Book Reviews

Arcadian Adventures

Catherine Bush (Author)
The Rules of Engagement. Harper Flamingo
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Will Aitken (Author)
Realia. Random House
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Reviewed by Susan Fisher

Arcadia Hearne, the protagonist of Catherine Bush's new novel, is a London-based war researcher who studies the intractable problems of modern conflict: When is intervention warranted? How can disputes be resolved? Her private life is fraught with similar questions: What responsibility did she have for a duel two men once fought over her? Can she accept that her current lover forges passports for refugees?

Bush's narrative unfolds as a dialectic between Arcadia's private guilt and her professional concerns, and the local pain of a troubled heart becomes emblematic of global suffering. The novel moves forward on parallel lines, one set in contemporary London, the other in Toronto in the 1980s. Bush keeps both stories advancing on a slight curve so that they neatly converge when Arcadia returns to Toronto. But in order for the governing analogy to work, the love duel has to seem a suitable microcosm of the conflicts that Arcadia studies. Unfortunately, the two combatants are puerile, and their folly is too lightweight to justify comparison with Rwanda or Somalia. At times, as if to pump gravitas into her material, Bush resorts to a portentous style, marked by anaphora, sentence fragments and redundant adjectival pairs. Yet she can also write startlingly well: her description of a night flight over the Atlantic is breathtaking, and she makes the canals of London and the ravines of Toronto haunting vales of despair. Even so, I could not feel for Arcadia. The love duel seemed too factitious, and the novel's ambitions too conspicuous. Moral lessons that advertise their approach deliver only glancing blows, whereas those that ambush strike deep.

Will Aitken's Realia, which also focuses on a Canadian in self-imposed exile, makes no such claim on the moral imagination. His protagonist, Louise Painchaud, is a feckless girl from Lethbridge who, like a latter-day remittance man, is being paid by her parents to stay out of Canada. Realia begins as an amusing version of the contemporary Japan tale. The conventions of this genre involve, first, a Westerner who discovers that Japan is not all cherry blossoms and temples and has the ultimate tourist experience of falling in love with a Japanese person; second, satire of the reverence with which Westerners have treated traditional Japan; third, juxtapositions of "old" and "new," such as a monk wearing a Walkman; fourth, allusions to Japanese literature. On all counts, Aitken delivers the goods, and with wit and energy.

First, his protagonist Louise, unencumbered by any knowledge of things Japanese, stumbles into a space-age Heian theme-park version of Japan and falls in love with a Japanese male. The second ingredient, satire of Western reverence for Japanese culture, comes through in Aitken's wonderfully wicked portrait of the Japanophile. One of the minor characters, Bonnie, has come to Kyoto to make films on traditional crafts (ranging from pottery to textile dying with goat placenta). Her sentences are peppered with Japanese words and she keeps trying to get Louise to try "authentic" Japanese food. For all her laudable efforts to connect with the real Japan, Bonnie remains ridiculous. Yet, at the same time that Aitken makes comic hay out of our infatuation with old Japan, he also elicits it: even hardened Louise, who isn't about to be impressed by anything, finds herself lingering over a shop window containing exquisite lacquerware bowls.

The third convention, paradoxical juxtaposition, comes into play when Louise becomes the English instructor for an all-girl theatre company (a parodie version of the Takarazuka troupe). The company school is located on a holy mountain just outside Kyoto, and all sorts of scandalous, technologically enhanced goings-on take place in the midst of shrines and torii gates. Louise's lover, a pop star named Oro, tends to arrive at their trysts in a Maserati or a helicopter, but then whisks her off to a private getaway complete with traditional house and garden.

As for the fourth convention, allusions to Japanese literature, there are motifs from traditional myths, references to the Tale of Genji, and scenes from Kawabata's House of the Sleeping Beauties and possibly Tanizaki's The Secret History of the Lord ofMusashi. Aitken frames much of the novel as a postmodern Orpheus myth: the prologue retells the myth, and the appearance of a character named Hermiko (whose silver sneakers are adorned with wings), and excerpts from Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus reinforce the connection. This is Western content, but with Japanese connections: the novels of Murakami Haruki, which Aitken cites in the acknowledgements as a source, make frequent use of Orphic parallels.

Nonetheless, readers who have enjoyed other contemporary accounts of Japan such as John David Morley's Pictures from the Water Trade or Peter Oliva's The City of Yes may find Realia discomfiting. One reason is that Louise's adventures are only incidentally about Japan; the main interest is designer drugs and inventive sex. This tendency becomes especially apparent once she lures Oro, the epicene pop idol, to her futon. From this point on, Realia gets progressively more farcical and raunchy. What begins as amusing and outrageous becomes just plain offensive. This shift happened definitively for me when I encountered Louise's musical version of Hiroshima mon amour, complete with chorines in mushroom cloud headdresses. This kind of ghastly spoof can work; think of Mel Brooks's The Producers. But here, Louise's campy musical is treated as amusing excess rather than the nadir of bad taste.

In the end, Realia, for all its satiric know-ingness, offers a rather shop-worn view: Japan is a grotesque theatre where foreigners enter free of charge and the natives pay with their flesh. Just as Bush attempts to give Arcadia moral consequence by placing her against a backdrop of modern warfare, so Aitken attempts to elevate Louise by making her a new Eurydice (perhaps Eurydice in drag). But in order for such parallels to work, the narrator's story must somehow resonate with the eternal or global one. In both Realia and The Rules of Engagement, these secret harmonies are lost.

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This review originally appeared in Canadian Literature #175 (Winter 2002), Dennis Jones. (pg. 129 - 131)

***Please note that the articles and reviews from the Canadian Literature website (www.canlit.ca) may not be the final versions as they are printed in the journal, as additional editing sometimes takes place between the two versions. If you are quoting from the website, please indicate the date accessed when citing the web version of reviews and articles.