I could write ten thousand words and still not convey the complexity of the position Robertson Davies' work holds in my life. I somehow managed to make it through high school without reading any of his work, but his name was tossed around with great reverence, though not so great that he was beyond critique. There were a few battered copies of The Papers of Samuel Marchbanks floating around the classroom, and these were used as evidence of Davies' obsolete sense of humour and the special quality he had of being "more British than the British." It was not meant to be complimentary. No doubt Fifth Business was available somewhere in the school library, but I never encountered it. Still, he loomed large, the Grand Old Man of Canadian letters alongside Margaret Laurence, the Grand Old Dame.

I went through a period of discovery when I first entered university. The idea that books were things written in Canada and about Canada was still very new to me, and I set about learning who the biggest names were, and acquiring as many of their books as I could. Today it seems to me like a rather juvenile way of going about exploring your national literature, but sometimes juvenile ways are the best. They can allow you to stay more open and curious, to dive right into things you might otherwise dismiss. At that point in my life I wasn't even making any sort of distinction between literary fiction and genres like science fiction and fantasy. It was during this period that I built the core of my CanLit collection, and finally read The Deptford Trilogy. The bar had been raised for me, and the first time I read Davies' own comments about his admiration for Stephen Leacock, I knew exactly what he meant. (There was even a time when I reassessed my admiration in the same way that Davies reassessed his.) I have spent the last decade building the most complete collection of Davies' work that I could. It's not the sort of collection that would be recognized by serious dealers, no doubt, as it contains mostly beat-up paperbacks, reprints, and as far as I know only a single first edition (Twice Have the Trumpets Sounded), but I think it would be the kind of thing familiar to serious readers. It's fair to say that he's my favourite author, and his work has influenced the way I see and think to such an extent that even I can't always see the edges of it.

Tempest-Tost, the first volume in what would come to be known as The Salterton Trilogy, was also Davies' first novel. I believe The Salterton Trilogy is a kind of microcosm of Davies' development as an author. The ideas that are introduced in Tempest-Tost and Leaven of Malice will combine in A Mixture of Frailtures to form something greater than the sum of its parts, the first "true" Davies novel in a sense, developing a unique concept of how we construct our identities that will not be explicitly outlined until his eight novel, What's Bred in the Bone, and will find its ultimate expression in The Cunning Man, Davies' eleventh and final novel. I hope to trace this concept through his work as I read and review each of his novels in turn over the coming months. True to both his prior incarnation as Samuel Marchbanks and his long-standing relationship with the theatre, Davies began his work as a novelist with a satire of amateurs on the stage. The Salterton Little Theatre Company, a squabbling flock of middle class busibodies and minor local swells, decides to mount a pastoral production of The Tempest when they learn that Valentine Rich, a native daughter who made a minor splash in the American theatre community, will be in town and is willing to direct. The production is the same glorious mess amateur theatrics have been seen the dawn of time, and will probably continue to be until long after I'm in the ground. Nearly everyone involved with the play learns their parts and performs their duties in earnest, but with little seriousness. Professor Vambrace, who is assigned the role of Prospero after passive-aggressively discouraging all other comers with his erudition and great booming voice, is unwilling to content himself with being an actor. He interferes with the set design, the lighting, the blocking, and all manner of things that are the purview of the director and her crew. He has convinced himself that his meddling is the best thing for the play, but the reader can clearly see that it's more about showing himself to good advantage. He is the epitome of the worst kind of amateur dramatist, and Davies is merciless in mocking his pretensions.

To be clear, it is Vambrace's pretensions that he mocks, and not his class or his education or his money. Davies has been charged with what in Canada may as well be high treason: élitism. On its face the charge may bear out. A great many of Davies' characters are wealthy, highly educated, or both, and they usually come off better than characters with less wealth and social standing. This is a clear sign of class bias, right? Perhaps, but what of Professor Vambrace? He has wealth, status, and education, but he's also a complete ass whose arrogance blinds him to his shortcomings. And what about Solly Bridgetower's mother, a woman with considerable education given her age and the period when the novel is set, with even more wealth and status than Vambrace, and yet she may very well be the very same crotchety old woman for whom the phrase "old battle-axe" was first coined. It's also clear that her wealth, her status, even her education isolated her and allowed her bitterness and her inherent inability to overhear herself, as Bloom might say, to consume her. Davies clearly does not place her among his supposed élite. Does this smash the whole idea of Davies as an élitist? Not at all. Think back to the quality that he mocked in Professor Vambrace: his pretensions.

The characters that Davies truly favours, not just in Tempest-Tost but in nearly all his works, his aristocracy of the spirit if you will, are those with talent, professionalism and a fair degree of self-knowledge. This particular kind of status can be earned, so the roster changes and expands throughout the Salterton Trilogy, but in this first volume the three characters to focus on are Tom Gwalchmai the gardener, Valentine Rich the director, and Humphrey Cobbler the musician and teacher. None of them are wealthy, though Valentine Rich is by no means poor and Tom most likely makes a decent living for his trade, but Cobbler is borderline destitute. The three come from dramatically different backgrounds and their personalities might even clash at times. But they do have three things in common, and those three things make all the difference in Davies' fiction.

First, all three have talent. The gardens Tom single-handedly creates for the Webster family are made out to be the envy of all Salterton. Valentine has carved out a solid career for herself as both an actor and director in the unforgiving world of the American stage, and though it's never made explicit until A Mixture of Frailties, the third book in the trilogy, Humphrey Cobbler is a virtuoso performer able to address European greats as equals (I don't think I've been in Toronto long enough yet to want to declare him "world class").

The second thing these characters have in common is their professionalism. Tom manifests it in the most obvious ways; his demeanour is crisp, measured, but not unkind, a reflection of his military background, no doubt. He keeps his tools sharp and clean, and his work shed (a significant location in the book) meticulously organized. It rankles him that the Little Theatre's barely-competent stage manager, Major Larry Pye, wants to tear up his perfect lawn to accommodate elaborate lighting and electrical schemes, but he understands that it's his job to allow it, and even assist, so he determines that if it has to happen, he's going to lobby for it to happen in the least disruptive and most craftsman-like manner possible. This lobbying happens off-stage, so to speak, and is mostly implied, but Tom maintains an aura of dignified professionalism throughout the whole of Tempest-Tost. Valentine Rich's professionalism isn't about rigid organization or strict discipline; it's about people. She manages to put Larry Pye and Tom Gwalchmai both at ease within minutes of meeting them, but even more impressively, she pushes aside the ignorant, manipulative and often bizarre dramaturgical theories of Nellie Forrester, the Little Theatre's presiding matron and busiest of busibodies, without ever damaging the cohesion of the group or losing her self-control. Rich is completely unflappable, even taking over the role of Gonzalo when Hector Mackilwraith nearly brings down the play (more on poor Hector later). And then there's Humphrey Cobbler, who is not professional in an obvious sense. He's loud, obnoxious, and a tremendous trouble maker, but when it comes to his responsibilities as a professional musician, he is as rigid as he is impish in enforcing his standards. When he takes over as the Music Director for the Little Theatre's production, he finds that the job has been double booked. Solly, who has been tapped for the role of Assistant Director, is afraid of confrontation and tries to unload the duty of firing Mr. Snairey (an embarrassingly mercenary amateur) on Cobbler, who wants none of it. Cobbler is willing to work like a dog to make the music beautiful and appropriate; he will even do it for free. But he will not fire Snairey. The hiring and firing of old Music Directors is not the job of the new Music Director, and Cobbler will not budge an inch beyond the purview of his job. Interestingly, when it comes to choosing the music and preparing the musicians, Cobbler is fully invested in the spirit of the Little Theatre, but when he knows it will cause problems for Solly (or just as likely, given their later friendship, when it forces Solly to face his weaknesses and conquer them), he lives and dies by the letter of the law, so to speak.

The third and final trait shared by all of Davies' aristocrats is self-knowledge. Tom recognizes that his affection for Freddy Webster and her home made wine is as much a liability as it is a virtue, since it requires deceiving his employer. He feels guilty, and lets Freddy manipulate him knowing full well what's happening and why. Valentine Rich arrives in Salterton with her reputation as a huge success riding ahead of her through town on the fleetest of horses. It would have been easy (and stereotypical) for her ego to take over and for her to bite off far more than she can chew. Instead she recognizes what's necessary for the production, and what she's capable of handling on her own, so she delegates and trusts the competence of those she delegates to. She understands her own limits, and works within them to create the very best theatre experience she can. Cobbler is much the same, though the limits he acknowledges are not professional, but personal. He's a Puck, a Loki, a maker of merry mischief. But he's also aware that, while he can't let that side of himself run wild, neither can he keep it bottled up, lest it burst out with ruinous results. What he does instead is let the tap drip (to mix my metaphors), so that he can let enough pent up mischief out in minor ways so he won't ever cause serious trouble for the people he cares about.

Hector Mackilwraith is not one of Davies' élite (he lacks self-knowledge), but he is far and away the most important character in the complex ensemble piece that is Tempest-Tost, despite Solly Bridgetower being the superficially obvious choice for protagonist. He is in many ways the true Prospero of Tempest-Tost, Professor Vambrace's posturing aside. The details are handed out piecemeal and not in chronological order, but the story of Mackilwraith goes something like this: Hector had a difficult but not quite abusive childhood, but rose above it to become one of the Province's most promising young teachers, perhaps even to one day cut a figure from within the Ministry of Education itself. He is a talented mathematician and an almost obsessive practical logician, qualities that serve him well in his career. Unfortunately he makes a complete ass of himself at a social function after boasting that he would display his sexual prowess (in a way that's laughably innocent now, but would not have been then, given the comically vanilla circles he traveled in). It's his lack of experience, and his lack of self-knowledge (ie. that he doesn't understand just how important that lack of experience is) that causes his humiliation. Instead of becoming a shining light in the Ministry, Tempest-Tost opens with him as nearly absolute master of a much smaller domain: his mathematics class in Salterton. He likes to impress with complex mathematical games (the magic of Prospero), but otherwise seems known as a fusty disciplinarian with a certain wit, stern but not genuinely cruel. He actually reminds me of one of my high school math teachers. With so little now at stake in his daily life, he's become even more rigid in his adherence to the form of logic that he developed for himself in his youth. He draws up elaborate pro/con lists for every decision that is outside his nearly pathologically micromanaged routine.

When the Salterton Little Theatre decides to stage their production of The Tempest, it offers Mackilwraith a chance to move out of those rigid structures and into a more open and human space, a chance to join Davies' aristocracy, even though he's not yet capable of seeing it that way. What's going on in Hector's mind isn't nearly so grandiose. He's served the Little Theatre as an able (more than able) treasurer for a number of years, and now he feels like he deserves the opportunity to branch out into something more glamourous, hoping it will raise his stature in the eyes of his peers. Nellie Forrester, Professor Vambrace, and the rest of the cabal that runs the Little Theatre are very passive aggressive about discouraging him, but Valentine Rich overrules them. Hector performs well at his audition; he will have his chance to shine.

What follows, despite the banality of its details, is as profound a sexual awakening and crisis of faith as any other in Canadian literature. Where Hector's plan falls apart is essentially the same place it fell apart when he was still in Normal School training to be a teacher. He was completely unable to account for the reality of a flesh and blood woman. The woman in this case is Miss Griselda Webster, cast for the part of Ariel. Yes, Griselda. She's the chaste object of love and lust (Bonnie-Susan "The Torso" Tompkins is the unchaste one) for any number of Salterton's young men, including Solly Bridgetower and Roger Tasset, the only two young men of any real importance in the novel. Mackilwraith, thanks to his inexperience and the misdirected, overwrought tangle of emotions and neuroses that develop after a decades of loneliness, falls hopelessly in love with Griselda after she offers him the most casual of compliments. This makes him the rather awkward fourth party in a bizarre love trangle where none of the participants seem to have a clear picture of the situation. This would be comical (well, okay, sometimes it is) if it weren't so tragic. Mackilwraith has no meaningful way to deal with these emotions, and because he's suppressed them for so long they overwhelm him far more than they would have even during the onset of puberty. He can't cope—his performance as Gonzalo begins to suffer, and so do his duties in the classroom—so he turns to his list making mechanism to find a way out. And for the first time, it fails him. Pro or contra, there are some things that don't answer to the demands of logic, and we might all unravel before them.

And unravel Mackilwraith does. He begins to mistake her acquiescence to his (unlooked for, not really appreciated) solicitude during rehearsals as a sign that she returns his affection, though it must be said that he doesn't really understand that affection himself. He even throws his little lists out the window and tries to spend his savings on a gift for her at an auction, but he fails there too. It never even occurs to him that he should speak to her, one human being to another. At this point most men, having already learned how to deal with these emotions and these little humiliating failures when they were young, would have taken a good, hard look at themselves and seen the absurdity of their situation. They would have put a stop to things before "absurd" became "humiliating". Mackilwraith isn't possessed of that sort of self-knowledge, however. He only knows his pro/con tables and his rather fusty version of logic. He therefore decides his problem is that he hasn't gone far enough, and (through what passes for the underground in Salterton) he acquires an invitation to the June Ball given by the cadets at the local military college, the most important social event of the year. His hope is that he can somehow get the lovely young Griselda to take notice of him. His plan backfires in two unexpected ways. First, his unsuccessful effort at the auction has earned him a reputation as a man with a sharp eye for an investment, and he's celebrated by the biggest of wigs and the fattest of cats at the Ball, who insist on filling his glass and lighting his cigar the whole night through. He's the hit of the party, but Griselda doesn't notice him at all. He also sees Griselda and Roger having a discussion that he simply isn't equipped to understand, even if he could have heard it. During that discussion Roger kissed her twice, the second time entirely against her will. (That discussion contains one of my favourite Old Davies Sayings—aphorisms and clichés and bits of folk wisdom that he tosses out so deftly it can sometimes seem profoundly original—Griselda tells Roger, "Do you know what chastity is? Not the denial of passion, surely. Somebody wise—I forget who it was—said that chastity meant to have the body in the soul's keeping." I believe the "somebody" in this case is Wittgenstein, but don't quote me on that.) Hector, to use my preferred vernacular, loses his shit. Even if he had heard what was said between Roger and Griselda, he wouldn't understand that Roger's advances were unwanted, nor that Griselda could so quickly or ably take control of the situation. He certainly wouldn't understand her notion of chastity. All he saw was a girl he'd idealized—to the point of dehumanizing her—being corrupted, and his own cowardice, since he fled rather than intervening.

I think that all men go through something like this at least once in their lives. We fall in love, not with a woman, but with the idea of a woman that we project onto a real flesh and blood girl. It's usually our first love, or what we imagine to be our first love (I have my doubts that it's anything resembling genuine love), and if we're some combination of lucky and smart we're able to outgrow that kind of adolescent foolishness before we do any real harm to ourselves or others with it. Seeing too much of who our partners are can have equally deleterious effects, but that's an entirely different box of frogs. Mackilwraith didn't have anything that your or I (or even someone of his own generation) would recognize as a proper adolescent relationship or sexual awakening. For all intents and purposes his crush on Griselda is his first pseudo-love, and he's going to make all the mistakes, fall into all the emotional traps, that a young man would, except instead of the raw emotional power of youth, he has the full weight of decades spent in loneliness, isolation, and obsessive routine to throw behind them. Mackilwraith sinks into despair, and does something I think only the most jaded of us would fail to identify with; on the opening night of the Salterton Little Theatre's production of The Tempest, he tries to hang himself in Tom's garden shed. (It is, unsurprisingly, in stage-managing the aftermath of this event where Valentine Rich shows the true extent of her professionalism and her devotion to the stage.)

Mackilwraith's suicide attempt was as botched as his attempts at romance, but it was more a cry for help than an honest attempt to take his own life. He's placed in Griselda's bed, of all places, to recover, and she pays him a long-overdue visit. The two of them talk briefly about what Hector did, and about the feelings that he projected onto Griselda. It's probably the most tender moment in the novel, and Mackilwraith emerges from the other side not an entirely new man, and not quite a member of Davies' self-knowing aristocracy, but taking his first steps in that direction. The journey towards wholeness that Mackilwraith should have taken in his youth finally begins as the novel closes. I think it's hugely significant that, though Mackilwraith is never the obvious choice for protagonist, Davies makes his revelation the final word of Tempest-Tost and the last thing he wants the reader exposed to on their first trip to Salterton. Mackilwraith's awakening into self-knowledge epitomizes the first of the three elements at the core of Davies' "true" novels, and his ideas about how we use myth to construct our identities. I'll discuss the other two elements as they appear in the other two volumes of The Salterton Trilogy.

Tempest-Tost was my first selection for the Third Canadian Book Challenge. Next is Leaven of Malice, by Robertson Davies, the second volume in The Salterton Trilogy.

By now you'll have realized that I make even less of an effort to review these books by Eddings than even my normal sloppy ramblings would suggest. I think there's only so many ways you can say "this book was light and fun, and that's all I wanted from it in the first place." Things just don't go much deeper than that between me and Eddings. But right now I'd like to talk about the concept of race in fantasy and science fiction. It pisses me off. When a science fiction or fantasy author uses the word race, they almost never mean it in the way it's used in contemporary society. It doesn't refer to the artificial classifications we make based on things like skin colour, but is more a curious intersection of ethnicity, nationality, and species. I'm not entirely convinced that it's an Americanism, but it seems to show up in their work most often, and it always strikes me as antiquated and mildly offensive. Star Trek in particular uses it to mean "species", but also as a shorthand for personalities and character traits. It was drilled into us by my high school biology teacher that the term "race" was a pure social construct (I mean, duh, right?), and had no scientific legitimacy, leading to false ideas about homogeneous traits in highly varied populations and other, sometimes dangerous forms of sloppy thinking. Eddings seems to use it as a blend of ethnicity and nationality, and it makes me cringe a little every time I see it on the page. I don't for a minute believe that Eddings ever meant anything offensive or controversial or hateful or anything of that stripe by his use of the word (nor does it come across like he did), but I can't help but feel that it's a vestigial appendage left over from the days of pulp magazines and weekly serials at the cinema.

As far as plot goes, there's the journey to the dangerous place, the death of the beloved friend, and the destruction of (most) of the big bad enemies while a huge armed conflict distracts the armies of the adversary. Typical stuff, but great fun.

Next is Tempest-Tost, by Robertson Davies.

In the Belgariad, Eddings' system of magic was a kind of profoundly American entrepreneurial system, dependent entirely upon the an individual's strength of will. Education had a certain impact, but largely what mattered was the individual's ability to impose their own desires on the shape of the world. Magic in the Elenium, by contrast requires that a person not only have a great deal of education, but also that they humble themselves before a power greater than themselves, that they ask permission to borrow some of that power for themselves. I think this is tied to the greater political complexity of the world Eddings has created. In the Belgariad, the political system was a simple, two-sided affair of might against might, good against evil. Even political power in that world was a matter of leaders on one side or the other exercising their will. In the world of the Elenium, political and religious power is contingent on deals and maneuvers and compromises. It makes sense that the other major system of power in the world would function in a similar way. Beyond that, it may be a sign of a maturing author.

The plot continues apace, with monsters and knights in armour (including some jousts!), and in the end, the queen imprisoned in the crystal throne is restored to her full health an beauty by the Bhelliom, only to trap our heroic knight into marriage. Our heroes must now move into enemy territory and destroy the evil god of the enemy race.

Next is the final book in the Elenium series, The Sapphire Rose, by David Eddings.

We're all familiar with the concept of comfort foods, things we eat when we're feeling anxious or depressed. Familiar things that help us feel better in the short term. True Scotsmen, er, I mean, hardcore readers are also familiar with comfort books. They aren't brought out just to lift our spirits in times of depression, but they can do that too. I may have mentioned this before, but David Eddings' books are comfort books for me. I've loved them since I was a kid, though now that I'm older they're just adventurey sort of fun. Now I'm sure I've told this story before. Eddings was pretty clear that he wrote for money, and there's no literary pretensions anywhere in his work. Still and all, if his books were even half as much fun to write as they are to read, he had one hell of a good time making that money. Most Eddings fans will tell you that his first high fantasy epic, the Belgariad, is their favourite, but I much prefer the Elenium, of which The Diamond Throne is the first volume.

There's a lot of your typical high fantasy flotsam and jetsam in the Elenium. There's a beautiful young queen who fell ill and was encased in crystal by a magic spell (that's the titular diamond throne), a heroic knight, and a powerful magic MacGuffin called the Bhelliom. Seen in those broad strokes, there's not that much to get excited about, but those don't really have much to do with why I love this series. The Belgariad has its own grand pantheon of gods and goddesses, but it never dealt with organized religion in any serious way. In the Elenium, Eddings does what I think is one of the most clever things I've ever read in a fantasy book (I'm not saying he's the originator of the concept in fantasy ficiton, only that he's the only author I've seen who's used it). He takes the concept of cloistered orders and combines it with concept of crusading defenders of the faith to create militant orders, their purpose being to defend the Church from worldly threats. Eddings drops these militant orders into a world not just full of magic and mysticism, but also full of political and religious intrigue. There's a few too many echoes of the Belgariad floating around in the world, but I think Eddings succeeds in building his strongest, most realistically complex society in the Elenium.

For those of you that want to hear about plot, I can tell you that The Diamond Throne opens with my favourite scene in all of Eddings' work. An exiled Pandion knight, Sir Sparhawk, returns on a dreary, rainy evening to the city of his birth in response to his queen's summons, to serve as her champion. Sparhawk reunites with some companions, learns that the queen has been poisoned and encased in crystal to prolong her life, and discovers that her poisoning is part of a plot to steal her throne (as well as part of a pseudo-Satanic religious plot). Knights from the various militant orders band together with a variety of other plucky adventurers to ride out into the world and find a way to cure the ailing queen and restore her to her throne. And stuff. My advice is to seriously not be a genre snob and just chill out with a book that's a shitload of fun.

Next is The Ruby Knight, by David Eddings.

Like Polar, True Cross features one of the main characters from the earlier Pearson novel, Blue Ridge. This time it's Ray Tatum's big-city cousin Paul, who also serves as narrator. Like his cousin Ray, Paul is generally a bit smarter and more sensible than the people around him, or at least he thinks he is, but unlike his cousin, he's a bit of an asshole. He's involved in an unfulfilling relationship with a woman he quite clearly loathes, and he abandons his dog on the big city streets because they fail to make an emotional connection. Paul's greatest skill, both in life and as a narrator, lies in justifying the often selfish and hurtful things he does. Blue Ridge, the novel Paul first appeared in, is Pearson's own version of a detective novel, but unlike in Polar, the earlier follow-up/sequel, Pearson doesn't even make token gestures toward the mystery/crime/detective/whatever genre. True Cross is mostly about satirizing small town Southern folk (though like most good satire it never quite graduates to out and out cruelty) and doesn't have a plot so much as a series of barely connected ramblings about the colourful locals.

The closest thing True Cross has to a centre is Paul's obsession with "that Hooper", which dovetails nicely with his neighbour Stoney's obsession with a painting called "St. George and the Dragon", by Vittore Carpaccio. Old George, it turns out, is the very spirit and image of Stoney. Paul manipulates Stoney's obsession with Saint George in order to feed his own obession with that Hooper ("that Hooper" is an exceptionally attractive local woman, married to an exceptional jackass—one can't help but be reminded of the Hot Chicks with Douchebags phenomenon), the end result being a far, far bigger twist than anything I though Pearson could have in him. Despite Pearson's excellent prose and exceptional eye for detail, much of the book is repetitive and a touch dull. The shocking conclusion, however, is more than worth the price of admission.

Next is The Diamond Throne, by David Eddings.

Last year I read a really excellent book called Blue Ridge that featured the kind of slow burn lore and quasi-biblical rhythms of the best Southern literature blended with a dash of down-homey humour and hung on a couple of murder mysteries. I felt like I'd found, in T.R. Pearson, a writer who could merge genres and temper the serious with the comic to avoid the sombre. As it happens, I was only partly right. Blue Ridge did indeed show that Pearson is capable of all those things, but I've since learned that it was the exception rather than the rule. Pearson, it seems, leans more in the direction of the yokelisms than the Southern gothic or the murder mystery, and Polar featured far more of that sort of thing than I was in the market for. It does feature Ray Tatum, my favourite character from Blue Ridge and still my favourite Pearson character overall.

Most of Polar focuses on a character named Clayton, who is a none too discerning pornography enthusiast and local layabout. He tends to involve himself in and create a certain amount of mild local mischief until one day in line at the grocery store something inside him snaps and he turns into a kind of backwoods clairvoyant. His statements are not much less cryptic than those of Nostradamus, though they tend to resolve themselves with something that resembles immediacy. So much time is spent poking not so gentle fun at this hideous porn-loving man-ape that the mystery supposedly at the core of the book, about the disappearance of a little girl in the woods, goes largely neglected. When Pearson does bother with that story, it's mostly to satirize the media-related ambitions of the missing girl's mother. When the case is finally resolved (in its way), it is incredibly anti-climactic, and there's far more important and emotionally significant events yet to come. While Blue Ridge seemed like a genuine effort to engage with crime drama, Polar seems more like an excuse to revisit popular characters in that author's more accustomed mode. The book was by no means bad, but it wasn't at all what I expected, and I came away more than a little unsatisfied.

Next is T.R. Pearson's True Cross.

This review will be rather quick and dirty, I'm afraid. Like with Farewell, My Lovely, I tore through this book in a single sitting. Given that Chandler is considered (to the best of my knowledge, anyway) to be one of the founders of the modern detective story, a genre known to laypersons like myself for sometimes elaborate but always tightly organized, clockwork-like plots, The High Window has a very organic, almost lop-sided plot. There were times when I had trouble following this book, despite Chandler projecting some pretty clear signals about which things were important and which things weren't.

In noir films, the women are always some manner of gorgeous, be they smoldering or flouncy or girl next door-ish, but not so in Chandler's novels, and it was only while reading The High Window that I actually noticed. The women aren't usually described as unattractive (and they're usually far more realistic than the women of, say, Ian Fleming's novels), but they're what would be called "striking" if the conversation were about Hollywood starlets, the word being code for women who are considered beautiful except for a single feature not usually considered attractive. The High Window doesn't exactly swarm with such women, but it certainly has its fair share.

I'll try for something a little more in-depth with my next piece on Chandler (I'm pretty sure I've got all his books now, so there will be more coming before the end of the year). Next is Polar, by T.R. Pearson.

There were two things that brought me to Raymond Chandler. The first was reading the lyrics to Robyn Hitchcock's "A Raymond Chandler Evening" in James O'Barr's graphic novel The Crow when I was in high school. I still haven't hear the song, but the lyrics are smooth and hypnotic, yet evoking a dark, very physical world with the threat of violence lingering just outside one's field of vision. It's the kind of teasing introduction that you'd think an author would have a hard time living up to. (You'd think.) The second thing is when I read an essay or interview or something by an author (and I have this horrible, guilty suspicion that it was Margaret Atwood, though it seems unlikely that she would stoop to reading genre fiction) in which she went on and on about how Chandler wrote about furniture with exceptional ability. That's more a writerly comment than a readerly one, but it got my attention. I may have told that story before.

Farewell, My Lovely was my second Chandler mystery, and it was just as mind-blowing as the first. Chandler is giving me flashbacks to my first Ian Fleming experience, really, in terms of resetting the bar on what I expect from genre fiction (that would be by raising it, of course). I'm continually surprised by how different Chandler's Los Angeles is from the image that's formed in my head from television and movies. (It does bear a striking resemblance to Michael Mann's LA.) I'm even more surprised by how violent a place it is. There's two competing notions of the past at work in that surprise. First there's the gangster mythos that has built up over the years about the period between the wars, a lashing, thrashing picture of America's major cities as combat zones where corrupt cops and wealthy bootleggers gun each other down in the streets. Second, there's the fairy tale fed to us by men and women of an older generation about how "in the old days" people were kinder, gentler, never cursed, and wouldn't even think about having sex before marriage. The truth of the matter is most likely somewhere in the middle, but it's always the more directly reinforced "home sweet home" version of events that seems to stick.

There's other things that struck me as strange. The character of Lindsay Marriott, who is intended to be a handsome, dashing ladies' man, by modern standards would be flagged as flamboyantly gay from over a hundred paces. He could be a prototype for Liberace, or an unsophisticated acolyte of Oscar Wilde. I hate to dwell on this, but it was striking. I'm tempted to think that Chandler modeled Marriott after a closeted man (or several), but given the period, didn't understand (or perhaps more likely, didn't acknowledge) what he was seeing.

I know I'm focusing too much on the differences between the context Chandler wrote in and my context as a reader, but to be honest I still don't feel like I know the genre well enough to write an intelligent, informed review based on both the quality of the writing and conventions of the genre. I hope I'll get there eventually.

Next is The High Window, by Raymond Chandler.

Regular readers, if I have any left after my ridiculously long hiatus, will remember that at the beginning of June I attended the Toronto launch of Terry Griggs' Thought You Were Dead. I began reading it on the subway home that evening, though I admit that Grigg's dense prose was difficult to concentrate on against the noise and crowd of the train. Griggs' novel has been called both a detective story and a satire of a detective story, though strictly speaking, I don't think it's either. It follows a path similar to the standard detective novel, in which the natural/social order is violently disrupted, and a character who is an outcast or otherwise on the fringes of society must solve puzzles and overcome other obstacles to reassert that order. In most of the detective fiction I've read, this path is ususally a tragic one, but Griggs doesn't seem built that way. Thought You Were Dead is definitely in the comic tradition. I've lately been thinking that detective fiction might exist in some middle space between tragedy and comedy, since it offers neither the optimism of something like Much Ado About Nothing nor the complete apocalyptic reboot of the full Macbeth. (I know tragedy and comedy are broader than that, but I'm with Harold Bloom in believing that there's no aspect of the human condition you can explore that Shakespeare didn't get to first.)

Anyway, Thought You Were Dead isn't really a detective novel. The death that opens the book isn't really the driving force of the narrative (it drives chunks of the plot, but the plot itself is more a vehicle for gentle satire and character development than being the backbone of the novel as it would be in a pure detective story), and indeed it's forgotten about for much of the book. Instead Griggs gives us a (startlingly accurate, at least given my own experiences) dissection of a broken man's relationship with women, and in particular with the woman who did the bulk of the breaking. I was quite impressed by how well drawn Chellis Beith is; I often get a bit twitchy when I read novels by women that feature male protagonists (I read Larry's Party and was left to wonder what Larry was, as he was certainly not anything I would recognize as a man), no doubt the same sort of twitchy some female readers may get when they read novels written by men with female protagonists. My only real complaint with how Griggs handles the characters is with Elaine Champion's vanilla-pudding of a husband, whose name I can't even begin to recall and am too lazy to look up. Like the husband in Sarah Dearing's Courage My Love, whose name I am equally incapable of remembering, Elaine's beau is a prop, a marionette performing a necessary narrative function, and nothing more. I sometimes think that when a writer is setting up a relationship as a roadblock for their protagonist, a pairing that is supposed to appear wrong in the eyes of the reader, they go overboard, making the relationship too poor a match, and I'm left wondering how they managed to get to the point of exchanging vows, never mind making a life afterward. (Julian Barnes' Talking it Over and Love, Etc. are almost the only two novels I've read that pull off that kind of relationship with any believabilty.) I can be thrown out of the world of the novel by watching those puppets bump up against the "real" characters. Griggs' prose is so—I want to say self-conscious, but that's obviously not correct—so packed with metaphors and puns and linguistic gamesmanship that full immersion is often not really possible. In fact it can sometimes be a little overwhelming, but to Griggs' credit, she was always able to ratchet it down enough at the right moments so that I never quite lost my emotional connection with the characters. Griggs' voice is incredibly distinct, and while I had a good time with Thought You Were Dead, I think it fits her short fiction better.

Another thing that places Thought You Were Dead closer to the category of comic novel than traditional detective story is the lack of emphasis on work. Nearly every single work of crime/detective fiction I've read (and indeed, even the non-fiction) has focused almost obsessively on people at work. Nearly all of Griggs' characters have jobs that allow them to work strange hours, in strange places, or often skip work altogether for long periods. This allows otherwise functional adults to be at home in the middle of the afternoon or skulking about aimlessly at ten in the morning, and is a pretty common trope for literary novels, but not at all in keeping with the detective tradition, where the protagonist is on the job for virtually every minute of the story, from beginning to end. The detective story is perhaps the last and truest place to find the working man (or woman) in contemporary literature.

I had hoped to say more about comic novels and some interesting parallels that I see between Chellis Beith and David Duchovny's Hank Moody on Californication, but I'm afraid that I ran out of time more than an hour ago, and am far enough behind schedule as it is, with at least ten more reviews to go before I'm caught up. Next up is Farewell, My Lovely, by Raymond Chandler.

A co-worker saw me reading Bad Behavior during my downtime at work, and asked what it was like. My response to that question is still the most apt summation of this book that I can think of: delightfully fucked up. I found Gaitskill by way of Mr. Beattie's series of posts on short fiction last summer. I don't remember a thing about what he wrote, or even what story it was (something out of Because They Wanted To maybe), but I do remember being intrigued. And when I found out that Gaitskill had written the short story that was the basis for Secretary, one of my favourite films, that clinched things for me. I'm now the proud owner three Gaitskill books, and I chose this one to start with because it has "Secretary" in it. I've since come across this interview from The Believer in which Sheila Heti (one of my favourite Canadian authors, but now most often found in the quasi-journalist role of snark-free interviewer for The Believer) asks some excellent questions, but reveals that she rather spectacularly misunderstood the film adaptation. Heti claims that, thanks to Steven Shainberg's remarkably sweet and sexy film, "[Gaitskill's] name now conjures up images of degrading, sexy sadomasochism and female weakness." Female weakness? Degradation? Really? Was the normally eagle-eyed, sharp-witted Heti completely fucking high when she screened the film? That comment is nothing but surface. The film adaptation (which has little in common with the story on which it's based) is about discovering the tenderness, connectedness and freedom in the extremes of human behaviour. It's also about self-knowledge and self-determination, but those are the kinds of things that can be easy to ignore if all you're interested in is trying to find something bad to say about Maggie Gyllenhaal on all fours with a saddle on her back and a carrot in her mouth. But to be honest I've been less and less impressed with Ms. Heti since, in a December 2007 Believer interview with Dave Hickey, she commented that "it seems so tiresome to make up a fake person and put them through the paces of a fake story." What a ringing endorsement of fiction from one of our nation's most praised young authors.

So: delightfully fucked up. Each of these stories explores an unconventional, dysfunctional relationship, usually where at least one of the people involved is completely unaware of the dysfunction. There's a lot in these stories that could be called shocking as well, and was probably included for that reason (though not, I think, for the sensational sort of shocking they might appear to be on the surface). There's a lot of unorthodox sex in the book (sadomasochism, bondage, dominance, prostitution, humiliation—the one lesbian relationship in the collection is likely the healthiest, but is placed, it seems to me, on par with the other sexual practices I've mentioned as a kind of shock to the reader's notions of normality, the fact of the homosexual relationship being less dysfunctional than all the others I mean. The strategy was probably pretty effective in the 1980s, given how the media of the time handled issues of homosexuality, but it seems like just another relationship, reading it today). Bad Behavior is, in any event, an apt title for the book, since nearly every one of Gaitskill's characters is a horrible, horrible person in one way or another. Normally this is the point at which I'd say that it makes them all the more achingly human, or something along those lines, but frankly I'm rather sick of the idea that giving reign to our basest impulses is somehow the most honest expression of our humanity. It might be because (being a dozen reviews behind) I'm on to Robertson Davies' more morally optimistic work, and it might be because the fact that my last girlfriend left me after almost three years of intense, on-again/off-again romance so she could fuck a doctor for his money has left me more than a little tired of justifications. So if all this horribleness doesn't make them all the more real or whatever, what does it make them? Really interesting to read about, even when they're doing not much of anything at all. ("Heaven" is the most likely candidate for a story in which the characters do not much of anything, and it's also the most straightforward and traditional, presenting a pretty clear contrast between middle class expectations and real-world outcomes.)

To be clear, I'm not accusing Gaitskill of cheap theatrics or moral sloppiness. The stories in Bad Behavior display nothing of the sort. She's quite clearly not only a keen observer of human behaviour, she's also a keen reporter of it. (Only a handful of clichés were harmed in the writing of this review, but nobody liked them anyway.) Gaitskill's stories are sharp, direct, disturbingly sexy, and show an interest in ambiguity and inquiry rather than proscription or justification. The bottom line is that I enjoyed the book, but it was so intense that I'm going to have to ration the others. I don't know that I could cope with reading them all in a row.

Next up is Thought You Were Dead, by Terry Griggs.