforced a mostly impenetrable border across the north of Africa; allowing people from the north to visit the affected areas – gawking at the starving, mutated people as though they were animals in a zoo – while only allowing a small percentage of the Africans to escape to the north (and generously wiping their brains when they arrive in the free lands).

It is the source of our raw materials, you mean; and even though we can replicate climatic conditions at will almost, we still feel the need to visit there for the real experience, though at considerable risk. And we let a few of the Barbarians leak in through the Border every year, because we have to replenish our populations and gene balances and immune systems. And we need their organs.

It is a matter of disbelief and distress to Sina and his friends that those on the other side of the Long Border might form militias and plot terrorist attacks against the same generous folks who airdrop the food and water (that is mostly stolen by warlords). It is also unbelievable to the GNs that the G0s sympathise with the “Barbarians” and think it's time to remove the border and let everyone live anywhere they like; why don't the Babies understand that we need to protect what we have from those who have no right to it?

Other than the details of the plot, that's pretty much the book. And in hindsight, it doesn't have that much to say. And note: I am someone who does wonder and worry about what the world might look like if we develop the technology to keep our bodies alive indefinitely. I don't want that, but will I think differently when I'm old and facing natural death? (Probably.) There are a ton of philosophical and moral dilemmas surrounding this idea, and unfortunately, I think that M. G. Vassanji only scratched the surface here. Not a terrible read, but not my favourite either.

Tunesday : In A Gadda Da Vida

In A Gadda Da Vida

(Ingle, D) Performed by Iron Butterfly

In a gadda da vida, baby
(In the Garden of Eden)
In a gadda da vida, honey
Don't you know that I'm lovin' you

Oh, won't you come with me
And take my hand
Oh, won't you come with me
And walk this land
Please take my hand

In a gadda da vida, honey
Don't you know that I'm lovin' you
In a gadda da vida, baby
Don't you know that I'll always be true

Oh, won't you come with me
And take my hand
Oh, won't you come with me
And walk this land
Please take my hand

In a gadda da vida, honey
Don't you know that I'm lovin' you
In a gadda da vida, baby
Don't you know that I'll always be true

Oh, won't you come with me
And take my hand
Oh, won't you come with me
And walk this land
Please take my hand

In a gadda da vida, baby
(In the Garden of Eden)
In a gadda da vida, honey
Don't you know that I'm lovin' you

Oh, won't you come with me
And take my hand
Oh, won't you come with me
And walk this land
Please take my hand

I suspect it will take me a while to get to the point of this week's song selection, and as the journey there will involve a lot of weird digressions, I'll add the warning that there's no way this post can have universal appeal: anyone who doesn't actually know me should just enjoy the song then look away. (Which presupposes that anyone who doesn't actually know me might read this, which is probably unlikely, but not unwelcome: my warning is only to prevent boredom. And eye-rolling.)

I've mentioned before that I have suffered life-long solipsism and delusions of Magical Thinking, and no matter how self-aware I am of these quirks, there has always been too much synchronicity in my life for me to ignore; just what is the universe trying to tell me?  I want to note: I'm telling my story as I remember it and have no desire to fact check any of the details; it's how I remember these events that's important; I could have misremembered and misinterpreted everything throughout the years, but these are the facts as my brain collected them; the facts that later frightened me so badly. Where to start?

When I was a little girl, maybe around ten, I was given my first digital alarm clock (which was not yet common: my Dad's alarm clock had a digital display but the numbers clicked over on Rolodex-type cogs; it was always fascinating to watch it click over to a new hour as all the numbers would flip quickly down the line right to left; tick tick tick tick). As my mother came in to say goodnight to me late one night, she sat on the edge of my bed, looked over at my clock, and said, "Isn't that neat? It's eleven eleven." When I looked over at the red numbers, glowing in their slender alignment, it filled me with a kind of dread: it was neat, but also portentous; eleven eleven felt like a message, a code, and I wasn't sure if it was meant as a blessing or a warning. The fact that it was my mother who pointed it out to me felt like an initiation, an invitation to another way of thinking. I cannot overstate how impactful this was.

For many years following, eleven eleven plagued me. I'd go to bed at nine or whenever and suddenly awake, look over at the clock, and see those four ones glowing in the dark. I'd come home for lunch, look at a digital clock on the microwave as I walked into the kitchen, and note the double elevens on the display. I'd go to sleep, promising myself that tonight I wouldn't look at the clock, and when I'd jolt awake, I'd lay there with my eyes squeezed shut for what felt like hours, and when I'd finally look -- certain that it would have to be the middle of the night by now -- I'd turn cold at the sight of once again, eleven eleven. I'd leave a friend's house, get into my car, and shudder as the clock powered up to display that dreaded hour. I'd be on the phone to someone, think to ask if they knew the time, and wince when they'd inform me, "Eleven eleven. Neat." Nothing bad ever happened to me at eleven eleven, I did understand that some internal mechanism was probably prompting me to look at just the right time, and what was even weirder is that the phenomenon was contagious: I told both my little brother Kyler and my friend Curtis of my affliction with eleven eleven, and they both started experiencing it, too. And here's where the synchronicity comes in.

After I moved up to Edmonton, my reading interests veered to nonfiction (I guess I was trying to self-direct the education that I had abandoned when I left the U of L). Now, over the years, Curtis and I had countless philosophical discussions, and I had once posed the question, "I wonder why the alphabet is arranged the way it is? Like, why aren't the vowels grouped together, or at least evenly spaced throughout the consonants?"And one of the first books I took out from the Edmonton library was on the Kabbalah, and it explained about Jewish mysticism and numerology and how each letter of the alphabet is ranked according to its numeric value. I was pleased that the universe had sent me this answer (and I both mean that literally and mean it in the least New-Agey-space-cadet sense) and then was stunned to read that the Jewish alphabet has no eleventh letter as it's considered unlucky; it also has no twenty-second letter because eleven plus eleven is the most dreaded of all. Obviously, this shone a new and foreboding light on my experiences. And that's how my reading proceeded through my twenties: I would choose seemingly unrelated books that somehow would answer questions I had about life or reality, each supplying a piece of the puzzle that I didn't know my brain was assembling; pure synchronicity. (As an aside: When Dave and I got married, on June 29th of 1991, his friend Burqhardt's fiancée said to me, "I'm sure you know that in Numerology, you reduce two digit numbers to single digits by adding them together. But with '29', once you add them together to make 11, you don't reduce it further: '11' is a special number that means challenges, but not without rewards." I did not know this, but with my background, I nodded without surprise. But look at that date: if you could reduce the 11, you'd get 2+9=11, and then 1+1=2. With the 1991, 1+9+9+1=20, and then 2+0=2. Making the date '22', or 11+11. Of course, this only works if you ignore the month of June and its unhelpful 6. And of course all of what follows is about ignoring the evidence that doesn't fit in with the philosophy my mind was trying to work out.)

I became interested in quantum physics, and especially as it pertains to the insubstantiality of the physical world (the ideas that there is more space between the subatomic particles in an atom than there is actual stuff, that photons will behave as either a wave or a particle depending on what you're testing for, misunderstandings of Heisenberg, Schrodinger, and Einstein). I loved books like Dancing Wu Li Masters and The Tao of Physics (discredited now as junk science, but at the time, they forged a strong link in my mind between Western science and Eastern mysticism). I read One by Richard Bach, and it explained how a knowledge of quantum physics could lead to astral projection; including a guide on how to engage in lucid dreaming, which I was afraid to try; what if I left my body and couldn't find my way back? I read Zen, Drugs, and Mysticism, in which the author describes the differences between psychedelic drug trips and mystical states, and although he laid out how to use drugs to achieve the mystical (what drugs, where to go [the mountains if I remember?], what music [Mozart?], what your sober guide should be doing to help you reach the state of bliss), I was never interested in drugs (as I've said before, Go Ask Alice and various After School Specials gave me a lifelong fear of future flashbacks). I read deeply of Carlos Castaneda and The Teachings of Don Juan and dabbled in everything from The Tao of Piglet and The Te of Pooh to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I hadn't quite arrived at a personal philosophy yet, but I was assembling pieces throughout the years. Eventually, two books that were gifted to me would change everything.

My inlaws always seemed to misunderstand my reading interests -- what I essentially thought of as sciencey, they considered "out there", and they were always giving me books on ghosts and Bigfoot and the like -- and after Kennedy was born, my father-in-law gave me the book Communion. In it, Whitley Strieber describes being abducted by aliens, which was a horrifying experience for him, and to stave off criticism from those unbelievers who would point out that it's a little rich for a man who wrote a bunch of horror novels to now pretend like this abduction tale is nonfiction, Strieber wrote that he now knew that he had been abducted throughout his life, memories of which were now slowly coming back to him, and that the horror novels he had written throughout the years were simply his subconscious mind trying to release the images that only it was aware of. I found this argument compelling, and although I didn't really believe in aliens, I got a shiver of dread just thinking about the possibility.

When I told my father-in-law that I had enjoyed that book, being a lovely and thoughtful man, he came home one day with Strieber's followup: Transformation. If I remember it right, it was in this book that Strieber wrote that, while he absolutely believed in his abduction experiences, what he meant by "aliens" wasn't necessarily "little green men from outer space". He explains that the "aliens" might be living on a parallel plane to ours, their atoms vibrating at a higher frequency like colours off the ends of the visible light spectrum that we humans can't see, and that the form they take when they visit our plane are always in line with what we might expect to see: this explains long ago visions of angels, jinn and sprites, and after we reached the space age, aliens. I found this book terrifying as Strieber insisted that more of us are abducted each night than will ever remember it, and that those who are open to it, can be transformed into a being on the higher plane. I honestly felt like I had been dabbling in dark magic and had opened a door. When my father-in-law asked me if I wanted the next book in the series, I had to admit that I was now too scared, and we laughed about it. (I might have read the third in the series and stopped there, but the point is that I got to this point in Strieber's story and couldn't continue.)

It was either my mother-in-law or sister-in-law who eventually gave me a Sylvia Browne book (either The Other Side and Back or Life on the Other Side), and her proposed world view dovetailed nicely with Whitley Strieber's: that there is indeed this higher plane of existence, but to Browne, the beings there aren't frightening; it's filled with angels and spirit guides, and after we die, that's where our own spirits go to live, review our earthly lives, and decide which lessons we still need to learn on our next journey through this plane; being a psychic simply meant that Browne had the ability to interact with this higher plane, and when I'd catch her on Montel Williams, I always found her psychic act to be plausible. I read quite a few more books by Browne, found her philosophy to be attractive (and have to admit that if we do, indeed, determine the challenges we'll face before we're even born, I am not a brave soul if this is all the struggle I selected for myself), but I was still afraid of being abducted by aliens. 

I read The Celestine Prophesies, and although I hadn't really known what to expect from it beforehand, was distressed to read that it is essentially a manual for how to consciously vibrate yourself to the higher plane. I had profound regrets that this knowledge was now in my brain: remember, I had been too nervous to attempt astral projection or drug-induced plane-exploring, and I now feared it could happen by accident.

Then I got a curious phone call. My sister-in-law Christine had been watching Larry King Live, and his guest was Sylvia Browne (Chrissy then asked if I knew who she was because she didn't know that I was already a devotee). Apparently, a woman from London, Ontario (coincidentally, where Dave grew up, where his parents still live, and where we got married) had called to ask Ms Browne what "eleven eleven" means because she had been encountering it all her life. Browne nodded knowingly and said that whenever you notice eleven eleven, it means that the universe is telling you to pay attention, and especially to coincidences; it means you're on the right path. (Although I always meant to look into Jung and his ideas on Synchronicity, I haven't yet, but think this is the same idea as what Browne was talking about here.) Chrissy was excited to share this with me (and especially because Kyler apparently never stopped encountering the phenomenon), but it filled me with a type of dread: there was a tightening of the noose, as though it was becoming inevitable that I would one day vibrate (with or without the assistance of what I would perceive to be aliens) out of existence. And even at the time I knew it was kooky, but I was becoming afraid to go to sleep at night, and I just got a message from the universe that I was "on the right path".

It was around this time that I watched an episode of Unsolved Mysteries about the disappearance of Philip Taylor Kramer; one time bassist for Iron Butterfly; the creators of this week's Tunesday song (I warned that it would be a long journey to the point). As I remember the show (I did try to google the episode, but while the straight facts are out there in various articles and blogs, the New Agey elements seem to have been dismissed from the record, so I'm going to tell the story as I remember it; how it affected me), Kramer left the band to finish his advanced degree in Engineering or Astrophysics or something like that. He worked for the government on top secret guidance systems for missiles, formed an early tech company with Michael Jackson's brother Randy, and spent his free time obsessing over disproving Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity; certain that he could find a way to travel faster than the speed of light. According to the show, it was after Kramer read The Celestine Prophecy that he believed he was finally on the right track, and he would work on his computer through the nights trying to find the intersection between Western science and Eastern mysticism. After working obsessively for some days straight, Kramer told his wife that he had finally found a way to break the light barrier, but that the knowledge was dangerous and that "they" would never let him reveal the truth. He left to pick up a friend from the airport, changed his mind about going, made a series of bizarre phone calls (including telling a friend that O.J. was framed), told 911 that he was going to kill himself, and he and his van disappeared; never to be seen again. The show concluded by saying that we'll probably never know if Kramer did commit suicide, if he was snuffed out by his own government (after all he had Top Secret clearance and now showed signs of mental instability), or maybe he had been abducted by aliens (something he feared) or simply vibrated off to a higher plane (something he claimed to have experimented with). I watched this show with wide-eyed horror.

I was now afraid to go to sleep at night: while I was intrigued by the notion that these pathways might be out there, I was by now a mother with two small children and I didn't want to be taken away from them. From my readings on Buddhism, I knew that sometimes, when an acolyte was on the brink of enlightenment, a Zen Master would take a bamboo stick and thwack them across the back (because only a frightening shock could force the soul to make the leap from this world to which it is too attached). I knew that I was being ridiculous, but I was horrified to imagine what frightening shock could be prepared for me; and I assumed (to stress: in my imagination, while always certain that it would never come to pass) that it would be a terrifying abduction experience by aliens that weren't really aliens, but merely beings from the higher plane. Like putting away a Ouija board that has given you a scare, I totally abandoned this decade-long reading path; attempted to stuff this "knowledge" into the back of my mental closet, hidden under old sweaters and mateless mittens. It took me a long time to get over my fear of the dark. 

Two factoids I later learned: after those girls in Cleveland were saved from their years-long captivity at the hands of psycho Ariel Castro, it came to light that Sylvia Browne had once informed the mother of one of the girls (on Montel Williams) that her daughter was dead; to give up hope of ever seeing her again and to get on with her life. What a horrible sham that was in retrospect (I also remember Browne saying repeatedly that Osama bin Laden had been killed in a cave during a bombing run in the early days of the second Iraq War and that his body would never be found), and this kind of thing really underscores the reality that TV psychics aren't always providing harmless entertainment. The second fact was that Philip Taylor Kramer's van and skeleton were eventually found by hikers and it's assumed that, after threatening suicide, he simply drove off a cliff. I wouldn't prefer to live in a world where I go to bed every night worried that I'm going to be confronted by aliens or vibrated off this plane, but it's sad to have to acknowledge that the world we live in is probably just what it seems to be: likely a random case of the evolution of conscious beings from protoplasmic goo; frail humans who fall for frauds and suffer mental anguish that could propel them off of cliffs. (One more thing: I later saw Whitley Strieber on some show [maybe Weird or What?] and he was talking about how he had proof of time travel and he sounded so whackadoodle that I wished I had seen him interviewed back in the 90s when I was buying into his nonsense.)

And another interesting coda: When Delight and I reconnected a few years ago, during one of our first face-to-face meetings in twenty years, she casually mentioned how she had been plagued her whole life by seeing eleven eleven, and she always wondered if it had meaning. I was dumbfounded. Delight had been my best friend during my Edmonton years, she knew of my kooky reading habits (she obsessed over Stephen King, which seems to support Whitley Strieber and his writings about horror novels revealing the truth of one's subconscious mind), but had we really never compared notes on eleven eleven? I tried to say that that was my thing -- perhaps I had passed the contagion on to her? -- but Delight insisted that it had always been her thing, too. She said she had tried to research the phenomenon online, and while there are websites devoted to those who experience it, no one has an answer for "why?". I told her my story about Sylvia Browne and being on the right path, and we agreed that that is probably what it means for our friendship anyway.

And to end on the  happiest of notes and to tie it all together. In two days, Dave and I will be going on our 25th anniversary trip to Peru. We'll be flying in a small plane over the Nazca Line Drawings, taking a glass-roofed train up the mountain to Machu Picchu, walking around on the reed islands of Lake Titicaca, exploring Lima, and Cuzco, and Urubamba. As a geek, I was trying to figure out what book I should bring to be photographed reading up at Machu Pichu (and it was thinking of the various books I've mentioned here today that prompted me to lay out the whole, nutty tale), and that's when I landed on the perfect one: Chariots of the Gods, in which Erich von Däniken started the whole ancient aliens mythos. When I reached for it and flipped the book open (because I have many, many "of the Gods" books on my shelves from these long ago days), I found pictures of Machu Picchu and the Nazca Lines Drawings -- even a picture of Chichen Itza in Mexico where Dave and I have gone before -- and there's little doubt where my long held fascination with Peru and its artefects has come from. Perhaps the inlaws are right and my interests have always been "out there", and perhaps Burqhardt's fiancée had been right when she informed me that our wedding date promised "challenges, but not without rewards", but I'm still here, Dave and I are still here (while Burqhardt is on his third marriage), and whether or not I still see eleven eleven sometimes, I know in my heart that I'm on the right path.

In a gadda da vida, honey
Don't you know that I'm lovin' you
In a gadda da vida, baby
Don't you know that I'll always be true

Oh, won't you come with me
And take my hand
Oh, won't you come with me
And walk this land
Please take my hand

Stranger: A Novel

There was no plan. Life is not that organized. The world is round. Things sometimes just happen.

Stranger by David Bergen is a deceptively simple kind of novel – if you read the book flap or the Goodreads synopsis, you'll learn the whole plot – but despite not finding many surprises (except for sudden acts of violence or kindness) as I was reading, it was the overall tone that I thought was this book's strength (and in a way, also what makes me hesitant in my judgment in hindsight). What's for certain is that this book is lingering in my mind, and that's always a good thing. 

Beginning in the Guatemalan highlands, Stranger is told from the perspective of a young woman, Íso, who works as a “helper” at a fertility clinic while studying English Literature and saving to go to med school; you would be wrong to underestimate Íso. Right away there's a class distinction drawn between those wealthy white American women who come to “take the waters” and the local brown girls who excel at becoming invisible attendants; too insignificant for the clients to even consider modesty around as they allow the helpers to undress, bathe, and full-body massage them. In addition to the clients, the clinic is staffed by foreign doctors who look down on the locals while acting as great white saviours (but remember this is a for-profit clinic of questionable alternative medicine; hardly Doctors Without Borders). When the handsome Dr. Mann steals Íso's heart (despite warnings from her friends and family, Íso believes herself too smart and aware to be treated as a trifle), events are set in motion that will see Íso embark on a dangerous journey: crossing illegally into first Mexico and then the US, Íso navigates an altered America in which the rich have barricaded themselves further against the riffraff (hey, if you can't build an impenetrable wall at the southern border, why not build those walls around your individual neighbourhoods?) while the poor majority riots in the streets.

That's pretty much the plot, but as I began with, it's the tone that worked the best for me – and for the most curious of reasons. Now, I'm not someone who would ever warn another to “check your privilege” or gang up on an “ally” of (insert identity group) for misguidedly “white-knighting” during a conversation in which members of (the identity group) could very well speak for themselves (however I am fascinated by these confrontations and will read incredibly long comment threads to see how they play out), but I have long felt uncomfortable reading books written from the perspective of one gender when the author is of the opposite (and for the purpose of my generalised complaint I'm going full binary on gender; and note that I don't tend to buy women writing as men any more than I tend to believe men writing as women). When you add on the fact that Bergen is an older white man from Canada writing from the perspective of a young Guatemalan woman, something about this doesn't feel like his story to tell; there's an ironic overtone to the well-intentioned white man writing about the well-intentioned white man who went to Guatemala and messed everything up. And yet...I bought into Íso and her perspective. Using abrupt, clipped sentences (as in my opening quote), Bergen somehow keeps the narrative gender-neutral and matter-of-fact and this propels the plot without hitting any false notes. 

As for the clipped sentences: some review (that I can't now find) said that a mark of Bergen's genius is that you'll find nary an adverb in his writing (and I'll need to think further on the truth of that). Maclean's refers to the spare writing in Stranger as “gorgeous lyricism” and The Globe and Mail says of Bergen, “He’s known for his clean prose and wonderful, startling observations, and this book has perfect pitch”, and I won't argue with that. There are a few passages that did approach the lyrical, and while the following long chunk (which, be warned, contains my only real spoiler) might have annoyed me in principle (as the experience of giving birth is not a man's story to tell), it was real enough to make me nod and think, “Yeah, there's truth in that”. 

Íso closed her eyes. She breathed quickly and then slowly, depending on her state. She saw herself as floating on water, and then she became the water and the water became her. She went under, and she rose to the surface, and again she went under. And each time she went under, she went a little deeper, so that when she looked up at the surface of the water she made out vague shapes, and dim lights, and she heard as if from a great distance her mother's voice singing. She was no longer afraid. She was quite peaceful. The final time she went under she went very deep, and as she rose she saw the surface shimmering above her, but it was quite a distance, and she was losing oxygen, and just as she felt that her lungs were finished, she broke through the surface and gasped for air and the baby was born. She did not see the baby being born, of course, but she knew, because as she sucked for air she felt an extreme euphoria, and she heard Francisca say the word bueno, and she heard the women's voices rise and fall in happiness, and in that moment she believed she had done something that no one else had ever done before, and she was amazed at herself.

It is eventually revealed that Íso's full name is “Paraiso Perdido”, which translates as “Paradise Lost” (in an interview with the CBC, Bergen says, “whose paradise lost I guess is the question”), and in tandem with the American doctor's surname being Mann (and everyone is always warning Íso that men can't be trusted), I assume these names signal that the story was meant to be read as allegorical. If it's a geopolitical allegory, then maybe that Maclean's review is correct in thinking it's simply a rebuke of the US and how, “American interference has ravaged Guatemalan society while hostile U.S. immigration policies have hindered Guatemalan people from finding refuge there.” (But that seems a little too on-the-nose and smugly progressive-Canadian.) And it could be read as an allegory of the widening gulf between the rich and poor in America (but I found it to be a little over-the-top that the rich are greedily hoarding what they have – with razorwire-topped walls and paying their undocumented help so little that they must sleep under bridges and in squats – while the poor are eager at every turn to help Íso and share what little they have). Or it could just be an allegory of the continuing power differential between men and women, and especially as it concerns fertility and reproduction. It's probably some combination of all of these ideas; the fact that this book makes me think on all these ideas argues for its importance.

So after being startled by the clipped, spare prose, and having this ironic discomfort of being aware of the white foreigner commenting on meddlesome white foreigners – further complicated for me personally by the gender switch and the second half of the book serving as a commentary on American social wars as written by a Canadian; was this really Bergen's story to tell? – I liked Stranger more than I would have expected. I have no idea how it will stack up against the other titles on the Giller Prize longlist (I won't have read many of them before it's reduced to a shortlist next week), and it feels like a rounding-up to give four stars.

The  2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize Longlist:

Mona Awad : 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl
Gary Barwin : Yiddish for Pirates
Andrew Battershill : Pillow
David Bergen : Stranger
Emma Donoghue : The Wonder
Catherine Leroux : The Party Wall
Kathy Page : The Two of Us
Susan Perly : Death Valley
Kerry Lee Powell : Willem De Kooning's Paintbrush
Steven Price : By Gaslight
Madeleine Thien : Do Not Say We Have Nothing
Zoe Whittall : The Best Kind of People

*Won by Madeleine Thien for Do Not Say We Have Nothing. Not really a surprise, but this is how I ranked the shortlist, entirely according to my own enjoyment level with the reading experience:

Gary Barwin : Yiddish for Pirates
Catherine Leroux : The Party Wall
Madeleine Thien : Do Not Say We Have Nothing
Mona Awad : 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl
Emma Donoghue : The Wonder
Zoe Whittall : The Best Kind of People

The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary

Sir Joshua's words were to provide the starting point for a relationship between Doctor Murray and Doctor Minor that would combine sublime scholarship, fierce tragedy, Victorian reserve, deep gratitude, mutual respect, and a slowly growing amity that could even, in the loosest sense, be termed friendship.

This is how The Professor and the Madman was described to me: When, in Victorian England, the Oxford English Dictionary was first being compiled, its editors put out a call for volunteer readers; people who could peruse books both old and new, looking for quotes which perfectly define specific words embedded within them, most especially looking for the dates when words first appeared in English, or the turning points at which their meanings changed (I now realise that I've never had the pleasure of flipping through a copy of the OED, but these quotes and dates are apparently its claim to fame). Professor James Murray was the editor of the project, and after receiving tens of thousands of excellent submissions by a Dr. W. C. Minor, Murray was shocked to discover that Minor was being held in a lunatic asylum outside London. I was promised that this is a fascinating story of both the creation of the OED itself and the friendship between these two men. While the book does more or less sketch out these two potentially interesting narratives, I don't think that author Simon Winchester really pulled it off: he seemed to focus on the wrong things – never going into anything too deeply – and with a florid and nonacademic writing style, I never caught his enthusiasm for the tale. 

It is a book that inspires real and lasting affection: It is an awe-inspiring work, the most important reference book ever made, and, given the unending importance of the English language, probably the most important that is ever likely to be.

The Professor and the Madman was released in 1998 – a year in which I and everyone I knew already had the internet – so right from the start, I can't believe that Winchester seriously thought of the OED as the “most important reference book ever made” or “that is ever likely to be” (I won't even touch his assertion that English was and is the most important language in the world). While in Victorian times the idea of crowdsourcing the quotes must have seemed revolutionary, imagine how much easier it would be to start from scratch on a project like this today (think Wikipedia or Reddit), and with the Gutenberg Project and other public sharing of old books, I assume that the OED is constantly being amended with better quotes at an exponential rate. All this to say: Yes, you can still order the multivolume set of the OED for a thousand bucks, but in today's world, it kind of fails as a book; there's no point in printing out something so inherently improvable; I categorically reject Winchester's primary thesis. On the OED itself and other details, Winchester's personal opinions made my eyes roll hard:

Murray's interest in philology might have remained that of an enthusiastic amateur had it not been for his friendship with two men. One was Trinity College, Cambridge, mathematician named Alexander Ellis, and the other a notoriously pigheaded, colossally rude phonetician named Henry Sweet – the figure on whom Bernard Shaw would later base his character Professor Henry Higgins in Pygmalion, which was transmuted later into the eternally popular My Fair Lady (in which Higgins was played, in the film, by the similarly rude and pigheaded actor Rex Harrison).

Professor Murray's story was quickly told and interesting enough from what we learn (he was an autodidact polymath who became a school teacher, and by pursuing his interests in philology and etymology, he befriended and was hired on by those who would embark on the OED project), and although Dr Minor's story is more detailed (and more dramatic), Winchester repeatedly resorts to conjecturing, Is that what drove him mad? Is this? To summarise: Minor was raised in Ceylon by Missionary parents, went to Yale, became a medical doctor, and enlisted for the Union Army during the American Civil War. He witnessed horrorshows on the battlefield, was forced to brand the cheek of an Irish mercenary with a D for desertion, and soon became unfit for service. When he was released from the army, he spent all of his time and money on prostitutes, and as he became more and more paranoid that “the Irish” were out to get him, Minor decided to relocate to London. In a paranoid fit one night, he ran into the street and shot the first man he saw: George Merrett, an impoverished workingclass husband and father of six children. Found not mentally responsible, Minor was held “at Her Majesty's Pleasure” at the Broadmoor Lunatic Asylum, where he was given a suite of rooms, permission to acquire an enviable library, and it was from here, with his limitless leisure hours, that Dr. Minor was about to find and write out his many thousands of submissions. While his contributions to the OED were perfectly suitable, he remained disturbed: believing that people broke into his room every night and performed unspeakable acts to his body. Over and over, Winchester makes conjectures: wondering if it was exposure to naked swimming girls in the Ceylon of his youth that caused Minor to have a lifelong fixation on the sexualising of little girls (and he mentions this about little girls near the end without having been specific before about Minor's sexual “momomania”); Winchester wonders if it was PTSD from the war or specifically a fear of an Irish vendetta that fueled Minor's paranoia; and in what I thought was a tasteless bit of conjecture, after noting that Minor performed an autopeotomy (look it up), Winchester writes: 

No suggestion exists that the meetings between Minor and Eliza Merrett were anything other than proper, formal, and chaste – and perhaps they always were so, and any residual guilt that Minor may have felt stemmed from the kind of fantasies to which his medical records show him to have been prey. But it has to be admitted that it remains a possibility – not a probability, to be sure – that it was guilt for a specific act, rather than some slow-burning religious fervor, that prompted this horrible tragedy.

So, the murder victim's widow – whom Minor had the means to assist financially throughout the years – would sometimes visit him at Broadmoor, and although Winchester could find no evidence that anything improper happened between them, he just thought he'd throw it out as a possibility. That's just wrong.

And here was what I thought to be the biggest fail in the book: In the Preface to The Professor and the Madman, Winchester writes of the first meeting between Murray and Minor, saying that the Professor, after corresponding with one of the OED's most prolific contributors for over twenty years, finally decided to board a train and make his way to Dr. Minor's address. Pleased to have his train met by a stylish carriage, Murray is even more impressed when the coachman turns into an oak-lined lane and arrives at an enormous mansion. Murray is shown inside, and when he is presented to a finely dressed gentleman in a book-filled study, Murray extends his hand and says, “Dr. Minor, I presume.” “Oh no,” says the other, “I am the warden of this lunatic asylum and Dr. Minor is one of my sickest patients.” That's a great story: too bad it never happened. After opening with this anecdote, I spent the next two hundred pages believing that this was the way it happened and was dismayed to read near the end that this was merely the tabloid invention of an American journalist; Murray was aware of Minor's situation from the start (yes, to be fair, Winchester begins with, “Popular myth has it”, but I read that as, "This story has reached the level of myth", not, “I'm starting this nonfiction book with something you shouldn't believe”, and I felt tricked; even the Goodreads book synopsis details this version of the story).

This could have been a totally fascinating book – I'm sure there were more stories about the literally tons of submissions that were sent to the Scriptorium by eager contributors; I would have liked much more information about that whole process (it took seventy years from conception to completion!) – and so much more could have been written about Murray and Minor, Victorian mental health care, and the murder victim and his family. This could have been a great book in the right hands, but I just don't think Winchester was up to the job.