The Culprits by Robert Hough - review

The Culprits
By Robert Hough
Random House of Canada, 320 pages, $35.00


First, a quick note; this may be the greatest description of the Canadian peoples ever put to paper. “The people work too hard, and are boring because of it. They live in nice homes, and watch hockey on television…The people do not like opera or ballet, and they have no famous writers. They are polite to one another, without ever being friendly. They keep their problems to themselves, and don’t know how to laugh properly.” Perfect.

I think Robert Hough must delight in confounding expectations.

His first novel, The Final Confession of Mabel Stark, with its quaint cover evoking a bygone era of big-game danger and circus escapades, looked to be a rousing send-up of adventure novels. Quite a surprise, then, to discover Hough leavening the ribaldry with deft psychological depth and witty meta-fiction asides.

Six years later, he does it again. First, the title: The Culprits. It puts one in mind of a crime thriller, along the lines of The Usual Suspects or Reservoir Dogs. Then there’s a cover image, a silhouette of a rabbit, blindfolded, with a target painted on it. I am immediately reminded of the bizarre Canadian movie Phil the Alien, wherein a secret operative with a shadowy U.S. agency is trained to ignore all emotions by killing puppies with a cheese grater. It’s funnier than it sounds.

What a non-surprise to discover that the culprits of the title are not villains bent on monetary gains, but something far more intangible. “How about fantasy? How about desire? How about the need to keep the mind nimble and the soul a little more lifelike, despite all the drudgery that is thrown by life at us?” The culprits, in Hough’s universe, are the emotions that fight to take chances, to seek joy, to be happy; these culprits keep us interested in living.

The next surprise comes through the plot, which sets itself up in a few broad strokes to be a comical satire of lovelorn individuals trapped in marriages of convenience. Again, however, Hough refuses to deliver the expected. Damn him. Damn him, I say, and damn his inestimable talent.

Hank Wallins is a lonely man. A night-time computer operator with an insurance company, he has no friends, no prospects, and a maddening case of tinnitus. As he notices one night, “[he] had fourteen cigarettes left, and enough change for five cups of coffee from the Quality Assurance vending machines. Other than that, there was nothing, not a thing, in the joke that was his life.”

A fortuitous push into the oncoming path of a subway train puts him into hospital, and into contact with a man who has recently benefited from the offerings of the website From Russia with Love. It is an online love market for lonely North American men and desperate Russian women, and Hank is a prime candidate for its services. As is Anna, a Russian woman badly treated by her lover, and in desperate need of a change. Hoping for anything, she begins a correspondence with Hank, who sees in her the image of his long-lost love.

This is the stuff of classic comedy, of Neil Simon witticisms and Hollywood fluff a la Green Card. And there is fine humour in Hough’s smooth delivery of Hank’s transparently bad idea, of his desperation in finding companionship through Internet scams. Anna’s obvious dislike of Hank, her disappointment in his ordinariness, is matched by her feelings toward Toronto; “There was something about the city’s orderliness that exacerbated her turmoil. There was something about its cool functionality that made her lose her composure. Even the air felt thin, the soul squeezed out of it.”

Yet after this initial set-up, Hough brings in a third character; Ruslan, a Dagestani living in Russia, the former lover of Anna who finds himself kidnapped in Putin’s Russia. Suddenly, all expectations go out the window, and Hough expertly manoeuvres through a plot that combines the mundane goings-on of Canada with terrorists, disgruntled Russian citizenry, and horrific brutality. All of this from the omnipresent POV of a narrator whose identity shall remain secret, but whose outlook on life is arguably amongst the most touching and unique in 21st century Canadian literature.

There is much more to Hough’s story, as he effectively contrasts the disparate personalities who propel the plot forward. But for all its modern pyrotechnics, there is something undeniably sweet and old-fashioned at the core of The Culprits, a yearning for more than life gives. As Hank pines, Anna whines, and Ruslan slowly erodes, Hough reveals a compassion for the simple needs of his characters, whether they be in straits commonplace or dire. “Humans, they cope,” the narrator advises, and it is this theme that brings about the major events of The Culprits. Whether it might be ill-advised acts of love or acts of terrorism, the humans, they do indeed cope. It’s all we can expect to do, Hough appears to say, and it is a testament to his storytelling verve that such a sentiment does not bog the story down in depression. Rather, like Hank falling to the tracks below, it hovers. It stays aloft, and floats, and astonishes. The Culprits is one of the best novels of 2007.

Houdini's Shadow by Leo Brent Robillard - Review

Houdini’s Shadow
By Leo Brent Robillard
Turnstone Press, 177 pages, $19.95

In his review of the under-rated modern noir Johnny Handsome, esteemed film critic Roger Ebert opined that stereotypes are not always a bad thing. Sometimes, he believed, a story is better when it acknowledges its roots.

I felt the same way after reading Leo Brent Robillard’s uneven yet entertaining novel Houdini’s Shadow; here is a novel of dark, pulpy, noirish themes, yet it would be a better story if it acknowledged itself as such.

Despite an opening chapter detailing one of Houdini’s famous escapes, Houdini’s Shadow does not concern itself with the magician. Rather, Robillard follows the path of Jake, a young boy who witnesses Houdini’s cheating of death, and becomes enamoured with the prospect of becoming an escapist. With a boxer father on the take, however, it isn’t long before Jake’s life departs from the glorious illusions of youth, and enters the gritty reality of a life of crime on the streets of Montreal.

Soon, after an aborted life as a professional thief, Jake takes up as a driver for Israel, a local mobster who isn’t as big as he’d like. Israel has taken up with a fetching young lass named Louise who, in classic femme fatale fashion, takes up with Jake on the side, says her name is really Lulu, and begins playing all the angles to suit her own mysterious needs. “[H]e understands in some oblique way that she is like a mirror. Only, rather than a likeness, she reflects a yearning. She is what you want her to be, and is therefore perfect.” If that isn’t a dangerous woman straight out of Chandler and Hammett, it ought to be.

Robillard displays a fine knack for crafting evocative moments that effortlessly capture the essence of mystery. At one point, Jake observes a man and woman sitting at the other end of a train car, when the train enters a tunnel; “when the light crashes through the windows on the other side of the tunnel, they are where he left them. Only something is different. A smudge of blush, perhaps. A loose lock of hair. And suddenly he understands something important about the dark.” Passages such as this tinge the plot with hints of indigo sadness, pushing the noir to its limits.

The problem with Houdini’s Shadow (other than a third act that unwisely abandons its third-person singular narration) is its unwillingness to fully embrace its pulp origins. Robillard rarely pushes hard enough, trying to find the artistic slant to his slim plot rather than delve into the darkness that his tale truly requires. It’s too much surface, all gloss and polish, when what is needed is a healthy dose of grit. Robillard needs to commit to the stereotypes of the genre; the somewhat-dim hero, the deadly dame, the aggrieved gangster. These are the tools of the trade, and while Robillard understands their uses, he is unable to build more than a façade that looks good, but has little depth.

For Houdini’s Shadow is fully in the vein of the recent Hard Case Crime publications, and would make a good fit with the classic reissues of Donald E. Westlake and Ed McBain. Robillard has the moves and the technique, but he needs more seasoning to fully bring Jake’s sordid world to life. Houdini’s Shadow is an enjoyable story, but it’s a b-movie among b-movies.

The Commons by Matthew Hughes - review

The Commons
By Matthew Hughes
Robert J. Sawyer Books, 317 pages, $26.95

It’s not often that one can use the phrases “rich study of archetypal characters throughout human history” and “boisterous sci-fantasy action yarn” to describe the same story. In the worlds of Mathew Hughes, however, it would appear that going as far astray from the normal as possible is the norm, so to speak.

Hughes is one of a number of should-be-better-known science-fiction authors being pushed forward by Canadian sci-fi icon Robert J. Sawyer. Through his imprint, deserving authors such as Nick DiChario and Terrence Green are gaining a wider audience for their visions of the fantastic.

Lucky Matthew Hughes. While he has published several novels to acclaim—many concerning his terrifically warped Archonate universe—The Commons may mark his introduction to a far more expansive readership; deservingly so, as an imagination as tremendously unbridled as Hughes should be experienced by as many as possible.

Using the Archonate themes of earlier novels Fools Errant and Black Brillion, The Commons is an exploration of Hughes self-styled “noösphere,” a spectacularly dense world underneath the world, “the distillation of all human experience, everything that had ever been important to humankind, individually or collectively, since the dawntime.” A universe that exists within the minds of humanity, the noösphere can only be visited by those specifically trained by the Institute of Historical Inquiry, an organization founded “scores, some said hundreds, of thousands of years ago, to explore and map the human collective unconscious.”

In this world of the Commons reside “the eternal archetypes of the species: the Fool and the Hero, the Mother and Father, the Wise Man and the Helpful Beast…[h]ere, too, were all the elemental Events, Situations, and Landscapes of the human story.” In other words, the noösphere is a world where all our myths and legends live on, cycling through their stories in perpetuity, never altering, and always dangerous to those “noönauts” brave enough to map its countries. Only by chanting a variety of “thrans” can the noönaut avoid being detected and absorbed into the psychological landscape.

Onto this crowded palette is thrust Guth Bandar, a trainee with the Institute who finds himself increasingly (and unwillingly) forced into interactions with humanity’s historical archetypes and event patterns. Soon, he comes to believe that the collective unconscious has achieved consciousness, and may be trying to use Bandar to some purpose he cannot comprehend.

As with most speculative fiction, the fun is in the details: how this new universe functions, what its rules are, etc. For most, this requires an exacting certitude in presentation, to ensure no anomalies are present. Hughes sidesteps this potential dilemma by creating a universe with no rules at all; the world of the noösphere is in the unconscious imagination, and therefore has no limits, and therefore can do whatever it pleases. This can lead to some bizarre and hysterical archetypal mashups, as when Bandar (no spoilers here, just hints) finds himself physically transformed in a subplot to a famous Greek myth, escapes, and becomes trapped in a children’s fairy tale. All of this is relayed in scientific/psychological jargon such as “The forest, when he entered it, was of the Sincere/Approximate classification…its iconic characteristics told Bandar that he was almost certainly in a Class Four Situation…the Situation’s cycle would involve only indispensable interactions between the idiomatic inhabitants.” Hughes never reveals his hand, letting the reader have the joy of slowly realizing the common archetypes in play. The only obvious parallel is Jasper Fforde’s Tuesday Next novels, wherein the heroine walks through a world populated by characters and themes from great literature. Where Fforde uses Austen and Dickens as templates, however, Hughes mines the psychological texts of Jung and the myth explorations of Joseph Campbell.

While Hughes imagination is exemplary, the novel falters in its overall execution. Originally a series of short stories Hughes wrote for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Hughes has performed a “fixup,” a reorganization of the stories as an overall novel, with inconsistencies smoothed out and overall theme emphasized. Sawyer, in his introduction, takes pains to establish this technique as a classic manoeuvre in literature, reminding us that Frank Herbert’s Dune and Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy began life in the same format. All this is well and good, but The Commons is too obviously a series of stories, and never fully congeals as a novel in its entirety; it is too episodic, too repetitive, and its lack of overall linear flow damages the novel. Bandar is a charming enough protagonist, but he is too much the cipher, and other characters never have enough opportunity to become more than pieces on a chessboard.

It’s a quibble, nevertheless, because The Commons is so rich and rewarding an experience that its shortcomings can easily be forgiven. With its unique employment of archetypes and psychological depth, The Commons is a great introduction to Hughes, and leaves the reader yearning to discover his other works, which may be the greatest compliment one could give.