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About a decade ago, I read Bill Bryon's A Walk in the Woods, a type of book I suppose I had never imagined existed: it was clever, funny, well-written, and loosely categorized as travel literature, a genre I had never heard of. I read other Bryson tr...more
About a decade ago, I read Bill Bryon's A Walk in the Woods, a type of book I suppose I had never imagined existed: it was clever, funny, well-written, and loosely categorized as travel literature, a genre I had never heard of. I read other Bryson travel narratives and a few of his interviews. When asked, during one discussion, which writers he admired, the Des Moines, Iowa-born writer replied Jonathan Raban, Paul Theroux, and Redmond O'Hanlon. The interviewer told the interviewee his writing reminded him of O'Hanlon's and Bryson answered with something like, "Aw shucks."
I went on to read one book by Jonathan Raban and several by Paul Theroux (the godfather of travel literature, surely), but didn't get around to Redmond O'Hanlon until recently. I suppose I should have begun with one of his more famous books, like Into the Heart of Borneo, In Trouble Again, or Congo Journey, but I found Trawler staring at me from a bookstore shelf one day not long after I had thought a good idea for a story would be to go out on a lobster boat in Eastern Canada and write about it. O'Hanlon has saved me the trouble.
I've never read anything like Trawler before. It is highly unique, and for that reason alone it deserves praise. Redmond O'Hanlon, an Oxford-educated academic, joins a Scottish fishing trawler from Aberdeen as it sails into the North Atlantic to go about its business. Yes, there are predictably humourous bits about the author getting seasick and banging his head on things and not being able to get his sea-legs, but this is not an account of a stodgy, over-educated Englishman and his laugh-a-minute travails aboard a working vessel staffed by a no-nonsense, unforgiving Scottish crew. It is more like a running dialogue; like one long, 340-page conversation with a somewhat no-nonsense, occasionally forgiving, extremely brave, superstitious, rather desperate, astonishingly knowledgeable, and slightly mad Scottish crew - members of which are both gracious and hostile, sometimes within the span of seconds.
O'Hanlon provides very little commentary, something I've never seen a travel writer do. Instead, he focuses on relaying what happens and what's said, and if that sounds boring, it isn't, because the experiences and discussions are so authentic and so convincing you feel like you're onboard. When O'Hanlon is gutting fish with his tattered gloves in the fish room, listening to Luke explain how a hagfish evolved and what its defensive mechanism is, with tangents about love, life, hope, and fear, the narrative is oddly moving, mysteriously compelling. To say O'Hanlon has an ear for dialogue doesn't quite capture his talent. Perhaps the author has a photographic memory (my first guess), or maybe there were whole days where he mainly took notes and didn't mention this in his book, or he might have been recording the conversations, or I suppose he could have made much of it up - only the conversations are extraordinary, banal, weird, normal, angry, friendly, asinine, and brilliant. Many are not the type of conversations one would make up. O'Hanlon sometimes says incredibly daft things or rambles (because he's out of his element, because he's sleep deprived, because he's a bookish nerd), which he immediately regrets, yet he records his statements and the responses anyway. Again, it's all so real, and that's what makes it all so strangely riveting. What of interest happens on a Scottish fishing boat? Well, just about everything if presented correctly. There's no gloss, no sheen, no special effects -Trawler is like highly literary investigative journalism, with wonderful vernacular and lots of explanations about natural science and ocean life.
Because the account is exceedingly realistic, there are lots of disturbing bits (trawlermen tend to verbally abuse each other when they haven't had any sleep in four days; and they tend to be unforgiving toward know-nothing landlubbers), but there are also plenty of deeply funny parts, and in addition to being unpredictable (how would you know when one of the crew is going to say something off-the-charts bizarre?) the humour is situational and fantastically awkward. British, in other words.
One part that really got me, that completely had me in stitches, had to do with O'Hanlon's wanting to see a Force 12 hurricane. Apparently, he sort of requested or expressed a wish to see a fierce storm, asking to be woken up if he should be asleep when one occurred. One day he is woken up and sent to the bridge. Presumably, he thinks the skipper, Jason, is going to provide an overview of how a vessel like the Norlantean operates in a tempest. On deck, O'Hanlon is buckled into the First Mate's chair. Jason greets him:
"Good evening, Redmond. Welcome to my bridge."
"Jason," I said, "yeah, good evening. But is this it? Is this a Force 12?"
"Aye," he said, not looking at me. "Maybe. Maybe not. Who cares? Only you! But I'll tell you this, Redmond. In my opinion, and please, feel free to disagree, I'd say it's a stormy, stormy night."
"Jeesus Jason," I said, turning on him, for some reason, with real aggression (and holding tight with both hands to the arms of the chair, despite my chest-harness), "don't you sleep? How can you do this?"
(Jason explains that he sleeps at home and that here he's the ever-alert captain, responsible for everything, before lecturing Redmond on what was wrong with his generation and how it glorified and ruined dope.)
"When you were young, your kicks, real kicks, what were they? Jeesus, you sad old fucks, you lot who thought you were going to change the world (save us!) - you beatniks, hippies, flower-power jerk-offs, gentle layabouts, whatever you called yourselves, what did you really do? Books, fine, I'll give you that. You loved books, and that was great. And you loved your music. But give me a break, look, so what? The fucking sparrows love their music. So you gave up and lay around and smoked dope or cannabis or hashish or gear or grass or hemp in spliffs or joints or whatever you chose to call it - all those words! Worse than winos! And that's right, shit, I remember, that's the word, you smoked shit, in a mental world of hippie shite, real shite, and in the least aggressive possible way you fucked up your own lives, and you took away the motivation for your children. And free love! Spare us! So it was all cool, man, to leave a chick and hang out with another. Except, fuck you, one of those chicks happened to be my mother. Yes, my mother! And to me, not to you, a mother is a serious business. And if you leave her, you ought to be shot!"
"Jason, hang on, what are you talking about? I thought you'd been here for ever. I thought your great-to-the-nth grandfather swam ashore from the Armada..."
"You know what I think? I think there's nothing bad in itself about dope. Not in itself. Of course it does less harm than alcohol. Of course it should be legal. It's piss-nonsense. But you people, you, my dad, the old UK hippies - you invested that shite with wisdom. Just because it made you feel good. A herbal ga-ga tranquilizer. It's a plant, for Chrissake! Harmless. A couple of dreamy relax-me pills. No more, no less. And you made a fucking religion out of it!"
"Jason, hold on. Please - tell me about your dad, tell me about your mother."
"My mother? She's a Costello. Spanish. She was a great beauty in her time. Still is. And one of her very first boyfriends was John Lennon."
"Christ."
And on and on it goes - one conversation blends into another and into another.... It takes a bit of getting used to, but I would say by page 30, you ought to be hooked. Trawler is more than a simulated jaunt on a fishing boat, more than a documentary in print. It's a commentary on the wonders, dangers, and absurdities of life.
Troy Parfitt is the author of Why China Will Never Rule the World(less)
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Something approaching awe
While sending out review copies for my book about China, I warned readers they might find its content polemical, controversial, “politically incorrect,” or whatever. Two reviewers replied ‘not to worry,’ – they liked oppositi...more
Something approaching awe
While sending out review copies for my book about China, I warned readers they might find its content polemical, controversial, “politically incorrect,” or whatever. Two reviewers replied ‘not to worry,’ – they liked oppositionist perspectives and were admirers of Christopher Hitchens. I thought, ‘Christopher who?’ Incredibly, I didn’t know who Hitchens was (in 2011, no less), though I knew of his book God is Not Great, which didn’t appeal to me because, pompously perhaps, I reckoned I didn’t need to read an argument I already supported and a conclusion I had already arrived at. Like many, I familiarized myself with Mr. Hitchens through Youtube and found myself learning heaps about politics and history, and more than I expected to about religion (I had never thought of religion as the original tyranny, for example). And then I chanced upon a copy of his memoir.
Hitch-22 is the best memoir I’ve read and better than any biography I’ve read. From a startling account about his mother’s suicide to a Socratic declaration of how little he knows (the spur which kept him learning and reflecting on his positions and beliefs), Hitchens’s crisp and articulate prose courses through 400 pages, drawing you in, propelling you on, causing you to reflect, and impelling you to learn more about the many subjects, historical events, themes, and memes he scrutinizes and dissects. It also sends you to the dictionary, a healthy exercise, surely.
And it’s not a conventional memoir. Apart from the section pertaining to his youth, there is little straightforward or chronological autobiography, and there is limited mention of things there should be, his wife and children for instance. Rather, after describing his upbringing (vignettes of his loving but tormented mother Yvonne, awkward chats with his kindly but conservative father “the Commander,” and the bizarre rituals and norms of British public school), the volume morphs into a study of personalities, events, and subjects that shaped Hitchens’s life and career as a journalist, a writer, a political commentator, a radical, an iconoclast, and a public intellectual of the first order. So, in the beginning of the book, we get chapters like “Yvonne,” “the Commander,” and “Fragments from an Education,” and in the middle and latter portions we get ones like “Salman,” “Mesopotamia from Both Sides,” and “Edward Said in Light and Shade (and Saul).” The final chapter, “Decline, Mutation, or Metamorphosis?” does not, as I thought it would, speak to the writer’s battle with cancer (indeed, there is no mention of the disease that took his life just two years after this book was published), but instead to the volume’s overarching theme, encapsulated within its apposite title.
Hitchens, you see, far from being an absolutist (one of the charges from his reactionary and absolutist detractors), has always been acutely aware of his many contradictions. Ever since he began his rabble-rousing at Oxford (by day; by night he socialized with profs and dons) he has been cognizant of the fact he has kept two sets of books.
Like so many intellectuals, Hitchens was drawn to the Left through Marxism (he was a very active member of the International Socialists), but unlike other big thinkers, he quickly saw the contradictions of Marxist ideology, the shortcomings and failures of Communist states, and the fascist nature of anti-fascists. But Hitchens’s outright rejection of the Left was the culmination of a process that occurred over decades. For anyone who has ever wondered or felt confused about just which notch on the political spectrum they occupy, Hitch-22 offers consolation. “Mutato nomine et de te fabula narrator,” our Anglo-American narrator writes. “Change only the name and this story is about you.”
Reading this book taught me too many things to comprehensively list, and whetted my appetite for more. Apart from Bill Clinton’s Mayor Quimbyesque “I did not have sexual relations with that woman,” (and Clinton, remember, was impeached for lying under oath) I wasn’t fully aware of just what a lying sack of bovine fecal matter he was. I did not fully comprehend the challenge to freedom of expression (and freedom in general) that Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa on Salman Rushdie represented. I did not really understand the severity of the situation in Iraq (or precisely how evil and fanatical Saddam Hussein and his sons were). But most of all, and although I’ve had suspicions for a while and have been tiptoeing back to the centre of the political spectrum, I never fully realized just how utterly brainless, extreme, and absurd the Left really can be. See members of this bleeding-heart’s society demonstrating against armed intervention so fascist states and military juntas can continue threatening their neighbours and torturing and murdering their citizenry; see them advocate for freedom of expression while denouncing books and points-of-view their point of view deems “offensive”; watch as people who call themselves liberal criticise all US foreign policy as crass and corrupt imperialism believing nothing the United States government does is motivated – in whole or in part – by morality; note the expression of satisfaction on Leftist faces when the planes hit the towers and thousands die. “Well, hey, America had it coming.”
“If Hitchens didn’t exist,” Ian McEwan said, “we wouldn’t be able to invent him.” The cynic thinks this is overstatement: the endorsement of a friend in exchange for a mention or reciprocal endorsement. But the cynic who reads Chirstopher Hitchens should have their cynicism replaced by clarity if not perspicacity. They should come to the understanding that McEwan’s statement represents the truth.
At the risk of stating the obvious or sounding hagiographic, what a pity Christopher Hitchens is no longer with us. He did what the media so often fails to do. Not only did he use reason and logic to point the way toward what to think, but how to think. He got us to question what we knew or thought we knew. And now that he’s gone, who’s going to replace him? I reckon someone of Hitchen’s intellect and drive comes along once every twenty or thirty years. Or maybe longer. There was Socrates.... There was Orwell.... The feeling I got while reading Hitchens’s commentary was something approaching awe, and I felt foolish for not having known who he was. Without question, I will read his massive book, Arguably (reviewed opposite my own book in the San Francisco Book Review). I’m sure the pages will practically turn by themselves. Will I agree with everything Hitchens says? Of course not, and I doubt he would have wanted it any other way.
Six stars.
Troy Parfitt is the author of Why China Will Never Rule the World.(less)
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"[T]he very multiculturalism and multiethnicity that brought Salman to the West, and that also made us richer by Hanif Kureishi, Nadeem Aslam, Vikram Seth, Monica Ali, and many others, is now one of the disguises for a uniculturalism, based on moral relativism and moral blackmail (in addition to some more obvious blackmail of the less moral sort) whereby the Enlightenment has been redefined as 'white' and 'oppressive,' mass illegal immigration threatens to spoil everything for everybody, and the figure of the free-floating transnational migrant has been deposed by the contorted face of the psychopathically religious international nihilist, praying for the day when his messianic demands will coincide with possession of an apocalyptic weapon. (These people are not called nihilists for nothing.) Of all of this we were warned, and Salman was the messenger. Mutato nomine et de te fabula narrator: Change only the name and this story is about you."
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Christopher Hitchens
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Mordecai Richler's Cocksure is an amusing and fast-paced satirical novel that challenges – nay, skewers – political correctness; cheers for that. However, though it is a decent read, it doesn't quite come off and isn't as fulfilling as the writer’s p...more
Mordecai Richler's Cocksure is an amusing and fast-paced satirical novel that challenges – nay, skewers – political correctness; cheers for that. However, though it is a decent read, it doesn't quite come off and isn't as fulfilling as the writer’s previous work, The Incomparable Atuk, a lesser-known gem in Richler’s ground-breaking repertoire. (By the by, the reason Atuk is less known probably has to do with its wonderful political incorrectness. Or, as Richler once said, “Satirical novels are probably least seriously treated in Canada because... in Canada there’s an insecure attitude about culture.... People feel that culture is a very serious thing, and a duty, and connotes earnestness... and haven’t got enough confidence to realize that something funny may be of the highest seriousness... and people in England and the United States haven’t got that problem.”)
In any event, Cocksure revolves around Mortimer Griffin, a white-bread WASP from Caribou, Ontario who makes his mark in the London book trade. When an eccentric, self-obsessed Hollywood magnate named The Star Maker buys his publishing firm, Griffin is confronted by the fact he (Griffin) is not Jewish (many people think he is) and the impact this has on his career and personal life.
So, we've got a bit of a weak premise, especially for Richler, whose more serious efforts weave dozens of themes and characters together in a complex, erudite, and oh-so-satisfying mix. Regard, if you will, the literary pyrotechnics of Solomon Gursky Was Here, the profoundly good storytelling within the covers of Joshua Then And Now, or even the more conventional delivery and ba-dump tshewww! comedy of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. And we all know, or should, about the subtle intricacy and tragicomedy of Barney’s Version.
Humour helps Cocksure along – the bit about Griffin analyzing why he thinks about hockey legend Gordie Howe when making love to his wife is priceless – but some of the jokes don’t work. One does get the impression, however, the story must have been fun to write. The dialogue is good; Richler had that ear for vernacular. He never needed to describe the colour of the sofa or what was happening in the background; he just provided authentic and sustaining speech. And Cocksure’s characters are quite funny: the “ageless” Star Maker, for example, and Polly, who pretends she’s living in a movie, with scene cuts at all the dramatic spots.
It’s interesting to note that well into the twenty-first century, Mordecai Richler’s writing still pushes the envelope. He wrote Cocksure in 1968. Sure, it’s a bit ribald in places (the title being the clue), but that was the Zeitgeist, wun’nit? Still, the book was judged too risqué for some and was banned by WH Smith in the UK and by bookstores in Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa. We’ve come a long way, and we have writers like Richler to thank. In a CBC interview about Cocksure, Richler said, “I guess it’s a rather vile book. It’s really a novel of disgust. It’s meant to create discomfort especially among liberals who are so insufferably smug and self-satisfied about being moderately good.”
Cocksure is a decent read, but shouldn’t be anyone’s first Richler experience. I would wager you’ve got to “get to know him” elsewhere before you can appreciate this idiosyncratic, mocking little yarn. Cocksure might not achieve typical Richlerian heights, but it is fun; 4-stars fun.
Troy Parfitt is the author of Why China Will Never Rule the World(less)
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The Rachel Papers was my first Martin Amis novel and I liked it enough that I would read Amis again, most definitely. People say his subsequent efforts, such as Money and London Fields, are brilliant, and based on this book – published (if my math is...more
The Rachel Papers was my first Martin Amis novel and I liked it enough that I would read Amis again, most definitely. People say his subsequent efforts, such as Money and London Fields, are brilliant, and based on this book – published (if my math is right) when the author was 24 – I imagine they are. What a talent to write that well at that age. In terms of style and ability, it reads like a novel penned by someone twice as old.
The story (a narrative told on the day before the protagonist’s 20th birthday, recounting the previous pre-university year) revolves around Charles Highway and his “first love” Rachel, though it’s unclear if Charles really loves Rachel (or anything, or anyone, besides perhaps William Blake). Charles, you see, isn’t a very nice person. He is an exceptionally bright and an exceptionally egomaniacal and shallow 19 year old. He lies, he manipulates; he’s cold. But he knows he’s not a nice fellow (indeed, he tells you precisely why), so this articulate candour makes for humour, and the book is really funny in places. And it’s that can’t-see-it-coming humour, the best kind. I particularly liked the line (after some confessional about some inadequacy or personal issue) ‘My heart really went out to me there.’ It’s an interesting premise for a first-person narrative; Charles is effectively saying, “I’m a worm, and here’s why I’m a worm.”
The only problem I had with the book is that it is a sort of literary teen romance – very literary in places, but very teen romance in others. It made me think back to those zit-concerned, first girlfriend days: sneaking around behind parents’ backs, thinking “oldsters” were quite lame, and all that jazz – but at times it came across as too teen-edition-Harlequin-romance. I didn’t really need a description of fumbling for buttons or a step by step through opening a condom package (well maybe one, but not two or three). You get to an age where reading about that kind of thing loses appeal. But what else could a 24 year old have written about?
The character Kevin, Charles’s bother-in-law, is priceless – endless comedy, certainly based on a real person. Kevin is a kitchen-sitting, booze guzzling, card playing lout who likes to indulge Charles in banal conversation or locker-room talk about his sister (and Charles doesn’t seem to mind because he admits he thinks his sister is hot!). Kevin’s not a very nice person either, so he and Charles (or so Kevin thinks) seem to have a connection.
I wonder what Martin Amis thinks of this book. It was written in 1973, and Amis has since gone on to become a literary giant. Most writers wish their first couple of efforts would disappear.
I thought The Rachel Papers was a good read. I imagine twenty-somethings with good taste in literature (and a sense of humour) would find it a great one.
Troy Parfitt, author of Why China Will Never Rule the World(less)
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" I think you mean Hokkaido Highway Blues by Will Ferguson, not Tim Fergeson.
Troy Parfitt's Why China Will Never Rule the World - Travels in the Two Chi...more
I think you mean Hokkaido Highway Blues by Will Ferguson, not Tim Fergeson.
Troy Parfitt's Why China Will Never Rule the World - Travels in the Two Chinas is good.
Oh, wait. That's my book :-0(less)
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3.80 avg rating — 15 ratings
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