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

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