The Last Hiccup - The First Rave

Before I begin a post of unabashed enthusiasm on Christopher Meades' weirdly wonderful new novel The Last Hiccup, a note of caution:

Through careful research and self-imposed paranoid fear-mongering, I have determined that Chris, having never met him physically, is undoubtedly one of the following:

• my doppelganger;
• my long-lost twin, the one I thought I devoured in utero;
• a pod person bent on destroying me.

Why this belief, Corey, oh master of hyperbole? Take a look, and you tell me I'm freaking out over nothing:

All together now;

Meet Corey, who's done most everything,

From practice law to plane jumping.

But Chris has only stayed the course,

He's never even seen a horse.

What a crazy pair!

'Cuz they're authors,

Identical authors and you'll find,

They dress alike, they walk alike,

At times they even write alike:

You can lose your mind,

When authors are two of a kind.

Spooky, no? Maybe it's a coincidence, but I'm afraid to go to sleep at night. Should we meet I have no doubt the universe will cease to exist, or at least suffer a splitting headache.

On the plus side, should I ever die, we have a spare.

But I come here to praise Chris, not to fear him. I was a fan of his debut novel The Three Fates of Henrik Nordmark, an unceasingly silly chase novel that gave me no end of pleasure. So when approached, I gladly agreed to blurb his novel (a professional first!), for his sophomore effort The Last Hiccup is everything I look for in a novel; funny, weird, vaguely historical, barely linear, ambiguous, and saturated with synchronous diaphragmatic flutter. Having suffered from a lengthy bout of the devil's esophageal convulsions myself (seven days, no fooling), perhaps I'm inclined to sympathize with Vladimir, the young Russian boy who starts hiccuping at age eight and continues to do so for decades.

If the novel were simply that, twenty-plus years of hiccuping, I think I'd have tired of it. Meades, however, takes the Kurt Vonnegut route of torturing the protagonist, placing his hero in early 20th century Russia and submitting him to horrendous ordeal after horrendous ordeal. In short order, Vladimir, a strangely self-possessed little boy, is abandoned by his mother, experimented on by a mad doctor, and sent to live in the mountains with a strange and silent monk. And I haven't even begun to factor World War I into Meades' melange.

I do love a story that never takes me where I expect, and Hiccup certainly fills that bill. It's also extremely clever, dark, surreal, and unexpectedly poignant. I certainly hope Chris continues to push himself into the unexpected, for I sense there are fathoms of fantastic weirdness in him just aching to be discovered.


[NOTE] Should there ever be interest in mine and Chris' life story, perhaps as a Patty Duke-like family comedy with hijinks galore, I hereby submit the following unknown Canadian actor for consideration:

'Cuz they're triplets!

Identical triplets, and you'll find,

They act alike, they brood alike,

Sometimes they're even subdued alike...

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 - The Players by Margaret Sweatman - "The wonderful violence of freedom."

Today, the Monkey takes a bold walk through Canada's past.

Boy, it is freakin' cold out. Luckily, the Monkey has a built-in coat of fur.

Look out! Trappers!

The Players
by Margaret Sweatman (2009)

I admit, while I may not read the genre as much as I should, I harbour a great admiration for the writers of historical fiction. To immerse oneself in the literature, to sift through the data to come up with new words, new modes of thought, new ways of seeing the world so that it will seem fresh to the reader even though couched in the past and only filtered through 21st-century sensibilities; it is a skill greatly to be envied. See, even writing about writing about historical fiction makes you adopt a tone of haughty historical privilege.

But research means nothing (less than nothing, really) without the skill as a writer to back it up; see (better yet, don't) James Patterson's The Murder of King Tut, an abysmal slice of hackery wherein the author brags continuously about the copious amounts of research he has done, yet the end result being so false and inauthentic it reads as if he cribbed his entire book from the Wikipedia entry on Egypt.

But Margaret Sweatman, thank the gods, has talent, and gallons of it. She has a poet's ear, a librarian's passion for research, and a storyteller's verve, which makes the Winnipeg author's fourth novel The Players a vastly entertaining read.

The Players is set in Restoration-era England, among the fops and finery of the court of King Charles II. It was a place of style and grace, where violence was commonplace but yet "even the convicted regicides died (hanged, drawn and quartered, burned, their ashes licked up by dogs) in a gentlemanly manner." But Sweatman takes pains to assure us that, despite all the outward frippery, there is an underbelly of rot that coats every action. The city of London is beset by the Plague, and all the silks and linens in the country cannot hide the rot that seeps through. The outward illusion of civility only masks the innate corruptibility of our bodies. In one vivid aside, she notes that amongst a group of men visiting the King, "two or three were so well dressed that they'd not been successful in relieving themselves, which added a certain damp caution to walking already made risky by ill-fitting shoes on a stone floor. That acid scent of pizzle."

In this age, a woman's place is chosen by men, and it is only the smartest or most cunning woman that gains any sense of independence for herself. Such a woman is Lilly Cole, 16-year old actress and mistress to the king, and woman that weaves a dark spell on most men who cross her path. Yet Lilly still lives "in a bubble made by men," convincing herself that she has freedom denied other women yet still always at the mercy of the gentlemen who surround her. These include King Charles II; Bartholomew, Second Earl of Buxborough, a drunken poet/playwright who was an adoptive son of the Court after his father "died of the stomach"; and the repulsive Sir George Rose, "an irritable old Royalist" who comes to view Lilly as a threat after she kills a vile gentleman in self-defence.

Coming into this seething den of affected politeness are Médard Des Groseilliers and Pierre Radisson, two French explorers seeking financing to discover the Northwest Passage to China. The duo are ill-equipped to deal with the less-direct methods of business of the English Court, which leads to some lovely examples of dark humour: "They were all navigating by instinct, filled with a sense of inadequacy for a loathsome task. The disease of conversation, foul business." They would appear at odds with the King and his cohorts, but as with the clothing, the money of the kingdom is an illusion as well; "The trade must bring us a great deal of money," Charles whispers to his cousin Rupert, "or we are thoroughly stewed."

It would not do to give away too many plot point, but suffice to say, the machinations of the plot result in the adventurers being provided ships, and Lilly and Bartholomew being smuggled aboard. Thus, the novel changes acts, and the gentility of England is summarily replaced with the bleakness of Canada. Lilly finds herself on an expedition headed by Magnus Brown, an eccentric genius: "Magnus Brown weighed more than seventeen stone. His head weighed more than a lamb. He wasn't fat, he was a living fact."

At its base, The Players is about a woman making her way through a universe ruled by men, doing whatever it takes to survive, which makes Lilly as much an explorer/adventurer as Des Groseilliers and Radisson. Lilly is the main 'player' in The Players, but in a way, all the characters are only acting their parts to achieve their true desires. The novel is also about the death of entire worlds, whole societies, replacing them with a new one, that of 'civilization.' As the explorers rue, "Civilization will seep into everything, it will mimic, steal, atom by atom, yes, like that, so that nothing evermore will be free of falsity." In The Players, the entire world is being slowly transformed, becoming an actor as well, disguising its feral nature underneath the trappings of enlightenment.

Sweatman brings a wonderful sense of flair to the proceedings, finessing new methods of viewing the world. Her eyes and ears tend toward the poetic, reminding one at times of Michael Ondaatje's texture-heavy texts, but Sweatman has a lighter touch. Sometimes, overly poetic language can become annoying, but when Sweatman writes of Lilly's body, "When she was lying down, her pelvis seemed like a basin of milk," all is forgiven. I love a sentence that gives me pause, savouring the imagery. When Magnus, tongue-tied, tries to work out his feelings toward Lilly, Sweatman magnificently captures both his turmoil and the universe he inhabits in a few choice phrases: "Silence poured down on him, but he ruined it with words, words pearled like the white fat on moose kidney." Lovely, that.

Sweatman also, as noted above, does her research, throwing in huge chunks of historical exposition that never feel superfluous. Much of The Players could serve as a primer for the mechanics of Restoration English society. The upper class walk the streets in urine-spotted pants because of the ridiculous methods of keeping them in place; Lilly, needing a contraceptive, at first uses a gummy mixture of manure, then upgrades to a "sea sponge wrapped in silk, an elegant pessary." Prince Rupert, wearing a constantly blood-soaked bandage about his head, reveals that he uses a technique of self-trepanning to relieve the pressure on his brain.

The Players is part bodice-ripper, part adventure, and part comedy of manners, and Sweatman is a bold conductor of the whole affair.

VERDICT: MONKEY LIKES A LOT