Monkey droppings - Verbatim by Jeff Bursey

The monkey craves political comedy.

But The Daily Show is on too late, The Colbert Report on even later, The Rick Mercer Report is not as clever as it thinks, and This Hour has 22 Minutes ain't nowhere near what it used to be.

And in a world where Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin are political icons, isn't satire dead already?

Verbatim (Enfield & Wizenty, 2010)
by Jeff Bursey

We are not here to make politicians sound like tramps or the average person. We are here to uphold the stability of decorum and the dignity of the house, which comes from the Mother Parliament in England, and is an institution worth preserving, not one to be torn apart. The road we are on is wrong! It leads to a mockery of an institution and degrades the Members.

In a former life, I attended law school for three terrifyingly long/remarkably speedy years. During my tenure as student, I had opportunity to peruse the many legal resources available to Canadians. Dominion Law Reports. The Canadian Abridgement. Black's Law Dictionary. And of course, Hansard, the written accounts of parliamentary debates. And once I looked in, I never wanted to return.

Reading Hansard is a slog (although recent electronic advancements have made it slightly easier to search). I did whatever I could to never need visit its pages. It is an invaluable resource; it is also dreadfully dull. Just my opinion, is all. I pity the person whose job it is to transcribe and edit the speeches, complaints, grandstanding, and just general mental meanderings of these woefully verbose Canadian politicians.

In other words, I pity Jeff Bursey.

Bursey has, going by his official biography, worked for Hansard for seventeen years, as transcriber and editor. It only seems fitting that his debut novel Verbatim have Hansard as its subject. Write what you know, you know? However, if Verbatim proves anything, it's that prolonged exposure to Hansard permanently skews the way you see the world. I mean, what if this is all Bursey can write? The poor man must suffer so, his life doomed to reinterpreting every thought through his editorial prowess.

That's a joke (I'm sure Bursey is inherently sane and pleasant), but not a huge one. Verbatim, written mainly in the form of actual Hansard transcripts, is a political satire so dead-on in tone and presentation it's almost indistinguishable from the real thing. I am sure whole segments of Bursey's imaginings could be dropped into actual Hansard pages with little to no disruption. It is a bold choice, and a commendable achievement, but it's also a flaw, as I'll explain.

Verbatim, set in an unnamed Canadian province sometime in the 1990s, is presented on the pages as actual transcriptions of parliamentary sessions (click here for an actual Hansard example: the presentation is exact in every detail). In this province, the Alliance Party and the Social Progressive battle for supremacy, each member giving lip service to their constituents, each primarily concerned with attacking the other's policies and credibility. Interspersed between sessions are letters between the new Director of Hansard, his staff, and the Clerk of the Court, outlining the day-to-day developments in renovating Hansard editorial policies to more accurately represent the speech and content of parliamentary members. In other words, to make them sound like sensible, rational people, not the easiest task in the world. And as the new Hansard policies are implemented, it becomes more and more obvious that the province is run by, for lack of a better word, sub-literates. And we, correspondingly, are implicitly to blame.

Bursey's reproduction of speech patterns and over-the-top hyperbole of Canadian parliament filtered through the arcane editorial processes of Hansard is note-perfect (I particularly love that, as in real life Hansard transcripts, bits of random hubbub by members are reported as "Some Hon. Members: Oh! Oh!" and "Some Hon. Members: Resign! Resign!"). As the members of each party repeatedly attack and mock the other, the statements prove that Parliament is, like most institutions, hardly a step above an elementary school in pettiness, vindictiveness, wilful blindness, purposeful obtuseness, and one-upmanship. As Bursey writes it, there are big, important issues out there, but when Parliament is in session, he who shouts the loudest and longest wins. This is hardly a new idea, but Bursey's inventiveness and integrity to the style and cause of his satire breathes new life into a stale theme. The epigraph by Wyndham Lewis is instructive: "Should we describe it as Satire (merely because it does not refine the truth?) or should we call it realism?" Bursey's satire is well-nigh indistinguishable from the real thing.

Indeed, Verbatim is such intensively perfect rendition of Hansard that it inadvertently falls prey to my own issue with Hansard; it can be frustratingly hard to read. This is not satire that may be read as a novel, in its more usual storytelling form. There are no characters, and members are interchangeable. This is as it should be, of course, showing us that good intentions and integrity mean nothing when the game of politics is at play. Yet I cannot deny that, as the book goes on and the attacks become louder and louder until the clamour of idiocy can almost be heard through the ink on the page, the satire becomes wearisome.

Verbatim is a book is easier to admire than it is to enjoy; just in the writing of this, I've realized that my appreciation of Bursey's accomplishment is far deeper than I first suspected. Bursey stuck to his guns on its form and narrative style, and should be applauded for the result (and it was not an easy book to get to press: click here for a story concerning one of its past publishing upheavals). His presentation is perfect, the comedy subtle yet deep (with a few broad jibes thrown in). Verbatim is not an easy book to digest, and I fear its challenging nature will turn off potential readers; it is, however, damned fine at points, and overall deeply worthwhile.

VERDICT: MONKEY LIKES

Monkey droppings - The Three Fates of Henrik Nordmark by Christopher Meades: For the want of a plum. . .

The monkey's been doing some heavy reading lately.

Literary heavyweights. Thick tomes of grand themes and ambition.

The monkey needs a beer and something decidedly lighter, just to take the edge off.


The Three Fates of Henrik Nordmark (ECW Press, 2010)
by Christopher Meades

He was neither young nor old, weak nor strong; not fat enough to be obese, but chubby enough that parts of his sides folded over onto the seat next to him on the bus. He smelled a little, but his musty odor - part mildew, part inside-of-a-reptile-cage - wasn't particularly malicious and rarely did it cause great offense. Henrik had no interesting stories to tell. He'd never run through the streets in the middle of the night in a desperate search for condoms or had a girlfriend force him into a sunflower costume for Halloween. In fact, he'd never had a romantic relationship of any kind. Henrik had lived his entire forty-two years in complete obscurity. He was the weed sprouting out of the wallflower; generic in his generality.

A good loser is hard to find. A great loser is a rare thing indeed.

To qualify that; loser's ain't hard to find, and even easier in literature. But a great loser - a hapless sort who somehow keeps you coming back for more, despite his or her countless faults and social inadequacies - that's a rare beast indeed. Off the top of my head, I would call out Ignatius J. Reilly, Holden Caulfield, the anonymous narrator of Fight Club, Lee Goodstone, and the nameless fact checker from Bright Lights Big City as being paragons of the species. You can't say that you'd enjoy being around them in person, but reading about them can be an exhilarating experience.

It's a fine line, however, maintaining interest and readability in a character that, in any normal situation, you would likely yawn in the face of, hide in the closet to avoid, or run screaming away from. Some clever wags have labelled this genre 'loser lit,' but you won't hear me call it that. James Patterson, now that's loser lit.

I'd be hard pressed, however, to come up with a bigger loser than Henrik Nordmark. A man of no means, no charisma, no distinguishing characteristics, no anything, Henrik is almost intolerably awful as a lead character.

Almost. Christopher Meades finds a way to combat Henrik's loathsome passivity with a breakneck approach to plotting that throws everything into the mix to see if it stick. And while the resulting novel The Three Fates of Henrik Nordmark may not qualify as high literature, it certainly ranks as one of the goofier good times I've had with recent novels.

Three Fates is a novel of mistakes, accidents, and massive coincidence, all revolving around the black hole that is Henrik Nordmark. A forty-two year old security guard, Henrik has never in his entire life done anything remotely interesting. Yet on one fateful day, Henrik comes face-to-face with his own mortality. Dropping a plum during a grocery store visit, he chases the juicy orb outside and into the street, where his life is saved by a mysterious man in a full tuxedo. Recognizing how close he came to death, and how few people would be at his funeral, Henrik comes to a turning point in his life: "He would turn his life around. He would find something interesting about himself. He would become unique if it killed him."

As Henrik goes about trying to get himself recognized for something, anything - including very strange and whimsical slapstick forays into sexual deviance, drug use, unfocused rage, and clipping his toenails in public - other characters who have somehow fallen into his sphere of influence weave their own tales of misery. Roland is a business analyst who quits his job, mistakenly believing that he won the lottery. Bonnie and Clyde are a long-suffering married couple who each have been surreptitiously attempting to kill the other for months. And most oddly of all, a trio of extremely elderly assassins have been hired to kill Henrik, for reasons left obscure. In a way, the novel begins to resemble some of the early films of Jim Jarmusch and Richard Linklater, following characters as they criss-cross each other's paths, and Three Fates has a great deal of the shaggy charm of those low-budget gems.

This is not to imply that Three Fates is high art, but it is damned entertaining. Meades has a lovely bit of fun with dialogue, such as Henrik's meeting with an employment counsellor:

"I want to find a job that makes me unique."
"What's your previous occupation?"
"Security guard," Henrik said.
"Well that's not very unique at all. There are thousands of security guards out there."
"That's my point exactly. I need a job that, by definition, makes me unique."
The man in the green tie picked up the clipboard with the list of occupations. He scanned the sheet for the ones Henrik circled. "Let me see here. Aerospace Engineer. Professional Bodybuilder. Lactation Consultant. Do you have any expertise in these areas? Any aerospace training?"
"No, sir, I don't."
"Any weightlifting or bodybuilding skills?"
Henrik covered his pot belly with his arms. "No."
"What about this last one - Lactation Consultant? Do you have an actual proficiency in this area?"
"Actually," Henrik said, "I wasn't a hundred percent sure what that one was."

Meades keeps his many balls in the air, juggling from each plotline and back again, piling on the coincidences, keeping momentum even when the story veers into terrifically unbelievable proportions and the entire structure resembles a particularly intense game of Jenga. That the story begins to resemble the anarchic narratives of the Marx Brothers (by way of the Three Stooges) is a compliment. The three assassins and their escapades are certainly worthy of plaudits, and Roland's desperately silly dive into despair is marked with high style.

What keeps The Three Fates of Henrik Nordmark from taking off and becoming more than a diversion (although an exceedingly funny one) is Henrik himself. Despite his top billing, Henrik is never more than caricature; he is clumsy when the plot calls for it, he is dense only to propel the plot forward, he is hapless beyond belief only because any believable character would have wised up far earlier than he. Henrik is a foil, a device, but he never becomes human. He's a good loser, not a great one. And Meades storytelling, as enjoyable as it is, isn't refined to the point where he can turn such an oblique character into something more substantial, nor is his style as relentlessly hilarious as the titans of comedic writing such as Douglas Adams and Robert Rankin.

But sometimes, all you want is silly, and The Three Fates of Henrik Nordmark fits the bill. Meades shows definite talent, and I look forward to what his imagination unleashes next. The Three Fates of Henrik Nordmark may not change your life, but sometimes that's not what I look for nor need. I don't want The English Patient all the time. Sometimes, I just want Happy Gilmore. And that's a compliment.

VERDICT: MONKEY LIKES A LOT

Monkey droppings - Drive-by Saviours by Chris Benjamin

The monkey feels bad about things.

The monkey watches a movie about good people helping other people, where everybody hugs at the end after learning heartfelt lessons about something.

The monkey knows he should feel better, but somehow feels even worse. And dirty, like a kitchen rag squeezed dry after wiping up a spill.

Drive-by Saviours (2010)
by Chris Benjamin

If there is one genre of art almost guaranteed to raise hackles (mine, anyway), it's that of 'liberal guilt.'

You know the genre. There's a person who feels guilty, and takes it upon him or herself to somehow 'better' the life of someone less fortunate. When done wrong (and it has been done so, so wrong), it usually takes the form of overly-sentimentalized Hollywood hokum (The Blind Side, Freedom Writers, Dangerous Minds, etc). The kind of movie, book, or television show that ends with the audience so damned pleased with themselves, feeling themselves better for having shed a tear for those plucky immigrants/inner-city students/sick kids. And please don't think ill of me, I promise this is not a conservative screed disguised as a book review; I'm as lefty as all get out, but I call shenanigans on such saccharine drivel.

The genre does have highlights, works that somehow transcend the genre with though, imagination, and a lack of bathos. Friday Night Lights, for example, presents realistic portrayals of all involved without over-varnishing of the travails of everyday life (and I hate football, so for me to watch it, it must be freakin' good). Dead Man Walking was a movie that could have gone wrong in so many ways, but gripped me from beginning to end. Half Nelson found a good balance.

My point? It's a fine line between writing a theme and bashing people over the head with it. And I should know; I mean, have you even read Shelf Monkey? Sledgehammer, baby.

Drive-by Saviours, by newbie author Chris Benjamin, skirts this line time and again. But through skill and subtlety of character, Benjamin for the most part pulls it off.

Drive-by tells in alternating chapters the stories of two men; Bumi, an Indonesian immigrant, and Mark, a Toronto social worker. Bumi's life has been one of hardship; brought up in the island of Rilaka, he is removed from his family to enter a newly-established residential school. Bumi is eager to learn, intelligent to a fault, but he suffers from variety of obsessive compulsive tics that make it difficult for him to concentrate, and earn him a reputation as a fairly strange man:

his incessant purification rituals that crossed the line toward self-abuse; his long morning routine of dressing, undressing, and redressing multiple times until he got it just right . . . His use of elbows and feet instead of hands, which were often protected in plastic bags; his strange and complex series of patterned twitches . . . his harassment of strangers as they passed on foot, writing down their names and purposes or fretting inconsolably if they refused to provide the information.

Through a series of mistakes and assumptions, Bumi is forced to flee for his life, leaving his family and taking up a life as an illegal immigrant in Canada.

Mark, on the other hand, is a fairly well-off Canadian with little in common with Bumi save a less than perfect childhood. His job as a social worker at a community health centre is undemanding, Mark writing up proposals and plans, seeing people less and less; his clients would "give me the Coles Notes version of all their problems and I made suggestions, like a drive-by saviour."

It doesn't take a genius to see that these two men will cross paths, and it's a tribute to Benjamin's talent as a writer that the trek to that point is almost sheer pleasure. Perhaps by necessity, Bumi's tale is far more interesting, and Benjamin pulls off the neat trick of taking a potentially dark tale and never succumbing to despair. Bumi's life is harsh, but the bleakness never overwhelms either Bumi or the reader. Mark's life, likely more familiar to the average North American reader, is more comfortable than Bumi's, but his life too is full of pitfalls and disappointments. Benjamin is working with a universal theme here, the idea that happiness comes from within, and it is how we strive against obstacles that defines us. It's a far more palatable motif than the aforementioned theme of 'let's help those who cannot help themselves and feel better about ourselves as a result.'

And when the two finally meet, not as social worker and client but as two figures on public transport, Benjamin takes great pains to avoid any clear-cut resolutions. Mark understands Bumi's dilemma, and recognizes his OCD, but such a revelation does not lead to triumphant resolution. Bumi appreciates Mark's efforts, but knows that his life in Canada is not the life he wishes.

At times, Drive-by Saviours veers perilously close to polemic, telling rather than showing, especially with regard to Mark's efforts to help Bumi, but Benjamin's novel only uses their relationship as an anchor to tell the stories of two sad and lonely men, each trying to find their place in the world. While it's a common theme, it's only as strong as the storyteller, and Benjamin proves himself a natural.

VERDICT: MONKEY LIKES A LOT