Bulwer-Lytton winners announced!

Just too much of a joy for me to contain: this year's winners of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest have been announced.

For those unaware, Bulwer-Lytton (named after Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton, the originator of the phrase "It was a dark and stormy night") is an annual contest to see who can come up with the worst opening sentence to the worst novel never written.

This year's winner, from the mind of David McKenzie, "a 55-year-old Quality Systems consultant and writer from Federal Way, Washington":

Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin’ off Nantucket Sound from the nor’east and the dogs are howlin’ for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the “Ellie May,” a sturdy whaler captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin’ and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests.

More winners and runner-ups can be found here.

Monkey droppings - Far North by Marcel Theroux

On today's menu: the apocalypse, with a side of artistic license.






Far North
by Marcel Theroux
HarperCollins Canada, 296 pages, $29.99

Science fiction, as a genre, has always suffered from a decided lack of scholarly respect. Yet while ‘literary’ authors may be wary to dive into the space battles of tomorrow, the same cannot be said of one of science-fiction’s subsets, the post-apocalyptic novel, which regularly attracts the heavyweights with its promise of heady themes and bleak world outlook.

Writers as lauded as Margaret Atwood, P.D. James, and J.G. Ballard have routinely explored the world that lies just a plague, oil shortage, or nuclear blast away from ours. Cormac McCarthy recently won the Pulitzer Prize (and, more profitably, an Oprah endorsement) for The Road, a gruesomely bleak foray into the hell-blasted landscape of our future.

Marcel Theroux would appear to have the chops to successfully take on the subject. A British author and broadcaster, and son of celebrated American author Paul Theroux, he has carved a career for himself with well-received novels such as The Paperchase, earning himself the 2002 Somerset Maugham Award in the process.

Far North is Theroux’s attempt to present the Earth after society has all but given up the ghost for reasons left tantalizingly unclear, although there is talk of blighted areas and poisonous animals. His narrator is Makepeace, possibly the last person living in a settlement in northern Russia.

Humanity has reverted to a nomadic lifestyle where suspicion of one’s fellow man is the wisest choice of action. Makepeace understands that while there is nothing so friendly as a well-fed man, “take away his food, make his future uncertain, let him know that no one’s watching him, and he won’t just kill you, he’ll come up with a hundred and one reasons why you deserve it.” After Makepeace witnesses the sheer impossibility of a plane flying overhead, the notion that there may be a world still evolving takes hold. Makepeace sets out to discover the plane’s origins, and quickly discovers a world “fading to nothing, like the words of a vital message some fool had laundered with his pants and brought out all garbled.”

Theroux guides Makepeace’s journey with a steady hand, slowly revealing both the state of humankind and Makepeace’s surprising nature with a deliberate, unforced caution. While lacking the stark, hypnotic beauty of McCarthy’s prose, Theroux is an able craftsman, and Far North engages in its depiction of mankind’s survivors kept cowed and under thumb through “the patterns of older gods…terror and mercy, like twin shadows of an old totem that gets fed with blood.”

However, a marked lack of urgency drastically hampers Theroux’s imaginings. Makepeace’s world may be winding down, but this ramping inertia unfortunately transfers to the story, resulting in scenes that feel stale where they should excite.

There are some late-act developments that beggar belief, including a McGuffin of a mysterious elixir and the reemergence of a person important to Makepeace’s past. The last fifty pages pile on the coincidences, as if Theroux did not trust his world to be fascinating on its own.

There is enough good (and some excellent) in Far North for it to warrant a look, especially for aficionados of ‘end-of-the-planet’ scenarios. Yet for a novel encompassing the climax of mankind, Far North is quietly anti-climactic.

Originally published (expurgated version) in the Winnipeg Free Press, June 28, 2009.

In today's little tidbit of absolutely appalling news, or, people don't get that Shelf Monkey wasn't meant to be taken seriously.....

This may be the most disgusting thing I've heard all week, but then again, it's only Monday, and I'm sure another all-out assault on common sense by Glenn Beck/Sarah Palin/Sean Hannity/take-your-pick-they're-all-the-same is just around the corner.

From The Guardian:

In a scene which appears to have been lifted straight out of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, a group of Christians in Wisconsin has launched a legal claim demanding the right to publicly burn a copy of a book for teenagers which they deem to be "explicitly vulgar, racial [sic], and anti-Christian".

The offending book is Francesca Lia Block's Baby Be-Bop, a young adult novel in which a boy, struggling with his homosexuality, is beaten up by a homophobic gang. The complaint, which according to the American Library Association also demands $120,000 (£72,000) in compensatory damages for being exposed to the book in a display at West Bend Community Memorial Library, was lodged by four men from the Christian Civil Liberties Union.
...
The legal challenge follows a lengthy campaign by some West Bend residents to restrict access to teenage books they deemed sexually explicit from library shelves, which was eventually thrown out at the start of June."

I can't even begin to describe how disgusted I am at this.

Thanks to Bookninja for the info.

This week in disturbing imagery

I present, the heroic Redekop:

and the deeply unsettling Redekop.

*shudder*

*NOTE: I'll have better posts soon, I promise. I'm having a bit of down time at the moment.

Mysterious artwork enlivens humdrum task

As a librarian, one of the duties is to ensure that all books in the library are being used and, if said books are not used often enough within a certain period of time, to weed unused books from the shelves.

Sad, but true.

Yet today, as summer interns began the arduous task of examining every single book in our fiction area, a small piece of hardened parchment fell out of the pages.

And another.

And another.

Over thirty so far, and we haven't even finished the As.

Who did this? Who depositied tiny pieces of watercolour artwork randomly into the novels of the Fredericton Public Library? No one knows, but it does add a touch of utter wonderment to the day.

I can hardly wait until the Bs.

Anyone have any idea what this is all about? I'd like to thank the artist if I could. Thank you, mysterious painter, I and my colleagues thank you for your gifts.