Rin Tin Tin, The Life and the Legend, by Susan Orlean, is a book that will satisfy a variety of readers in a variety of ways. Orlean has researched with heart and commitment the story of US army corporal Lee Duncan, a lonely young man who discovers a litter of abandoned German Shepherd puppies in rural France near the end of World War I. He goes to great lengths to transport two of the puppies back to US with him, one of the puppies does not survive beyond her arrival on American soil, but the surviving puppy goes on to become the genesis of the Hollywood and television legend Rin Tin Tin.

The story of Lee and Rinty – their devotion to each other, their collective determination to succeed, their collaboration and dedication to an unusual type of performance craft and most importantly, their profound bond – is a sufficiently absorbing and heartwarming tale unto itself. On that basis alone, Orlean offers a book that will captivate readers who are pet owners and animal lovers.

But Orlean takes that story as a starting point for examining and meditating on much more. Thematically, she muses on and considers how some lose families and familial identification and forge new families and identities (as was the case with Lee Duncan), and how some live with animals and make them part of uniquely constituted definitions of family. Through Lee Duncan and subsequent dog trainers, breeders, fans and professional and amateur curators and archivists who contributed to the ongoing Rin Tin Tin story, Orlean scrutinizes, sometimes in person and close at hand, how some ascribe to animals the traits and qualities we aspire to, and how many seek to fill what is lacking in their lives and relationships with companion animals. On that basis, Orlean offers a book that will appeal to readers seeking a non-judgmental exploration of the ways in which people find professional, personal and even spiritual fulfillment.

Eventually, the physical reality of one man and one dog, who obviously couldn’t live forever, ascends into something bigger. Rin Tin Tin becomes a franchise (a series of dogs, some blood related, some not, take up the Rin Tin Tin name), a trademark, a brand, an idealization and a legend. Orlean offers interesting and even instructive insights into the entertainment and advertising realms.

Orlean makes clear throughout Rin Tin Tin that the ideas of continuity and enduring memories and values developed in the book had personal significance for her. She is a strong presence and even a participant in the later chapters of the Rin Tin Tin story, both confirming her devotion to and connection with the subject, but perhaps also provoking the questions:  Does Orlean in fact bite off more than she can chew thematically with Rin Tin Tin? Does she get too involved in the story, perhaps not leaving space for the reader to independently interpret and react to how different players in the story – including Orlean – are variously invested in the legend?

We all have our own motivations for being drawn to a character and entity like Rin Tin Tin and to a book chronicling his story and enduring value. Susan Orlean provides a range of intriguing entry points into a still fascinating story that will appeal to many.

The following is a brief interview with Susan Orlean about her experiences researching Rin Tin Tin, The Life and the Legend:

Thank you to Simon & Schuster Canada for providing a review copy of Rin Tin Tin, The Life and the Legend, by Susan Orlean.

Appointment in Samarra vividly traces Julian English’s calamitous and seemingly inexplicable path of destruction in 72 hours during the Christmas holidays of 1930. In his early thirties and from an affluent family, college educated, manager of a thriving Cadillac dealership in small town Pennsylvania, married to an attractive and admired woman – there would seem to be nothing significant to explain English’s reckless behaviour and decisions that precipitiously eradicate his professional, personal and even spiritual footing in a matter of days. Even more so than Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry’s 1947 novel that captures a doomed character’s similarly compressed and irrevocable slide into oblivion, Appointment in Samarra is a breathless read, where one simply can’t look away until it’s over.

O’Hara’s novel showed great daring for its time, with respect to language and subject matter, touching on everything from alcohol consumption to sexual relations, marital infidelity, criminal activities and even suggestive clothing. The narration and dialogue are brisk and jazzy, albeit somewhat dated, but still vibrantly capture the idiom of the Prohibition and pre Great Depression era. The propulsive action of the story – wherein English lurches from one social gaffe to increasingly more disastrous, perverse behaviours – while compelling in its own right, almost overshadows O’Hara’s equal daring with more experimental themes and stylistic approaches. These include the suggestions that English’s bewildering flameout is somehow predestined, suggested by the novel’s epigraph, hinted at in references to English’s grandfather and even prefigured by the time frame of the novel, where there are mentions of the looming economic and social storm clouds of the Depression. As well, O’Hara employs shifting voices and points of view, and even some striking stream of consciousness narration.

Finally, O’Hara brings the novel to a startling non sequitur of a conclusion that drives home a memorable, almost existential lesson: the irony of how one’s misdemeanours might never be forgotten, but one’s essence and value can vaporize from memory as soon as one is gone.

Norman Bray is a middle-aged, underemployed actor who perhaps is self-deluded as a professional skill and defence … or perhaps is just self-deluded. As career, home and relationships all unravel, events from his past start to bubble up for re-examination. As circumstances change more and more rapidly for Norman, does he learn and change personally? It’s hard to tell as this acerbic, at times funny, at times troubling story unfolds. It’s that “hard to tell” element that is the most authentic and lifelike aspect of this at times infuriating but always intriguing, surprisingly affecting book.

None of the multiple meanings of “the cat’s table” suggest positions in the room, in the world or in life that hold particular esteem or prestige. However, all meanings hint that secretly (or perhaps not-so-secretly!) that’s where we know we’ll gain the most insights, meet the most interesting characters and have the most fun. Certainly, it’s a reverse, perverse privileged position and where you want to be to embark on the latest adventure in storytelling spearheaded by the incomparable Michael Ondaatje.

In sea voyaging parlance, the cat’s table is the polar opposite of the coveted and perhaps ostentatious Captain’s Table, where anyone who aspires to be anyone wants to be and be seen amongst passengers on a cruise, in company of the head of the vessel and voyage. The cat’s table is the humble dining spot for those lowly passengers – maybe not affluent, influential or glamorous, likely young, often carrying some kind of social stigma – with whom no one else is interested in keeping company.

The German expression “Katzentisch” (quite literally “cat’s table”) was also a small low table at which well-heeled people fed their cats or small dogs. (1) Such a table was situated in the dining room, but in a corner away from the dining table. Again, it connotes something at a remove, although perhaps it was a somewhat more exalted position for an actual cat to be at a cat’s table than a human being.

Finally, the cat’s table was and is synonymous with the kids’ table, a dining room tradition still common today at family holiday gatherings, where children are seated at a table separate from and often shorter, humbler and featuring only an abbreviated dining selection from that of the grand dining furniture and repast of the adults. It’s considered a rite of passage and maturity to move up to the adults’ table. At the same time, the most fun, mayhem and mischief can be found and is tolerated at the kids’ table. Notably, adults who join the kids’ table are often remembered most fondly (that would be game-for-anything Uncle John in our family) and are clearly most able to throw aside inhibitions and prejudices to hang with the truly most entertaining crowd.

Ondaatje’s young protagonist, Michael, encounters the cat’s table in almost all of these forms during the course of an eventful ocean voyage in the 1950s. Shunted for not fully articulated or understood reasons from his family in Ceylon to his mother awaiting him in England, 11-year-old Michael balances the freedom of a comparatively unsupervised (except for perfunctory check-ins with a couple of ostensible but largely indifferent guardians) three-week adventure on an ocean liner with feelings of rootlessness, disconnection, loneliness and disaffection in the intriguing, bustling and highly socially stratified of that closed world. Michael finds his niche in that world fairly quickly, and perceptively and precociously assesses its hidden worth: while the Captain’s Table was where self-important people puffed up their dubious significance, the truly worthy people and experiences were at the polar opposite of the dining hall and the social spectrum.

Or is young Michael precocious? While The Cat’s Table shimmers with the freshness of a child’s wide-eyed and openhearted perspective, it is filtered through the sophistication and acquired emotional agendas and baggage of an adult, and is also reframed through the eyes and ears of poets – both Michael the protagonist’s eventual vocation and, of course, Michael Ondaatje’s. At times, it isn’t clear if a given episode or its interpretation is that of the child, the adult or the imaginative artist weaving it all in a new fashion. That’s both part of The Cat’s Table mystery and charm, and sometimes a very minor source of disorientation, possibly germane to a story where both the child and the adult might not entirely know what was going on.

Michael’s alliance with two young fellow passengers, Ramadhin and Cassius, seems initially to be one of convenience, not allegiance. That is, the three boys are handy partners in crime and backups, and egg each other on getting into the varieties of tempting mischief unfettered and parent-less children can get into from the engine rooms to the decks to the staterooms of a largely and surprisingly unprotected environment. As their adventures unfold and the three boys navigate this realm of no parents, lost parents, surrogate parents, and various broken, reconstituted and newly realized families, they come to mean a great deal to each other, which Michael much more fully appreciates as an adult.

The Cat’s Table would have been enchanting as just a series of character sketches and picaresque vignettes, culminating in an affecting reassessment as an adult of the connections made as a child. That a genuine mystery emerges during that short but momentous voyage – gravitating around a menacing, shackled prisoner who is only let out under highly and unusually protected conditions at night – is a splendid, intriguing bonus.

If The Cat’s Table is not Ondaatje’s best novel yet (oh, but I think it is …), it is certainly his most straightforwardly told and emotionally accessible story. It’s a yearning tribute with an almost fairytale-like aura to the memories of awe that pervade our dreams (and nightmares and fears), and the memories of sometimes unlikely affiliation and love and what we mistake as love that pervade and haunt our hearts, guide us or sometimes lead us astray.

Notes

1. Definition of Katzentisch
http://www.katzentisch.com/2009/07/what-is-katzentisch.html

Thank you to the Alfred A. Knopf representative at the June, 2011 American Library Association Conference and Exhibit, who provided a U.S. advance reader’s edition of The Cat’s Table, by Michael Ondaatje.

Here are the books I’ve read so far in 2011, with links where they exist to books that I’ve reviewed. It’s a competition with no one but myself, but it is always interesting to reflect halfway through the year where one is at with one’s reading, both quantitatively and qualitatively. I could perhaps have read more thus far, but I’m really liking my reading year so far. How about you?

Braydon Beaulieu and Janet Somerville have been reading up a storm so far in 2011 – theirs are engrossing and impressive lists! Tweet me your list @bookgaga, and I would be happy to link to it here.

1. Patient Frame
   by Steven Heighton

2. The Water Rat of Wanchai
   by Ian Hamilton

3. Better Living Through Plastic Explosives
   by Zsuzsi Gartner

4. The Canterbury Trail
   by Angie Abdou

5. Pigeon English
   by Stephen Kelman

6. The Year of Broken Glass
   by Joe Denham

7. Irma Voth
   by Miriam Toews

8. The Bird Sisters
   by Rebecca Rasmussen

9. A Visit from the Goon Squad
   by Jennifer Egan

10. Lookout
    by John Steffler

11. The Guilty Plea
    by Robert Rotenberg

12. Up Up Up
    by Julie Booker

13. The Empty Family
    by Colm Toibin

14. Ossuaries
    by Dionne Brand

15. Skippy Dies
    by Paul Murray

16. The Cat’s Table
    by Michael Ondaatje

Currently in progress:

• Voltaire’s Bastards
  by John Ralston Saul

• The Mill on the Floss
  by George Eliot

• Offshore
  by Penelope Fitzgerald (rereading)

Robert Rotenberg’s debut novel, Old City Hall stirred delighted buzz and garnered warmly welcoming reviews from Canadian crime fiction circles and fans in early 2009. When the first foray is that good, establishing a pace, personality, setting and cast of characters that readers quickly become keen to revisit, two years feels like a long time to wait for the next installment.

The wait is over, and those waiting will feel well rewarded. Rotenberg has delivered another solidly crafted, engaging narrative with the right balance of primary and secondary (new and previously introduced) players, and diverting but not excessive or distracting subplots (that leave the possibility of being further explored in future books).

The plot of The Guilty Plea focuses on the case of Terrance Wyler, youngest son of a family in the high-end grocery business. He’s found stabbed to death in his luxurious home the morning of what was to have been the start of his and wife Samantha’s divorce trial, made sensational by the fact that he has taken up with a notorious Hollywood actress. That morning, Samantha arrives at her lawyer’s office with a kitchen knife that is undeniably the murder weapon. In what is perhaps becoming a signature modus operandi, Rotenberg presents a much too obvious resolution and then proceeds to take it apart and take the reader along for an engrossing, often surprising reassembling of the real story.

The Guilty Plea is seasoned with artful passing references to Old City Hall, and reconnects again with Detective Ari Greene, police officer Daniel Kennicott, Crown attorney Jennifer Raglan and other previous characters. However, The Guilty Plea can likely be enjoyed with no familiarity with its predecessor. This second novel is almost as crisply paced as the first, although it grows ever-so-slightly sluggish a little over halfway through, and then gets firmly back on track.

Once again, while The Guilty Plea offers up an intriguing and consistently sympathetic cast that interacts in interesting and compelling ways, the most vibrant cast member is still the city of Toronto. Seen in sensorily evocative moments across all seasons (the opening scene in the doldrums of sultry August is especially memorable), and in everywhere from coffeeshops and restaurants to landmark buildings and cemeteries, Rotenberg proves a mastery of establishing a sense of place even more impressive than his skills with plot and character. The fact that Rotenberg heads out into the city to write, rather than exclusively cloistering himself in an office or cottage retreat to write, has paid off in terms of his stories’ atmospheric authenticity.(1)

Ultimately, The Guilty Plea culminates in an untidy but not implausible resolution. It’s therefore pretty lifelike. It’s also therefore infinitely book-club-debate-worthy or just individually ponderable – all not bad things at all, especially to pass the time during the wait for the next thoughtfully forged installment in Rotenberg’s increasingly formidable franchise.

Notes

1. Robert Rotenberg: In search of a public place to write
http://arts.nationalpost.com/2011/05/23/robert-rotenberg-in-search-of-a-public-place-to-write/

and

Robert Rotenberg: Writing about real places
http://arts.nationalpost.com/2011/05/27/robert-rotenberg-writing-about-real-places/

Thank you to Simon & Schuster Canada and the author for providing a review copy of The Guilty Plea, by Robert Rotenberg.

Stephen Kelman’s debut novel Pigeon English introduces readers to one of the most pervasively and persuasively authentic narrator voices in fiction in recent memory. That recent memory includes the precocious Jack in Room by Emma Donoghue and the quietly unforgettable Christopher in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon … which means that Kelman’s 11-year-old Harrison Opoku (known as Harri to his family and friends) is in admirable and luminous company.

Harri has just arrived in London from Ghana with his mother and teenaged sister, and is living in a housing estate that would be euphemistically labelled a “priority” or “at risk” neighbourhood in some constituencies. Harri’s family is asunder – his grandmother, father and infant sister remain behind in Ghana – and in some unspecified peril because of the terms by which some of them were able to come to England. Harri’s natural and infectious ebullience seems more affected by long distance yearnings for the people left behind than stymied or threatened by the more immediate cacophony surrounding him at home, at school and on the streets. Even when a boy is stabbed to death in his neighbourhood, it fascinates Harri more than it truly bothers or affects him, as the sound of his baby sister’s voice getting cut off on the phone clearly does.

Voices near and far are just one of an intricate interweaving of metaphors and imagery that Kelman handles with impressive assurance for a first-time novelist. Kelman controls well but not obtrusively not just his protagonist’s voice, but the chorus of supporting characters’ voices echoed and interpreted through the protagonist. Through his mastery of the subtleties of voice, accent and expression, Kelman also sensitively and precisely manages the perceptions that drive the story forward, and the misapprehensions and naivete that lead it understandably astray.

Kelman incorporates other types of potent imagery and weaves them organically and comfortably into Harri’s words and observations, without undermining the believability of Harri’s voice, but also of the gritty realities he faces navigating amongst schoolmates, gangs, shopkeepers, police officers and others in his inner-city world. References to fingerprints and fingertips are especially intriguing – how they are used to identify or when erased, to hide one’s identity – but also how they are used to gather information and experience the textures and sensations of the world. Much of the imagery builds on the feelings of a child hungry to learn, to grow, to love and be loved.

For a story and characters set in an unremittingly urban realm, much of the imagery infusing the world of Pigeon English is exhilaratingly natural, as illustrated in a sequence that captures what a wellspring of vitality and joie de vivre Harri is, in spite of it all:

I don’t have a favourite raindrop, they’re all as good as each other. They’re all the best. That’s what I think anyway. I always look up at the sky when it’s raining. It feels brutal. It’s a bit hutious because the rain’s so big and fast and you think it will go in your eye. But you have to keep your eyes open or you won’t get the feeling. I try to follow one raindrop all the way down from the cloud to the ground. Asweh, it’s impossible. All you can see is the rain. You can’t follow just one raindrop, it’s too busy and all the other raindrops get in the way.

The best bit is running in the rain. If you point your face up to the sky at the same time as running, it nearly feels like you’re flying. You can close your eyes or you can keep them open, it’s up to you. I like both. You can open your mouth if you want. The rain just tastes like water from the tap except it’s quite warm. Sometimes it tastes like metal.

Before you start running, find an empty bit of the world with nothing in the way. No trees or buildings and no other people. That way you won’t crash into anything. Try to go in a straight line. Then you just run as fast as you can. At first you’re scared of crashing into something but don’t let it put you off. Just run. It’s easy. The rain on your face and the wind makes it feel like you’re going superfast. It’s very refreshing. I dedicated my rain run to the dead boy. It was a better present than a bouncy ball. I kept my eyes closed the whole time and I didn’t even fall over.

The only false note in Pigeon English is the intermittent introduction of a second narrative voice that can’t possibly match the authenticity and vivacity of Harri’s voice. This second voice neither expands the view of the story credibly beyond Harri’s perceptions and assessments, nor does it work well metaphorically as other imagery does. As well, the pigeon/pidgin pun is not only forced, but is ever-so-slightly offensive, and seems to strangely demean the book’s greatest achievement: its convincing voices in all of their linguistic originality and complexity. A pidgin language is defined as a simplified language that develops as a means of communication between two or more groups that do not have a language in common. Harri’s voice and vocabulary form a surprisingly sophisticated argot and amalgam of everything from Ghanaian, English and Ghanaian-English slang to commercial and technological terminology to his own sweet and singular usages and classifications of the world. It’s unforgettable and not to be diminished as something lesser or compromised.

When the book ends and Harri’s voice is stilled, this reader immediately, achingly, acutely missed him – true testament to the strength of an indelibly forged voice. Asweh, you won’t want to let go of young, vibrant Harri either.

See also:

Pigeon English book trailer (from House of Anansi Press blog)

Thank you to House of Anansi Press for providing a review copy of Pigeon English, by Stephen Kelman.