Book Reviews

Bedevilling Cities

Mark Macdonald (Author)
Flat. Arsenal Pulp Press
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Russell Smith (Author)
The Princess and the Whiskheads: A Fable. Doubleday Canada Limited
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Paul Vermeersch (Editor)
The IV Lounge Reader. Insomniac Press
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Reviewed by Gregory Betts

Through his short fable, The Princess and the Whiskheads, Russell Smith invites readers to imagine a small country where, in gross defiance of the national norm, legislators draft legislation to "banish banality." As if that weren't enough to paralyze a Canadian reader with hope, Smith pushes further by daring us to imagine a country where political leaders describe street urchins, punks, and drug-addicted artists as "[a] part of our culture, and as such important to us." When a throng of oddly dressed protestors arrive at the palatial seat of government, chanting chants and brandishing torches, they are welcomed, and when incidents of violence and vandalism do break out, said protesters are easily calmed and politely escorted back to the national monuments they have defaced and currently occupy.

In writing this urban fairytale, Smith either got lost in a squatter's fantasy or he's attempting to resist the domination of bland industrial and suburban architecture, unenlightened politicians, and the dredges of corporate art that have spread out across our urban landscape. The contrast with our extra literary reality is more than poignant: Smith attempts to remind us that idealism can offer an escape route from urban decay.

The prose is flat and translucent, following the "once upon a time" bard's tale closely but with the welcome addition of waist up nudity, jugs of dirty wine, cyberpunk fashion, and socially respected weed smokers to update the genre. Smith's prose style, in fact, sits at the exact opposite end of the spectrum from the book's own plea for an art characterized by "sheer uselessness," valued for its "audacious design" rather than the narrative or political moralism that characterizes Smith's own production. To find such an art, designed "simply for marvel and discussion, pure form," a reader would do better to open Paul Vermeersch's The IV Lounge Reader and sample the new urban Canadian mode.

The IV Lounge Reader is a multigenre anthology based on a long standing Dundas Street reading series. Many of the works reflect this origin, gaining their impact through wry humour or a caustic line dropped flippantly this kind of performative irony works much better delivered than written. One effect, though, is a conversational, whimsical gait that cruises the streets of Canadian cities as if following the rhythm of George Bowering's Breath Line. The book has other well known and consistently impressive contributors - Dennis Lee, bill bissett, Andrew Pyper, Lynn Crosbie, David Donnell. More impressive, however, are the contributions by less famous and more caustic writers, such as Marnie Woodrow and Noah Leznoff, whose writing takes audacious design and performative irony to an exquisite and menacing extreme. The various cities that appear in the collection, if named at all, are nondescript and filled with a quietly disturbing perversity. Sherwin Tjia's gothic irony stands out in particular for contorting generic newspaper styles to horrifically humorous, anti-social effect. A similar playful menace emerges in Stephen Cain's disjunctive verbiage, Kristily Green's dry humour, and Adam Sol's wrenchingly human scenarios. Despite some unfocused selections, the collection as a whole delivers audacious, dark urban humour.

Somewhere in between the stylistic polarities of these two books lies Mark MacDonald's novella Flat. He begins his narrative subtly, similar to Russell Smith's straightforward yarn-spinning, but gradually develops this into the kind of dark, manic irony that characterizes The IV Lounge Reader. MacDonald's unnamed protagonist awakens one morning to a phone call asking him to execute the will after a distant acquaintance named J. commits suicide. The suicide is less of a mystery than the protagonist imagines, but this doesn't stop our hero from being sucked into the same vacuum of insanity that broke J.'s will to live. Like Smith, MacDonald targets bland architecture (Vancouver's, in particular) as evidence of social neglect and instigator of anti-social tendencies. His characters desperately want the dull, grey, square architecture to possess more imagination and meaningfulness than mere functionality and cost effectiveness. They get lost in conspiratorial speculations in pursuit of the cultural and spiritual purpose behind the city's stark and alienating high rise culture.

The maze that MacDonald constructs for his downtrodden characters is apocalyptic. The disturbing depiction of apartment buildings collapsing upon each other, of North America's typical urban blandness crushing under the weight of its own malaise, and of the final judgement against this society summed up by suicide may offer some catharsis for frustrated Canadian readers, but MacDonald affords his characters no such release: the threat of future self-sacrifice remains to be passed on from one spiritless vassal to the next, just as it passed from J. to the novella's protagonist.

A recent essay by Ron Keenburg, President of the Royal Architectural Society of Canada, argues that Canadian cities demystify the landscape and alienate their inhabitants ("Dare to Dream," Canadian Issues Feb. 2003). He argues that Canadians, despite being accustomed to such environments, have outgrown these functional but destructive dwellings and crave an architectural renaissance. The three books reviewed here each advance Keenburg's cause by dramatizing urban disease. As MacDonald's J. concludes in his last notebook entry, "I curse the moment of return to this upright, aging world. I cannot commune with this place, it is not my own .... The devil's horns are not curved. They rise perfectly from his flat skull at ninety degrees from any angle of evenness." The devil's road flat crown and his high rise horns are but the deceptively bland architecture that hides an internal, psychological horror show.

This review originally appeared in Canadian Literature #181 (Summer 2004), (Wiseman, Livesay, Sime, Connelly, Robinson). (pg. 176 - 178)

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