Book Reviews

Apocalyptic Consumption

Sinclair Dumontais (Author) and Patricia Claxton (Translator)
The Parachute. Key Porter Books
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Katrina Onstad (Author)
How Happy to Be. McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
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Barry Webster (Author)
The Sound of All Flesh. Porcupine's Quill
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Reviewed by Beverley Haun

While these books are vastly different in form—an extended satiric monologue, a first person novel, a collection of short stories—all three explore, to some degree, the folly of our continuing preoccupation with marketing and consuming products and people, and ultimately the planet.

The Parachute echoes Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” in form and structure, if not in length. Both are monologues addressing the privileged and powerful and offering solutions to economic problems that threaten to be social burdens. Both protagonists describe themselves as having spent a lifetime proposing visionary solutions, and both see themselves and their contributions as being worthy of praise and fame. Both offer an outrageous proposition that exposes the cold-blooded drive for profits at any expense. Swift speaks to the eighteenth-century English landlords who drain the wealth from the Irish countryside and impoverish the Irish who are their tenants. Dumontais speaks to the head of a multinational shoe company that outsources production at slave wages to children in third world countries, and by implication, the heads of all multinationals. In the guise of offering further sources of profit or benefit, both expose the greed and lack of human fellow feeling behind the powerful institutions of their times. And both, in outlining the horrors of the practices of those in power, also outline countermeasures that could be engaged by the victims of these institutions to redress the balance of power. Here the similarity ends. What Swift accomplishes in six pages, Dumontais spins out to 136 pages. To be fair, much of the writing in Dumontais is concerned with the ravages to the planet as well as to people that result from the unchecked excesses of multinationals, and warranted attention is drawn to these excesses in an effort to raise awareness and to emphasize countermeasures. But much of the extra verbiage in Dumontais is just that, padding and digressions that fit the egotistical and long-winded persona of his protagonist, but should have been pruned in the editing process as a courtesy if not a convenience to the reader.

I was struck early on while reading How Happy to Be by what was not there. While published in 2006, I knew by page eight that the novel begins in February 2001 in Toronto, and I expected the narrative to anticipate the events of the following September. But the novel ends a few weeks after it begins in early spring on Gambier Island, a boat ride from Vancouver, still innocent of our current terrorized dispensation. The past of the narrative and not the near future drives the plot, and as the protagonist Maxine says, “the past can be bossy.” That bossy past is Maxine’s own. It so profoundly shapes and continues to filter her present that she “can’t imagine any life but this one,” and describes herself as being “stabbed to death” by her own “point of view.” This is alienating her from committing to her personal life while driving a career she finds increasingly pointless. Max’s mother died when she was only eight, and her father settled in a Gambier Island communal experiment to try to create a family environment for his daughter, an environment that Max has been resisting ever since. In fact she gravitates toward the gloss of movies and celebrity in reaction to the earnestness and general grungy failure of the commune life. When the book begins, Max is a 34-year old entertainment writer for The Daily, an undisguised stand-in for The National Post run by a British minor aristocrat called Baby Baron. A long term personal relationship has recently ended for Max and she is trying to get fired from her insubstantial job, torn as she is between the emotional, ideological, and material discomfitures of her upbringing and the manufactured vapidity of the celebrity über-branding and promotion by which she now earns her living. Serious as the themes of this narrative sound, they are in fact told in a wickedly funny, quickly flowing style that is a pleasure to read as Onstad peels back the tape that holds so much of the star system taut, and shows the matching shallowness of the media hype that feeds from and values that system. Into Max’s dysfunctional and empty media-driven life come two alternative voices of reason, one reminding her of the values of her past, and one demonstrating values in an alternative future from the one she is currently navigating. Both voices represent a vision of creativity and social contribution within a context of relationships, commitment, and love. As Max’s crisis develops she returns to Gambier seeking some form of resolution. One anomaly in this final section is perplexing. The light hand with which Onstad has written up to this point serves the narrative well. But here she puts Max into a canoe, to navigate through the shoals of choices before her. So far so good. However, without any precedent of blatant symbolism earlier in the narrative, Onstad has Max literally lace on her father’s heavy hiking boots, and then climb rather stupidly into the stern of the canoe without a life jacket and head into the sea and into a sudden storm from which she must struggle to return. The heavy-handed transparency of her metaphor does not do justice to the rest of this finely crafted snapshot and critique of the shallow and frenzied contemporary media machine.

There are two key aspects to the stories in The Sound of All Flesh that make them well worth reading; the lyrical prose in which they are written and the often unusual and thought-provoking contexts for the forms of alienation with which the stories grapple. These stories work best when Webster toys with language and metaphor and gives his imagination free play, such as in “Earthquakes on the Far Side of the World” where his protagonist’s identity as a geologist and northern lover brings snow to Zurich in July when he throws himself into a Swiss relationship, and where tearing himself away to return to Canada causes the earth to heave and re-form back home. The intensity and riveting point of view in “Laughing Forever” has altered my relationship to clowns forever. And “The Royal Conservatory of Music” is a tour de force that shatters conventional narrative form and then uses the resulting bits in ones, in twos and through repetition to build a layered narrative confection. His prose becomes poetry, takes on rhythm and through, duplication, multiplication, inversion, and repetition turns the initial narrative fragments into their own musical piece. Aside from these three gems of extravagant prose, there are stories that explore contemporary Canadian urban concerns: pollution, the inherent danger of architectural design flaws, and consumerism run amok. In “Bicycle Dreams” a committed environmentalist discovers the uneasy truth that he cannot maintain his evangelical green posture without keeping the industrialized causes of his eco concerns firmly rooted in his own life to foster his zeal. In “Enough” a sexual relationship is only able to flourish if enough money has been spent, before each encounter, on enough designer costumes to manifest the role of desirable urbanite. Another set of stories focus on the Canadian abroad, navigating relationships in unfamiliar cultures. “The Modesty Wrap” demonstrates the powers and weaknesses of the flesh in Turkey. “Capturing Varanasi” creates a female protagonist discovering both the freedoms and restraints of Hindu India. In “Believing in Paris” a protagonist comes to terms with the fact that his friend with AIDS has lied about his health to many sexual partners. In “A Piano Shudders” a gifted piano student must reconcile the differing advice of two music teachers. These latter two fall somewhat short, while “Circles” is more of a lyrical exercise than a full blown story. None of these three pieces really achieves the impact of the other stories, but the other stories definitely make The Sound of All Flesh worth reading as his lyrical prose evokes both the frailties and robustness of the human condition.

Dumontais warns us of the apocalyptic consequences of the direction that multinationals are taking the world of consumption, Onstad, shows us the consequences of that consumption for the group of people who create and maintain the media machine that shapes consumer desires. Webster hears the dissonant sound of the apocalyptic rumblings and explores myriad ramifications that it has on different individuals. Three very different voices, three very different but overlapping moral visions, each pushing the possibilities of very different genre conventions: each, characteristic of all good writing, both disturbing and pleasurable.

This review originally appeared in Canadian Literature #193 (Summer 2007), Canada Reads. (pg. 120 - 122)

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