My 2011 reading got off to a breathtaking start with Joe Denham’s second collection of poetry, vividly and appropriately titled Windstorm. A dense read that was both exhilarating and almost exhausting, I mused as to what Denham might do next.

I didn’t have long to wait. Denham’s first novel, The Year of Broken Glass, arrived this spring with the impact of a strong, bracing blast of cold, refreshing, snow-tinged rain, sluicing the winter away and preparing the earth for new growth. I didn’t have long to wonder, either, as I cleared the “to be read” decks as quickly as I could to get swept into this spellbinding tale.

As Joe Denham unspools the fraught and increasingly fantastical story of Canadian west coast fisherman Francis (aka Ferris) Wichbaun, the intense layering of imagery that is sometimes overwhelming in Denham’s poetry seems to have more room to breathe in the extended novel form. Ferris is tormented and admittedly duplicitious in love, he struggles with an equally conflicted love of the sea, the world around him is in mounting upheaval as a number of natural disasters strike … and then a singular glass object that could mean his fortune and future or could mean something more troubling and sinister pretty literally floats into the midst of it all. Ferris’ emotions and circumstances are ripe for rich and vivid treatment, but also easily threaten to become overwrought. Somehow, Denham forges clear navigation through his captivating novel, even as the seas grow literally stormy, but also as the storyline and character interactions and connections grow more and more complex.

As that complexity drives its way into the evil equivalent of one deus ex machina and then another, what is meant to be “real” and what is possibly fanciful blurs. What is real and what is the fevered imaginations, perceptions and delusions of several of the characters – Denham also takes on multiple voices and perspectives with surprising mastery – also blurs, with the disorienting but still strangely compelling feel of failed literary experiments such as The Raw Shark Texts. But somehow, Denham still keeps muscular control of his plot and characters to keep them on course for a satisfying conclusion that is believable in the context of what has gone on before.

The pervasive metaphoric layers in The Year of Broken Glass bolster the story and character development without tipping into the overwhelming or feeling forced. Denham has created unforgettable, strongly sculpted characters and a cinematic sweep of dramatic circumstance and plot that will stick with the reader for a long time.

Thank you to the author, Joe Denham, and Nightwood Editions for providing a review copy of The Year of Broken Glass.

In her new short story collection, Better Living Through Plastic Explosives, Zsuzsi Gartner cuts a satirical swath through the early years of the new millennium. Everyone and everything is fair game, with Gartner’s laser sights set on those who smack of entitlement or hubris. Whatever we now call yuppies and their older demographic successors are and apparently always will be up for grabs, and Gartner takes no prisoners in terms of mocking their houses and lawns, their dietary, career and fashion choices, their family planning and rearing decisions and more. Gartner arranges to mock and reproach them from diverse angles, sources and perspectives. She is also quick to point out that anyone with economic or social pretensions can become them in a heartbeat, and can be brought down a sharp notch or two as quickly and calamitously.

Earthy and quirky comeuppances come to the proud and prissy from everyone from a lusty, barbecue-loving redneck, to another variant of tattooed white trash in a bass-thumping muscle car, to a disquietingly media savvy native elder destined for bespoke suits (with ambitions to become the First Nations Ivan Reitman, don’t you know). The range of characters marching through Gartner’s dizzying stories is breathtaking, not without their piquantly realistic and emotional moments, but ultimately verging on cartoonish, with a didactic, Coyote versus Road Runner sense of who will prevail and why.

So, fleeting jabs aside, if we’re not really meant to wholly and realistically identify with any characters or situations in these stories, what is Gartner trying to achieve with this collection? Is it pre-apocalyptic magic realism, post-apocalyptic surrealism or some other variant of an otherworldly, off-kilter, something-is-not-quite-right-here rising tide of dread of apocalypse in progress, vaguely reminiscent of DeLillo’s White Noise? If it’s any of those, she often overshoots that effect, sometimes grievously. Are we just being lectured at in an over-the-top, albeit highly imaginative fashion?

But then again, something stirring happens when you breathe and digest each story, and set the entire collection down. Weeks later, images and scenarios that seem overwrought as you’re reading them have distilled down from a headlight glare to a haunting, still potent glow after the fact: adopted Chinese daughters tiptoeing grotesquely across the starlit snow; a couple rapidly growing apart by heading in opposite Dorian Gray-esque directions; suburban housewives happily squatting like cavewomen around a fire pit; a bewildered but determined movie producer in sullied designer trousers struggling through the West Coast rainforest; most memorably of all, the final roar of a car approaching that will exact a harsh but symmetrical revenge.

Recognizing but perhaps not best articulating that I appreciate but am not sure what to make of the intriguing alchemy going on with Gartner’s vibrant but thorny stories, I’m delighted to discover that others are being invited to explore Better Living Through Plastic Explosives and other recently published short story collections in a new initiative. I’m interested to hear their reactions and conclusions. How they are going about it in this, the Year of the Short Story (YOSS), is detailed here by the incomparable Book Madam. The YOSS manifesto, spearheaded by Giller Prize nominated author Sarah Selecky, is showcased here. Ms Selecky best captures the special mystique of short stories:

“There’s nothing like that punch in the stomach that you feel at the end of a story, when the question of the story (not the answer!) is revealed in its wholeness, and you don’t know what to do with yourself because it’s so troubling, or beautiful, or impossible, or uncertain.” – Sarah Selecky

I’m wondering if it’s the questions revealed by Zsuzsi Gartner in the stories of Better Living Through Plastic Explosives that I’m still tussling with now. I think so, and I think that’s a good thing.

Thank you to Penguin Canada for providing a review copy of Better Living Through Plastic Explosives, by Zsuzsi Gartner.

Writer Susan Swan recently mused on Twitter, “Thinking about the need to show the dark side of fictional characters and how I always want to protect them and show their best side. Wrong.” (1) Did Angie Abdou muse similarly as she lived for some time (the novel first took form as her PhD thesis) with the colourful cast of characters populating her latest novel, The Canterbury Trail? It would seem so, and it would seem she made the right choices in terms of protecting or not protecting them, and showing both their sunny and dark aspects.

Abdou’s greatest gifts as a writer are sheer storytelling prowess, assembling persons, places and things in potent and compelling combinations. She melds that appreciable skill with a fearlessness about presenting her characters with all their warts, making them patently unlikable in some cases, and still managing to endear them to the reader by the end of their adventures. She does this in surprising ways in both recent Canada Reads contender The Bone Cage and The Canterbury Trail.

The range of disparate characters in The Canterbury Trail – stoner ski and snowboarding bums, working class snowmobilers, lesbian hippies with spiritual pretensions, an overly striving real estate developer and his pregnant wife, an urbanite freelance lifestyles reporter, all thrown together in a mountain ski cabin under increasingly treacherous social and meteorological conditions – seems stretched and thinned out to predictable caricatures at the outset. The pleasant surprise is that most of that ambitious cast gain some depth or unique traits before a key character hovering in the background throughout – Mother Nature – takes charge in the end. That’s testament, by the way, to the virtues of sticking with a book to the very end. The Canterbury Trail‘s payoff in that regard is immense.

What we learn from bringing a cross-section of society into pressure cooker close quarters was also the premise, at least in part, of the classic work from which The Canterbury Trail takes everything from its title, to character names, physical traits and profiles. Abdou commented recently on how Geoffrey Chaucer’s Middle English stories The Canterbury Tales, written at the end of the 14th century, so informed her novel:

“That’s the contemporary pilgrimage where I am: that trek through the backcountry,” says Abdou. “And, in a way, Chaucer used the pilgrimage to bring together people who would normally never spend time together in medieval society – the fighters, and the Priors, the workers – and so then he had a little segment from everyone in society where he was able to satirize them. So that’s the part that’s Chaucer: I get the rednecks and the hippies and the young ski bums and the developer guy. They’re all together, and they wouldn’t normally interact.”(2)

While Chaucer’s work clearly laid a strong foundation for the writer, it’s less of a prerequisite for the reader’s enjoyment and edification. Sure, it might give you a chuckle if you know that Alison, the rather lascivious freelance journalist, is gap-toothed. You don’t need a grounding in Chaucer, though, to appreciate the cultural clashes, connections and revelations between the skiing “pilgrims” of The Canterbury Trail, or to relish the authentic suspense Abdou builds through a gradual but genuine investment in the wellbeing of the various characters.

1. @swanscribe, February 23, 2011

2. Pilgrim’s Progress: Angie Abdou talks about The Canterbury Trail
by Mark Medley
National Post, The Afterword

Francoise Gilot was lover and muse of Pablo Picasso in the 1940s and 50s, and mother of two of his children. She was a gifted painter herself. Her insights into both the artistic process and behind-the-scenes with the personalities in the art world are absorbing and authentic. Look up her memoirs and other books for works of both technical and emotional accuracy about the art realm. (1)

Steve Martin is no Francoise Gilot. The eclectic modern Renaissance man Steve Martin doesn’t exactly need my defence or support of his take on the art world. The preternaturally accomplished actor, comedian, writer, playwright, art collector, musician (and who knows what else he’ll master on a seeming whim, like his facility with Twitter via @SteveMartinToGo) likely won’t be stymied and in fact would be rather existentially amused by any of his works provoking vitriol. Inexplicably, his novel An Object of Beauty seems to have excited criticism in some quarters (2) that his story is not technically and historically accurate. This reader respectfully contends that is neither the point nor an impediment to an elegant and enjoyable read here.

The protagonist of An Object of Beauty is Lacey Yeager. She is an up-and-coming young art dealer making her way in the late 1990s world of the high-end art trade in New York City through a combination of rapidly acquired knowledge and experience, craftiness, chutzpah and fairly carefully wielded personal charms.

“Lacey’s uptown moves, high-style reserve with a playful edge, had been perfected, but she hadn’t used her downtown moves – fearless sexuality with a flapping fringe of pluck and wit – in a long time.”

She balances the personal and professional with clear-eyed calculation, skewing decidedly towards the professional. Her machinations and survivor’s instincts are the most intriguing aspects of this story. Lacey’s premeditation paints her (pun intended) as essentially amoral, while paradoxically quite warm-blooded in other respects. Interestingly, Martin accentuates Lacey’s rather flat affect by not directly using her voice, but having art journalist Daniel Franks, an ex-lover of Lacey’s, tell the tale. While obviously still enamoured of this intrepid if slightly off-putting heroine, Daniel is less Nick Carraway to Lacey’s Gatsby than he is the authorial voice of Thackeray to the self-reliant and cunning Becky Sharp. Martin holds his heroine considerably less in awe than either of the narrators of The Great Gatsby and Vanity Fair, but certainly An Object of Beauty invites valid if less profound comparisons to the complicated and nuanced social strata of both of those classics.

Martin’s airy, but not unintelligent, rather emotionless touch neither bogs down nor condescends to the reader, either about the rarified milieu in which the story is set or about the thoughts and feelings of the players in that milieu. (And no, the inclusion of small reproductions of works mentioned in the story are not Modern Art 101 condescension, either. They are helpful and elegant additions to the reading experience.) However, does the narrative distancing make the story bloodless, and therefore does the reader feel no connection to either story or characters? Apart from some wistful regret for Daniel and art collector Patrice Claire, both who seem to genuinely care for Lacey … indeed, the story is rather emotionally disconnected from its characters. That said, it is still an informative exploration of a particular world at a particular time, digestible and sufficiently absorbing perhaps because it travels light.

In An Object of Beauty, it seems that the strongest feelings are not between people, but for the art, even if that fascination is not always the most fully articulated:

“Well, the water, to me, represents the earth and all the things that happen on the earth, reality. And the moonlight represents our dreams and our minds.”
“And …”
“And the reflection … well, I guess the reflection represents art. It’s what lies between our dreams and reality.”

This light, elegant book will still entertain and even edify without much more in-depth reflection than that.

Notes

1. Francoise Gilot’s Matisse and Picasso – A Friendship in Art (1990) is splendid:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CE2D81538F935A25751C1A966958260

2. Chelsea Girl, review of An Object of Beauty, by Steve Martin, by Andrew Butterfield
The New Republic, December, 22, 2010
http://www.tnr.com/book/review/chelsea-girl

Forensic accounting meets Kill Bill in the form of compelling heroine Ava Lee

Ready for a breathtaking rush starting with multi-million dollar purchase orders and dodgy accounting practices (um … ho hum?), segueing to financial transactions of varying legitimacy and 24/7 international banking activities bouncing from Toronto to Seattle to Hong Kong to the British Virgin Islands (hmm, OK …), sharply punctuated with more than a dash of Kill Bill (what …???) You’re in for a singular and suspenseful globetrotting ride with Ava Lee, one-of-a-kind forensic accountant and collections expert employing unique accounts receivable practices. Ava is the compelling heroine of The Water Rat of Wanchai, the first in an eagerly anticipated crime fiction series from Ian Hamilton.

Ava Lee is a young Chinese-Canadian forensic accountant who specializes in recovering large debts. She works closely with a Hong Kong-based “uncle” who is extensively connected, possibly with the Chinese criminal underworld. In The Water Rat of Wanchai, Ava takes on an assignment to retrieve money swindled from a business financing substantial purchase orders for a seafood distribution company supplying a major US retailer. A fairly straightforward case necessitating perhaps some minor negotiating and intimidation swiftly becomes complicated and possibly deadly when Ava runs up against and struggles to hold her own against a Caribbean-based crime kingpin who is seemingly business-like and even charming, but also amoral and menacing.

The Water Rat of Wanchai is a brisk, entertaining read. There is sufficient detail to capture the essence of every global stop in Ava’s journey, from Toronto to the British Virgin Islands. The storyline touches just the right amount on but is never too heavily freighted with the technicalities of the transactions along the way. The action is explosive whenever it occurs, is never couched in a fashion too unsettling for even the mildly squeamish, but is still offered up in suitably brutal and authentic form. The suspense is well concocted and genuine.

Hamilton obviously adores his intelligent and refreshingly self-aware heroine, and she quickly captivates the reader. Her resourcefulness, aplomb and, where necessary, outright sangfroid has brilliant flashes of other singular and often cinematic heroines, from Reese Witherspoon’s Tracy Flick to Uma Thurman’s unforgettable Beatrix Kiddo. Still, Ava Lee is ultimately her own unique being, and Hamilton leaves the reader wanting more of her and wanting to learn more about this enigmatic and forceful young woman.

How wonderful then to know that Hamilton and House of Anansi Press has astutely set the Ava Lee story in motion with four books queued up. A second book will appear this summer, and two more are slated for 2012. The Ava Lee series is the first offering of a new House of Anansi Press crime fiction imprint called Spiderline, and things are clearly off to a strong start.

Hamilton has left numerous doors enticingly ajar to further explore Ava’s family and personal life, get to know more of her professional associates and perhaps contend with repeat engagements with those with whom she’s tangled in this first installment. For example, Ava’s work associate Derek remains largely offstage in this book, but it would be intriguing to see him onstage in future installments. At any rate, readers captivated by this first encounter with Ava Lee won’t have long to wait.

Thank you to House of Anansi Press for providing a review copy of The Water Rat of Wanchai, by Ian Hamilton.

At first glance, it seems Nicola Barker has left behind the dark, menacing, labyrinthine world of Darkmans for sunnier, simpler climes – a quaint, pleasant village, the setting of Burley Cross Postbox Theft. Then again, whether you know this author by reputation or by past experience with her singular collection of works, do you really think she would pen a straightforward, conventionally charming epistolary novel along the lines of, say, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society?

Any such misapprehensions are quickly set aside as the first letter detailing the village’s recent postbox (mailbox) theft case is teed up … and devastatingly tees off on its recipient. That first letter is ostensibly a directive from a police sergeant to a police constable, instructing the constable to take over the investigation of the theft and recovery of a box of mail shortly before Christmas. That missive rapidly takes on strange intensity and personal viciousness, seemingly for nothing more than perverse reasons, as Sergeant Everill taunts Constable Topping on besting him in everything from job promotions to romance. Everill’s odd, manic outbursts carry with them more than a shade of the troubled Dory from Darkmans, a character who was possibly clinically schizoprenic. Before the reader can figure out what to make of it, the book rolls on into the seemingly random collection of letters that make up the recovered postbox plunder.

There are three types of epistolary novels (1): monologic (giving the letters of only one character), dialogic (giving the letters of two characters), and polylogic (with three or more letter-writing characters). In addition, a crucial element in polylogic epistolary novels (such as Dangerous Liaisons) is the dramatic device of ‘discrepant awareness’, wherein the simultaneous but separate correspondences of the heroines and the villains create dramatic tension. Burley Cross Postbox Theft is an arresting amalgam of all three, capturing connections made and missed.

Many of the diverted letters are comic monologues about life’s petty annoyances, ballooned into hyperbolic diatribes. Other monologues capture loneliness, longing and yearning. The inventory of the ill-fated Auction of Promises is a unique monologue of good intentions going horribly awry.

The book as a whole is a cacophonous polylogue, seemingly random at first but falling together in interesting, startling and often heartrending fashion as each letter is opened. The interjections of an opinionated translator form a kind of dialogue with her interpretation of one letter for which the need for translation is not entirely clear. Finally, the collection of letters is framed by a dialogue of sorts between assigning sergeant and investigating constable, where PC Topping renders both the final word as well as a singularly soul-redeeming monologue.

Throughout, Barker populates this written – sometimes scribbled, sometimes meticulously typed and tapped out – chorus with characters who run the sympathetic gamut, from quirky, forlorn and wistful to bewildering, manic and kinda scary, to the edge of irredeemable. And this is just as Barker would have it for the readers willing to hang in with her often dense, often thorny, always rewarding stories:

‘There are writers who exist to confirm people’s feelings about themselves and to make them feel comforted or not alone. That’s the opposite to what I do. I’m presenting people with unacceptable or hostile characters, and my desire is to make them understood.’(2)

Not only does she make her disparate tangle of souls understood by the end, but Barker sews it up elegantly, organically and in a way that is both uplifting and just a touch satisfyingly vindictive. It’s delicious.

In this day and age – and Burley Cross Postbox Theft is firmly set in the present – why should anyone care if some random bits of paper get lost in the increasingly dismissed and antiquated post? Barker addresses that in fine fashion, too, as part of PC Topping’s summing up of the postbox theft mystery:

“Let’s see … I know that pubs are on their way out (hundreds are closing every week), that they’re merely a sad reminder of things past (the way we once were, The Good Old Days), just like ‘community spirit’ is, and communities themselves, and churches, and local bobbies, and pickled walnuts, and brass bands at fetes, and tall hedgerows, and handwritten letters, and home-cooked meals, and sparrows, and boredom, and books, and gob-stoppers, and ladybirds, and innocence … Yes. All for the high jump. All for the chop. All nearly eclipsed, now (may they rest in peace), by a much bigger, brighter future, in twenty-four-hour digital HD.”

But just as PC Topping didn’t buckle under Sergeant Everill’s verbal assault when passed the postbox theft assignment, so his seeming rueful lament for a world quickly passing by is actually no lament at all, but a gentle yet pointed reprimand. Just as he plausibly disentangles the postbox theft and sorts out who needs to see which of the misdirected missives, his self-effacing tidying up at the end seems to more profoundly echo E.M. Forster’s beloved call to “only connect.”

Notes

1. Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistolary_novel

2. ‘I won’t make you feel better’
Nicola Barker revels in giving her readers hostile characters in odd locations. No wonder she’s addicted to Big Brother …
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/apr/29/fiction.features3
by Alex Clark, The Observer, April 29, 2007

Here are the books I read in 2010, with links to reviews where I have them. This is an exhaustive, all of list, not a best of list … although there are some “best of” in there … you can guess! It feels like it was a year of lively reads indeed.

1. Sink Trap – A Georgiana Neverall Mystery
   by Christy Evans

2. Matter
   by Meredith Quartermain

3. Invisible
   by Paul Auster

4. This is Water – Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life
   by David Foster Wallace

5. Man Gone Down
   by Michael Thomas

6. The Museum of Innocence
   by Orhan Pamuk

7. Awake
   by Elizabeth Graver

8. The Ordeal of Oliver Airedale
   by D.T. Carlisle

9. The Bishop’s Man
   by Linden MacIntyre

10. Outliers
    by Malcolm Gladwell

11. The Children’s Book
    by A.S. Byatt

12. Solar
    by Ian McEwan

13. The Last Woman
    by John Bemrose

14. Nox
    by Anne Carson

15. Chronic City
    by Jonathan Lethem

16. So Much For That
    by Lionel Shriver

17. The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie
    by Alan Bradley

18. Coal and Roses
    by P.K. Page

19. Pigeon
    by Karen Solie

20. Useless Dog
    by Billy C. Clark

21. The Certainty Dream
    by Kate Hall

22. The Heart is an Involuntary Muscle
    by Monique Proulx
    (translated by David Homel & Fred A. Reed)

23. The Imperfectionists
    by Tom Rachman

24. Migration Songs
    by Anna Quon

25. Grain
    by John Glenday

26. The Sun-fish
    by Eilean Ni Chuilleanain

27. 2666
    by Roberto Bolano

28. A Single Man
    by Christopher Isherwood

29. Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems
    by Randall Maggs

30. Far To Go
    by Alison Pick

31. Gould’s Book of Fish
    by Richard Flanagan

32. Fauna
    by Alissa York

33. Freedom
    by Jonathan Franzen

34. Sandra Beck
    by John Lavery

35. Annabel
    by Kathleen Winter

36. The Death of Donna Whalen
    by Michael Winter

37. Room
    by Emma Donoghue

38. Ghost Pine
    by Jeff Miller

39. L (and things come apart)
    by Ian Orti

40. The Bone Cage
    by Angie Abdou

41. Windstorm
    by Joe Denham

42. An Object of Beauty
    by Steve Martin

43. Burley Cross Postbox Theft
    by Nicola Barker

I start 2011 with the following books started in 2010 and still in progress:

• Voltaire’s Bastards
  by John Ralston Saul

• Maggot: Poems
  by Paul Muldoon

• Patient Frame
  by Steven Heighton

• The Mill on the Floss
  by George Eliot

In 2009, I read 52 books, inspired a lot by great discussions and suggestions I found amongst the book blogging and reader community on Twitter. I didn’t match my 2009 total – not even close, really … but then, I have to ask again (as I did a year ago) are total numbers of books or pages really the point? What do you think?