Monkey Droppings - Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey

The Monkey grapples with feelings of vague disappointment in the face of overwhelming opposition by the majority of critics.

Ah, who needs friends anyway.

Overrated, really.

Parrot and Olivier in America
by Peter Carey (2010)

Peter Carey is unquestionably one of the more celebrated novelists around. The two-time Booker-winner has proven time and again that he is a master of language, and every new novel from the Australian author is a tempting treat.

His most celebrated works, such as Oscar and Lucinda, tend to be historical tomes, and as such Carey’s newest effort, Parrot and Olivier in America, would appear to be another possible award-winner. Yet no author can maintain a perfect record; coming on the heels of his under-appreciated novel His Illegal Self, Parrot is sadly a lesser work.

Parrot and Olivier in America is set as a picaresque travelogue between two disparate personalities, representing class ideologies of the 19th century. Carey loosely bases Parrot on Alexis de Tocqueville, a French political thinker whose treatise Democracy in America is considered a magnum opus of social analysis.

Olivier de Garmont is a French nobleman, a lawyer sent to the burgeoning country of America, ostensibly to write on a dissertation on their prison system. Olivier is rather stuffy, described by his travelling companion thusly: “The trouble with the general class of Garmonts is that they cannot imagine the life of anyone outside the circle of their arse.”

John Larrit (or Parrot) is Olivier’s servant, an older Englishman acting as Olivier’s protector/transcriber during his voyages. Parrot is a rough-and-ready sort, an artist who has lived a truly Dickensian life of turmoil.

Together, the duo travels a period of great historical upheaval in Europe and North America. It is the time of France’s July Revolution, or as Parrot opines, the time when “the Frogs had once again become maddened by their king and went around the capital smashing anything that reminded them of their own stupidity.”

As they travel America, Olivier becomes enchanted with the future of governance, despite warnings that democracy is “a tiny tender fruit, but it will not ripen well.” Parrot maintains a more skeptical attitude, observing, “Democracies and monarchies, it does not matter—the world is filled with poor men tortured by the state.”

Historical novels are often a means by which to critique modern society, and Parrot is no exception. There is a harsh glee in Carey’s words when Olivier states, “Americans carry national pride altogether too far...Most of them boast about it without discernment and with an aggressiveness that is disagreeable to strangers and shows but little intelligence.”

While there is much humour to be found in statements such as “The common American people preferred their leaders to be as uneducated as they were themselves,” Parrot rarely achieves its potential. Carey has sketched out a novel weighted with political and philosophical concerns, but the story feels fragmented, by turns episodic and shallow.

Unlike Margaret Sweatman’s recent, similar novel The Players, Carey only occasionally achieves a balance between themes and characters. Rare for the author, Carey’s adventurers remain ciphers throughout, although Parrot is far more interesting than his titular counterpart.

It is impossible to label anything by Carey a failure, and Parrot and Olivier in America contains some set-pieces that likely rank with his best. Parrot is an interesting, sometimes lyrical foray into the roots of American democracy, but the novel’s unevenness proves its undoing.

VERDICT: MONKEY LIKES, BUT COULDN'T HOLD BACK THE YAWNS

Originally published (expurgated version) in the Winnipeg Free Press, April 24,2010.

Monkey Droppings - A duo on dogma: "People will leap to the most lurid meaning they can find, even if it's one the author never intended."

Today, the Monkey examines two recent fictions on Christian mythology.

Fictions on mythology.

So...fictions on...fictions?

The Monkey's brain just melted under the pressure of so much meta.

The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ
by Philip Pullman (2010)

Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bible!
by Jonathan Goldstein (2009)

He took the loaves and the fishes, and blessed them, and then said to the crowd "See how I share this food out? You do the same. There'll be enough for everyone."
And sure enough, it turned out that one man had brought some barley cakes, and another had a couple of apples, and a third had some dried fish, and a fourth had a pocketful of raisins, and so; and between them all, there was plenty to go round. No one was left hungry.
And Christ, watching it all and taking notes, recorded this as another miracle.

Let's get the obvious out of the way; if you're going to court controversy in Christian culture, you just couldn't do better than have Philip Pullman write a reenactment of the Christ mythology. Hell, that's just throwing gasoline on an already-raging inferno.

Backstory: Philip Pullman became a pariah to many in the evangelical Christian community upon the publication of his young adult fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials (of which the first, The Golden Compass, became an expensive movie that disappointed more than it enthralled). Filled with discussions on theology, God, and the functions of the Church, there has ever since been an ongoing challenge to the works as being anti-religious.

I'm going to throw in my two cents here (my blog, my rules); His Dark Materials (besides being a superior fantasy entertainment) is not anti-religious, although I can see why many might find Pullman's questioning of the Church a trifle upsetting. His Dark Materials is not anti-religious, it is anti-abuse of power, and in light of recent developments in the Catholic Church, more timely than ever. Now, back to our original scheduled programming already in progress.

So getting a novelist already condemned as being an atheist to rewrite the story of Christ is a good way to drum up some free publicity (and it's already working, apparently). Also, as his work The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ (hereinafter referred to as GMJSC) is being published as part of Knopf's Myths series, you get the added heat of persons ticked off that their religious belief system is being labeled 'a myth'; somehow, I don't think Margaret Atwood's retelling of Penelope and Odysseus or Alexander McCall Smith's take on Dream Angus would cause the same uproar. So, kudos to Knopf; there really is no such thing as bad publicity. Now, if you could take on the story of Muhammad, then you'd really get some attention.

But those gleefully expecting an excoriation of the Christ story (yeah, okay, I admit I'm one of them) will be somewhat disappointed, as GMJSC is an inherently respectful and solemn work. Pullman proves in this novel that he understands and truly loves the value of myths to society, and also that he condemns those who would use such value to corrupt and terrorize. But he will raise some hackles, never fear.

In Pullman's take on the myth, Mary (the virgin mother, for those unfamiliar with the story - what, I should just assume we all know this? Sheesh.) has, instead of the one son, given birth to a set of twins. "They were both boys, and the first was strong and healthy, but the second was small, weak, and sickly. Mary wrapped the strong boy in cloth and laid him in the feeding trough, and suckled the other first, because she felt sorry for him." Jesus, the strong one, is blessed with the force of personality that effortlessly attracts followers; as he's the quieter of the two, the three wise men who foretold his coming naturally gravitate toward him. Christ, the sickly second one, is more unassuming in manner; "although he resembled his brother, of course, he had the sort of face that few people remember, and his manner was always modest and retiring."

At first, it appears that a mistake might have been made; Christ has a natural affinity for small miracles, using them to get Jesus out of trouble. But as they mature into men, Jesus is the one who decides to teach the word of God to whomever will listen, abandoning his family and setting down the road with an ever-growing throng of disciples. Jesus is the prophet; Christ, the politician. Christ dearly loves his brother but is perplexed at his mind-set:

He does things out of passion, and I do them out of calculation. I can see further than he can; I can see the consequences of things he doesn't think twice about. But he acts with the whole of himself at every moment, and I'm always holding something back out of caution, or prudence.

Christ, wanting to fulfil a function in Jesus' ministry, decides to become a recorder of Christ's words and parables, but soon finds the task more complex than he initially realized. "What Jesus seemed to be saying with these stories, Christ thought, was something horrible: that God's love was arbitrary and undeserved, almost like a lottery." At the urging of a mysterious stranger, Christ begins to reinterpret Jesus' teachings to make them more consistent, more understandable:

Sometimes there is a danger that people might misinterpret the words of a popular speaker. The statements need to be edited, the meanings clarified, the complexities unravelled for the simple-of-understanding...What should have been is a better servant of the Kingdom than what was.

What Pullman tries to do (and very largely succeeds, from my point of view) is both celebrate the life of a man who tried to do some actual good and condemn the willful misuse and misinterpretation of his words to better control the masses. As Christ witnesses through his own actions the inevitable corruption that infects any political hierarchy, he begins to doubt his very belief in what he has so long argued for:

The body of the faithful, the church, as [the stranger] calls it, will do every kind of good, I hope so, I believe so, I must believe so, and yet I fear it'll do terrible things as well in its zeal and self-righteousness...Under it's authority, Jesus will be distorted and lied about and compromised and betrayed over and over again.

That's a little on the nose, but we are talking parables here, hardly the most subtle form of allegory around. The entire novel is presented in a similar tone, simple yet laden with meaning, not an easy effect that Pullman somehow pulls off.

If I have any real quibble with GMJSC, it's that it isn't risky enough. It's all well and good to have his stranger muse,

History belongs to time, but truth belongs to what is beyond time. In writing of things as they should have been, you are letting truth into history. You are the word of God.

but I want more. The word 'scoundrel' in the title raised my expectations, I suppose. Christ is hardly a scoundrel, and Jesus is a deeply flawed 'good man.' This goes toward Pullman's central thesis, that the truth is flexible and will always distort depending on the speaker.

Maybe the story is too familiar to audience's to real bend and twist, but in the same series of books, Russian author Victor Pelevin retold the Minotaur myth as being trapped in an electronic maze. It was a befuddling piece of work, but you can't deny it radically altered the structure of the story. I admire Pullman's moxie, but I wanted him to push even further. As it stands, his story is effective and compelling, but in a small way a loss of opportunity to see how far he could go. This is hardly a blight on a sterling novel, however; The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ is a fine piece of work, worthy of discussion.

And now, from Jesus to the others.

In a very strange reversal of my expectations, Jonathan Goldstein's collection of stories Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bible! has not garnered any noticeable controversy, this despite its re-imagining of various biblical characters as being misanthropes, cowards, dunderheads, egotists, and comedians. Maybe Pullman stole focus, or maybe Jesus is the only unimpeachable one in the whole book. Still, fairly odd, as I have always found evangelical Christians to be the ones least likely to have a sense of humour about themselves.

Goldstein, an author and broadcaster - who's superbly idiosyncratic CBC radio program Wiretap should be placed on your podcast playlist forthwith - has put together a number of stories retelling some of the most famous tales in the Bible (most of which have been narrated on his show in shortened and altered versions). In Goldstein's imaginings, Adam is a dull-witted simpleton who "tried to pinch his own eyes out in order to examine them and God had to step in," Jonah is a hapless loser whose sojourn in the belly of a fish is the only notable thing in his life, and Noah is a bitter old man who missed the work ethic of his youth, having "lived long enough to see that craftsmanship was going down the toilet."

Like Pullman, Goldstein pens his fables with a simple, parable-like narrative style that eminently suits the subject matter; it's interesting how little one has to tweak the style to switch from drama to comedy. Where Pullman is interested in truly examining a myth and its consequences, however, Goldstein wants to fill in the gaps that saturate the Bible's many stories with his own dry humour, and try and give greater context to the character's actions.

For example, did you know King David's entire career was based on his wish to become a comedian? You see, Goliath was not only a bully, he was a teller of very poor jokes:

As well as being creative at murder, he also had a very big and hurtful mouth. He used it to make the Jews look bad. When Goliath stood on the hilltop near the Hebrew camp and called out to them mockingly - calling them Jewburgers, Jewlips, Jewy Jewballs and other anti-Semitic foods - the Jews pretended not to care. But they did care. Still, they figured it was better to endure insults than broken bones.

Young David also has a sense of humour, but it is as raw and unfocused as Goliath's. For David, physical comedy is the way to go when dealing with the big bully, and killing a giant with a tiny sling is surely the most ridiculous (and therefore funny) way of dispatching him.

Maybe if I strike him right in mid-insult - just after the words 'and furthermore...' - or pop him just as he's gulping from his goblet so the stone can bounce off his head and plop into his wine! If the Lord, in His infinite kindness, might grant Goliath's dropping dead to be preceded by a plopping sound, I will have achieved a comedy of the highest order!

Yet as in most of Goldstein's retellings, nothing goes according to plan. David becomes King and rules the land, but never quite masters the art of telling a joke. Joseph feels cuckolded by his wife Mary's having a baby by a deity, but his love for the unborn child sees him through the rough spots. Samson is a muscleheaded moron but, in a surprising display of pathos on Goldstein's part, destroys himself through his yearning for Delilah.

But The Bible! suffers from the sin of repetition, especially if you read more than one story a day. The stories all have the same deadpan wit, which becomes a trifle monotonous. There's a lot of good in Goldstein's stories - at times, he achieves the transcendent satire of early period Woody Allen at his most surreal - but when placed all together, they can be exhausting.

So, in a head-to-head battle for supremacy, Pullman is the winner, but Goldstein put up a hell of a fight. Both tell exceptional stories about exceptional people, but Pullman's philosophical treatise cuts far deeper.

VERDICT: MONKEY LIKES The Good Man Jesus A LOT, The Bible! SLIGHTLY LESS SO

Monkey Droppings - The Amazing Absorbing Boy by Rabindranath Maharaj: "This was the age of improvisation."

The Monkey wonders what, exactly, makes a Canadian 'Canadian.'

A love of donuts and beer?

A superior ability to withstand cold?

Facial hair?

The Monkey has come up with a theory on what it is to be Canadian, but he's far too polite to bother you with the details.


The Amazing Absorbing Boy
by Rabindranath Maharaj (2010)

A typical Canadian - or at least those I had met - was someone who fussed all the time. About everything. Toronto was getting too modern and ugly. Toronto was stuck in the past. Too many immigrants. Too few. Foreign people were living all by themselves. Foreign people were walking bold-bold in places that shouldn't concern them. Too many American shows. Too few. Too much hockey violence. Too little. Too hot. Too cold.

For a seventeen-year-old, Samuel has had a far more interesting life than most boys his age in Canada. That, of course, is because he's not from Canada, but from the island of Trinidad; Mayaro, specifically, a place where "nothing really changed: people lived and died in the same house and arguments between neighbours lasted for years." Consequently, despite living a life alien to most teens in his new northern home, Samuel is often boggled by a land where "it seemed that every week something new was added."

Rabindranath Maharaj knows whereof he writes; the author emigrated to Canada from Trinidad, and has published several novels and collections that revolve around the themes of immigration and refugees. I'm not wholly familiar with his canon, but I can assure you that his short-story release The Book of Its and Buts is a sterling collection and well worthy of your attention.

In The Amazing Absorbing Boy, Maharaj takes a look at immigration from the POV of a young man, forced into moving to Canada after the death of his mother. His father had moved to Canada years previously, and now Samuel finds himself in a small Regent Park apartment in Toronto with a stranger who could charitably be described as 'cold.' Samuel is the prototypical stranger in a strange land, fish out of water hero; alone, frightened, resourceful, and very confused as to what a typical Canadian might be.

As Samuel navigates the new terrain, he comes to better grips with his situation through interactions with a wide variety of colourful individuals such as women poets, pawn shop owners, video rental enthusiasts, and borderline paranoid schizophrenics. Each has a story, each is quirky and eccentric, but the sum total of Absorbing Boy is not nearly as memorable as it should be. Despite some sterling writing - I particularly love the 'chimera fella' who works in the library and complains, "Everything has changed. Now the entire staff is beholden to lists. Horrible memoirs bursting with frivolous grief. I feel sometimes as if I am a custodian of misery" - Maharaj's tale never really connects. Hardly any character lasts more than a chapter or two, and the overall episodic nature of the storytelling halts any forward momentum in Samuel's bildungsroman.

I understand why Maharaj sets his novel up in this manner; Canada is a brave new world, to Samuel's eyes a constantly evolving universe that threatens to overwhelm him at every turn. Other than Sam, there are practically no recurring characters; his father is so distant as to be a ghost in the apartment, his family is back in Trinidad, and every person he meets disappears within a few pages. Keeping him disorientated is crucial to his triumph over the odds, but it also disorients the reader, and only past the halfway point (when Samuel makes a few crucial life decisions) does the narrative move beyond being a parade of random absurdities and encounters and become a full story. The surreal encounters play well to Samuel's bewilderment, but Maharaj's decision sacrifices any true empathy the reader may have for Samuel, crucial in a novel such as this. I cannot adequately explain (to myself, anyway) why this should be, as some of my favourite books of late have been exquisitely episodic in nature; Martha Baillie's The Incident Report springs to mind as a supremely episodic work that effortlessly caught me by the heartstrings. Nevertheless, Samuel's dilemma never fully engaged me.

There is also a comic superhero sub-theme (played up in the blurbs and book cover prose) that does not amount to nearly as much as supposed. While Samuel laments that "there was nothing better than comic-book English with the gulping and sighing and constant threatening," his lapsing into comic-book metaphors and analogies never amounts to anything more than a ploy to catch reader's attention, and could easily have been excised.

The Amazing Absorbing Boy is a work easier to admire than to like. I found myself wishing I enjoyed it more, as there is some fine writing on display, and some scenes have stuck with me. But the overall piece is hardly, well, absorbing. Sorry to end on a pun.

VERDICT: MONKEY THINKS IT'S SO-SO

Critical Monkey! Update the 9th!

Wow, what a roller coaster of a month! Two completions! Two survivors! Two participants of iron will, joining the ranks of the immortals! So exciting, I can't even form coherent hyperbole to adequately describe it!! Must resort to extra exclamation marks to express pleasure!!!!

Let's go to the stats:

Acceptance (seven reviews)

Lori L
Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen
Roses of Glory by Mary Pershall
Spock's World by Diane Duane
A Texan's Honor by Leigh Greenwood
Star Wars: Rebel Dawn by A.C. Crispin
Twilight by Stephanie Meyer *ineligible for contention*
Love Comes Softly by Janette Oke
The Outlaws of Mesquite by Louis L'Amour

Steve Zipp
Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town by Stephen Leacock
A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
The Whiteoaks of Jalna by Mazo de la Roche
The Palm-Wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola
Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens
The Navy Times Book of Submarines by Brayton Harris

Depression (six reviews)

Corey Redekop
Twilight by Stephenie Meyer
The Justice Riders by Chuck Norris
Jake and the Kid by W.O. Mitchell
Left Behind by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins
The Stainless Steel Rat by Harry Harrison
The Murder of King Tut by James Patterson & Martin Dugard *ineligible for contention*
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

Anger (five reviews)

Jeanne
Empire of Lies by Andrew Klaven
A Merry Heart by Wanda E. Brunsetter
A Washington, D.C. by Robert J. Hensler
It's Not that I'm Bitter by Gina Barreca
Fat Girls in Lawn Chairs by Cheryl Peck

Scrat
Bright Shiny Morning by James Frey
Hold Tight by Harlan Coben
Double Cross by James Patterson
Strangers in Death by J.D. Robb (Nora Roberts)
Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal by Christopher Moore

Guilt (four reviews)

Bargaining (three reviews)

Betty
Generation Dead/Generation Dead: Kiss of Life by Daniel Waters
A Bend in the Road by Nicholas Sparks
The Red Tent by Anita Diamant

Denial (two reviews)

gypsysmom
Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee
Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice

Shock (one review)

Alison
On the Road by Jack Kerouac

First off, congrats to Steve and Lori, our two fightin' centurions of literary merit. Steve made up for losing Canada Also Reads (and my respect) with a sterling non-fiction look at submarines, and Lori takes on a classic oater. As well, Betty and Scrat both took on books of a biblical bent, Jeanne attempted a little-known (by me, anyway) memoir, and I took to the high seas with a childhood staple.

As promised, I have an ARC of Alan Bradley's The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag available to anyone who wrote a review this month, which gives us a pool of five. And the winner is...

Jeanne! Whoo! Whaa! Wheee! Whuuu! Whiii! Jeanne, I'll contact you for your address.

And three months left to go. Who will be next to finish this horserace of utter futility? I'm betting on me, but I'm lazy, so someone could take third place of the tried.

But I only need one. When I started this, I wanted to force myself to not only read authors I've never read before, but to read the novels I prejudge as being 'awful' based on nothing more than my own unfocused rage. I'm not sure I've done that, not for every selection. Certainly, I always assumed I'd like Harry Harrison. I have violated one of my core principles, and for that, I must be self-punished.

I hereby promise that my next, and final, selection will be something I have been loathing to read. I cannot name it here, because frankly, I do not know the title. I will scour the shelves of my local public library and, rest assured, I will come up with something so potentially damaging it could endanger my very spirit. I am looking for something, in the words of Clive Barker's Pinhead, that will tear my soul apart.