Reading Daemon, one can’t help but compare it to William Gibson’s Neuromancer, perhaps because both deal with rogue artificial intelligences (AI) and can probably be considered science fiction. If I sound a bit tentative about that, it’s because, while Neuromancer neatly fits the mold, set in a time at least some distance from now and featuring all kinds of technology that we don’t have yet, most of the technology in Daemon exists today, and the time setting could be tomorrow or the day after. One is almost tempted to invent a new category for it — technosocial fiction, perhaps.

Prior to reading Daemon, I was among those who regarded Gibson as something of a visionary for the world he created in Neuromancer, but now it almost seems like a fanciful fairytale. This is not to say that Daemon is necessarily more prophetic. A part of me hopes it isn’t. Another hopes that it is.

You might be thinking that given the lack of progress in AI research, any story featuring it might properly be regarded as a fairytale. That’s where Suarez’s genius comes to the fore. True, actual, full fledged AI is still something of a grail, but pseudo-AI, or limited AI, or narrow AI — whatever you want to call what game designers use to get non-player characters in video games to behave in more devious, more human ways — that exists today.

What if a brilliant game designer, an absolute Einstein of the genre, wrote a distributed application that lived “out there” on people’s computers, on company servers, or anywhere a flaw or security hole could let in a worm? And what if this application (or daemon, a term used in UNIX circles for an application that runs in the background doing things unattended) possessed narrow AI of the highest sophistication, the brilliant game designer’s masterwork?

Initially the daemon bides its time, monitoring rss feeds, waiting for news of the death of its creator from brain cancer to start it on its path towards . . . but that would be giving away too much, and, indeed, is part of the fun of the book. Just what is this daemon doing, and what does it want anyway, to whatever extent non-intelligent, narrow AI can be said to “want” anything?

If this was purely a super-technology driven novel, it would fail to live up to its potential, or to the challenge that Suarez seems to have set himself, which appears to be to create and empower his daemon only with technology as it exists today. In fiction, a super bad AI could crack any encryption and do all sorts of unlikely things just because it’s so powerful and the plot requires it. But today’s encryption and security measures as employed by large financial institutions (heck, as employed by your web browser when you visit a secure site) would be beyond Suarez’s daemon. Much of the digital world would be closed or else very hard to crack, aside from some low hanging fruit. (One is astonished sometimes by security lapses committed by institutions which should know better.) There is no Gibsonian cyberspace in this fictive world which can be jacked into and manipulated in some not well defined but science-fictiony way.

Fortunately for the story, Suarez understands that the greatest threat to security is human beings. And in his fictive world (as in our real one) there are plenty of young, smart people — gamers, IT workers, electrical engineers, and so on — many feeling under-appreciated within government and corporations, feeling exploited and alienated in their basement server rooms from the rest of the organization, especially those on the highest floors. And there are plenty of this same type of person unemployed, laid off, out of work, and looking for money. For a smart AI in a networked world, procuring a virtually limitless payroll is no problem. I won’t spoil it with detail, but if you accept the premise of the daemon’s sophistication, its initial moves to acquire wealth are completely plausible.

The element of recruiting young, bright people who feel apart from the mainstream, who take refuge in computer games in virtual worlds the daemon is even more at home in than they, elevates the theme from simply technology gone amok to a kind of class warfare. It is at this level as well that one begins to question who really is the bad guy — the daemon which appears to be a major threat to the corporatist establishment, or that establishment itself? Both are cruel. Only one is fat, complacent, and much, much more vulnerable than its masters ever imagined.

This is a novel which doesn’t contain any characters who are “nice.” They seem to run the range from murderously psychopathic to, at best, people whose moral core is sound, but whose lives don’t always make having a moral core particularly comfortable. Nonetheless, there are protagonists one feels for. I wouldn’t say that character is Suarez’s greatest strength as a writer, but I’ve read far worse by much more famous scifi authors. And there are a lot of characters in this book, the story flicking back and forth between them. They are a colorful enough rogues gallery, though, that when the story shifts it isn’t difficult to go along with it.

I give Daemon four stars out of five for being a brilliantly conceived, if not perfectly executed first novel. (Parts near the end drop down to a more “hope they make an action/adventure film out this” level.) It is speculative fiction, but the speculation is so well founded in the world as it exists now — technologically, socially, economically, politically — that it does almost read as prophecy. The chief thing to tell oneself, if one doesn’t care for the prophecy, is that no one could be smart enough to create a narrow AI that sophisticated. Because if such a thing were possible, if such a distributed daemon could be written for a wired world full of brilliant disenfranchised young people fully prepared to follow a dead guy’s virtual ghost who not only understands their world but is a product of it . . . well, there might be some changes around here.

Daemon is a rollicking good, action packed story that respects your intelligence most of the time. A real treat, I highly recommend it.

Published by Dutton. Hardcover $26.95 (US), paperback $9.99, ebook 8.99

Diana Gabaldon either needs to stop writing such effortlessly good historical fiction, or she needs to keep her ignorant viewpoints on fan fiction to herself, because I am having trouble reconciling my shameless adoration of her Outlander series with my urge to kill her blog with fire.

Ditto goes for George Double-R Martin, whose Song of Ice and Fire series I love with unfettered (now somewhat fettered) glee, and whose screed against fan fiction is less inflammatory than Gabaldon’s but who still uses dubious bogeymen to assert that fanfic = author-poison.  Gabaldon has since called off her anger monkeys and removed her post (and subsequent posts [and predictable onslaught of furious comments]), opting instead for a a Pleez Don’ Fan My Fic policy on her official site.   Martin has let his stand.

Leaving aside as unworthy of comment Gabaldon’s sweeping blanket descriptions of fanfic as porny (it’s as porny as the internet, which is to say, a lot but not entirely and with much else to recommend it), DGal’s, GRRRRRRM’s, and any other author’s repeated cries that It Mustn’t Be Done are like so much shouting into a hurricane.   The internet is an inexorable sandbox, and everyone has a play space.  Insisting people shouldn’t write fanfic is like insisting 16-year olds shouldn’t stage renditions of If You Wanna Be My Lover in their cousin’s backyard (say).  Ees gonna happen.

But just because it’s doomed to happen doesn’t mean we need to quietly accept it, you say?  Isn’t there valor in fighting a righteous but losing battle?  Mayhaps.  But it is only so much wasted energy when your enemy hurts exactly no one, especially not the authors whose work they are advertising for free.  Fanfiction does not dent sales the way a cheap ereader might make me think twice about a Kindle (I’m a-lookin’ at you, Kobo); there’s no way reading Jamie and Claire go to Mars is going to make me pass up on Outlander: Original Sauce.

Because sometimes, yes, fanfic gets published and people make teh moneys.  Blogger Aja Romano has compiled a list of literary and filmic works that rip off other works, to greater or lesser (but mostly acclaimed) success, among them Geraldine Brooks’ March which fanfics off of Little Women, and the no-end-in-sight collection of ‘Jane Austen meets gimmicky monster’ novels.  But who’s going to read March who hasn’t already read Little Women?  Contrariwise, how many people now have increased sense and sensibility, due to the application of a few sea monsters?

There are obviously more legal snakes on this plane than addressable here, but one of the more harped-on frights is that if an author cops to being aware of fan pieces, said author ostensibly loses the ability to later fight those pieces.  Author Catherynne M. Valente, who sees fanfic as the sincerest form of flattery, offers an absurdly basic solution to this problem: don’t read them.  Ignorance is bliss, both rhetorically and legally.

It may be worth noting at this point that both Gabaldon and Martin take a heinous long time between books and may be suffering from Absent Boyfriend Syndrome (in this metaphor, Fanfic becomes the gentleman of dubious but available quality who moves in on the forlorn and abandoned fan).  In which case, relax, my darlings.  Fanfiction and I were just making out a little, while I waited for you to stop embarrassing me like this.

Books are shit nowadays, and I blame you. 

You may not have made the book deal with “Jersey Shore”’s bronzed illiterates Ronnie and J-Woww (I wish that was a typo), but you will probably read it.  And even if you bypass what is sure to be the most gloriously misspelled Gym-Tan-Laundry manifesto, you watch the show.  And if you don’t watch “Jersey Shore” then you watch “The Hills,” which makes you directly responsible both for Lauren Conrad’s fame and her New York Times bestseller L.A. Candy.  (It also makes you responsible for Speidi, but I think we all have to take the hit on that one.)

And, fine, if both these shows fall out of your sphere of influence, then you at least know who Paris Hilton is, and, since her erstwhile fame rested solely on people knowing who she is, and her 2004 bestseller Confessions of an Heiress relied solely on that fame, you share the blame for that, too.

This is not a new infection, this shilling book deals to anyone with a known face, and it makes fiscal sense.  “Jersey Shore” already has an audience, and even if half of that audience (ostensibly) watches the show ironically, they will probably buy the book ironically too.  But e-books and the internet have already bitten a hunk out of the publishing industry, and it is bleeding out.  Fewer and fewer book contracts are being given out each year, and the more of them that go to People Whose Names Your 11-Year-Old Niece Knows, the fewer there will be for People Who Can Write Worth A Damn.

So I’m throwing down a gauntlet: put away the hard-covered fame-whoring.  I can’t not know who these people are, and I have no problem with watching deliciously trashy TV, but I won’t reward them for scribbling rubbish just because they can.  I don’t want to wake up in a world where Never Fall In Love At the Jersey Shore wins the Booker because there wasn’t enough space for Wolf Hall to exist.

Review by Brian Brennan

Frank Molnar, Jack Hardman, and LeRoy Jensen were three dedicated and unfashionably tradition-based Vancouver artists of the 1960s who today are largely forgotten. Because they operated outside the confines of the exclusionary and restrictive Vancouver art establishment, their contributions are known only to a handful of collectors, fellow artists, and former students. However, thanks to the efforts of a gutsy little Salt Spring Island press, Mother Tongue Publishing, the three are now getting the broader public recognition they deserve. They are the featured subjects of the second book in a brave new series titled The Unheralded Artists of BC.

I say brave because the publishers, Salt Spring Island poet Mona Fertig and her printmaker husband, Peter Haase, gambled on launching their own trade publishing enterprise when they couldn’t find a British Columbia publisher willing to take on the series. Forgotten artists, it seems, don’t sell as well as roguish ex-politicians or sexually abused hockey players.

But how good were Molnar, Hardman and Jensen? That hardly matters. The point, as Lions Bay man-about-the-arts Max Wyman notes in his introduction, is that “we now have a clearer idea of what was going on in our small corner of the world of art than we had before.” When the trendy American-influenced abstractionists like Jack Shadbolt, Gordon Smith, and Peter Aspell were getting all the public attention and the big commissions, the European-influenced representationalists and expressionists like Molnar, Hardman, and Jensen were quietly writing their own chapters into the history of art in British Columbia.

Molnar, born in Hungary and trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, never gained acceptance in Vancouver because he dared to paint nudes with pubic hair showing. He refused to create works for commercial gallery owners who wanted landscapes, trees, and lakes, and he refused to produce canvases to match the sofas and drapes of would-be art buyers. Shut out of the major galleries, suspicious of art dealers, and unable to make a living from his art, Molnar taught art for 30 years at North Vancouver’s Capilano College (now University). Today, at age 73, he shows his work by appointment only at his home in Point Grey.

Hardman was a largely self-trained sculptor and printmaker from New Westminster who taught art in London for a couple of years during the 1950s, then returned to Canada to establish himself in Burnaby, first as a high school art teacher and later as director of the Burnaby Art Gallery. When his terra cotta sculptures were first featured in group shows in Vancouver and Toronto, Hardman told reporters that teaching was his hobby and sculpting his profession. However, because his occasionally figurative work ran counter to the prevailing abstract styles, he was marginalized. Feeling neglected and unappreciated, he destroyed two of his large sculptures in 1969. Forty years later, he was finally recognized, posthumously, with a retrospective of his prints at the Burnaby Art Gallery.

Jensen, born in Vancouver and trained as a painter in Copenhagen and Paris, found it impossible to break into the cliquish art scene when he returned to Vancouver in 1955. Like his fellow outsiders Molnar and Hardman, Jensen too found his niche as an art teacher, most notably at the revolutionary Vancouver Free University. Through his association with other radicals at this now-defunct institution, Jensen eventually became one of the first members of Greenpeace, sailing to Alaska in 1971 in a converted mine sweeper in a futile attempt to stop the United States from conducting underground nuclear tests at Amchitka Island. Jensen spent the last two decades of his life on Salt Spring Island, where he painted while exhibiting his work at galleries in Victoria and Nanaimo.

The best feature of this book is the artwork. Photographers Janet Dwyer, Ingeborg Hardman, Dan Fairchild, and Ernest Vegt have done an excellent job of capturing the artists’ work on camera, and the reproduction quality is second to none. So too is the design work by Jan Westendorp and Mark Hand. This really should be a hardcover coffee table book to do full justice to the photography and design, but I suspect that would incur an unrecoverable expense for the publishers.

Less satisfying is the accompanying text. While authors Eve Lazarus, Claudia Cornwall, and Wendy Newbold Patterson have done a good job of researching the stories of their individual subjects, the storytelling lacks energy, coherence, style, and flow. It feels as if some paragraphs were deleted from a longer original text for space reasons, and that other paragraphs were moved around to fit with the book’s design concept. The end result reads more like a product of expedient editing and restructuring than a work of creative literary endeavour.

That quibble aside, I recommend this book as required reading for curators, collectors, critics, art history enthusiasts, and others interested in knowing what was happening in the rest of the West Coast art scene when all the attention was being given to the teachers and students at the Vancouver School of Art, and to the local artists whose works were being exhibited at and acquired by the Vancouver Art Gallery. Molnar, Hardman, and Jensen were quickly consigned to the scrapheap of art history before a serious evaluation of their work could take place. Now, as Wyman says, it’s time for attention to be paid.

Author Brian Brennan has published numerous biographical profiles of West Coast artists, including Gathie Falk, Joe Plaskett and Takao Tanabe.

In our last episode, I said I’d tell you what I found out about why my review of What the Furies Bring disappeared from The National Post website a day after being put up. My little investigation provides a tonic insight into what happens when journalists find themselves on the receiving end of an interview.

First, I phoned up Mark Medley, co-editor of the Post’s online books section. Medley had earlier e-mailed me that he was looking into the matter. Now that I was calling as a reporter, though, he didn’t want to say what he’d found out. Hm.

So then I phoned up Duncan Clark, “Executive Editor, Digital.” If anyone would know why an article went poof on the Post’s website, it’d be the Executive Editor, Digital, right? But Mr. Clark said he knew nothing of the matter and that he’d pass my number on to those who might. Something told me, however, that I wouldn’t be getting a call back from those who might.

So then I called up a third individual who, it turned out, did know what had happened but would only tell me off the record. So, of course, I can’t tell you what this individual said. I will say, though, that my prognostication skills, as demonstrated in that previous post, are pretty damn good.

You have to wonder what it is about 9/11 that puts the Post into such a dither. I have previously written about the inertia that keeps newsrooms firmly locked in groupthink. And yet all over the world, millions of people are now speculating about what really led to that day, and what really happened. And not just on internet fringe sites, but increasingly in the mainstream press and TV (see here and here and here and here), and in academic articles such as the one I cited. Truthiness isn’t just for Truthers anymore.

For the Post, however, the matter must remain fixed and dry, because . . . because why? Because otherwise it might have to look into the matter? Because corporations dislike uncertainty? Because they’ve been told to toe the line? Because other newspaper people might laugh at them?

Of course, the Post might say that they simply have high standards for certitude. According to that scholarly article, there’s only a 1% chance that the sort of extraordinary stock trading that went on prior to 9/11 could have occurred randomly. But hey, 1% is 1%. “Beyond reasonable doubt” may be good enough for the court system, but not for the Post! Mind you, this is a paper that regularly publishes articles sceptical of global warming, also in the face of official explanations, and based on quite a bit less evidence than I can offer about those stock trades. But ya choose yer conspiracy theories. And besides, most of those were opinion pieces.

Oh, wait, so was mine.

And that’s what really makes what the Post did scuzzy, not to mention a bit dumb. The books section of a newspaper has traditionally been the place for a trade in ideas — ideas that originate between covers, and ideas that are offered in response. It is not just a place to remark on prose styles; it is, much of the time, a place for debate. Or should be. The appropriate response to my piece, from both a journalistic and business point-of-view, would have been to leave it on the site and let the festivities begin. Let some readers damn me, let others comment in support — think of all those page views! Let its columnists go after me, run an op-ed dissociating itself; whatever. The Books section would never have been livelier.

Instead, it chose the Delete key. If this is the way the Post intends to toddle into the prismatic future created by the internet, in which there is no one “truth,” and control of information is an anachronism, it truly is doomed, and deserves to be.

I knew when I submitted my last book review to The National Post that it might not be published. What I didn’t expect was that the Post would publish it, and then unpublish it.

The review was of a book of essays, What the Furies Bring, by Canadian poet Kenneth Sherman. Doesn’t sound like hot-button material, you say? Well, Sherman has pegged his book to 9/11, and that, of course, remains combustible — especially if you are of the opinion that the official explanation for the events of that day remains, er, incomplete.

The Post put my review on its website at 7:30 pm on December 18th. Of course, it might have been something less sensitive that caused them to remove it sometime the next day. Sherman’s book is mostly about literature, and hence my review was too. Maybe some Mallermé-lover on staff didn’t like the fact that the book is cool towards the poet and thought, “I’m not putting up with this aesthete-bashing any longer!” But somehow I don’t think so.

No, I expect what caused someone to press the delete button were these two paragraphs:

His reading of 9/11 itself, however, is thoroughly conventional. In “Amis’s Atta” he deals with the British writer’s collection of short stories and essays The Second Plane: September 11: Terror and Boredom. Amis portrays Muhammad Atta, who, we are told, flew American Airlines Flight 11 into the North Tower of the World Trade Centre, as a death-bent fanatic, and Sherman is happy to echo him. “After all,” Sherman writes, “those sons of militant Islam who crashed the twin towers were operating from a skewed sense of manhood, and their morality was topsy-turvy: Death is good; Life (World/Manhattan) is evil.”

The problem with received wisdom, though, is that it is sometimes wrong, or premature, or incomplete. Psychoanalyzing the hijackers without also assaying those who had sufficient foreknowledge of the attacks to profit from them on the stock market is to miss half the meaning of the event. But they don’t appear in Sherman’s reading, and so they don’t appear in his essays. He writes that John Updike’s novel Terrorist “addresses the essential questions that thinking Americans posed after 9/11. Is there truth in the fundamentalist’s assertion that materialist America has poisoned itself with trivia? Has America justly incurred the wrath of the globe’s unfortunate by becoming an exploitive, soulless nation?” But this is a sentimental explanation for 9/11, handed down by the Bush administration at the time – “They hate our freedoms” – and it doesn’t sit on Sherman’s book any better than it did on Updike’s.

The Post might have been able to tolerate that note of doubt about Atta — after all, we are told he piloted Flight 11, right? Nothing wrong with saying so, right? They might even have gritted their teeth and put up with my bit of Bush-bashing. After all, he’s gone now, right? No need to keep defending him, right?

But that bit about the stock trades? Not so much.

Now, I was quite careful about what I wrote. There’s an immense amount of speculation around 9/11, and most of it remains just that — speculation. But the fact that there was extraordinary trading on the stocks of American and United Airlines in the weeks prior to the attacks — up to 100 times the usual volume — is acknowledged even in the 9/11 Commission Report. The trading was in the form of “put options,” which are taken in anticipation of a stock’s price dropping. The more it drops, the more money is made. The Commission adopted a “We checked into it, nothing to see here, move along now” approach to the matter, but a scholarly, peer-reviewed article published in 2006 noted that the chances of such trading happening randomly are 1%. That’s good enough for me. Of course, it might not be good enough for the Post, but the place to deal with that would have been during the editorial process, before publication. Instead, I got a nice note of praise from my editor, and that was that.

It’s a little hard for me to cry censorship because the review did appear that same day in the print edition of the paper. But the Post’s behaviour suggests that they would have removed it from there, too, were newsprint as ephemeral as the Web. The fate of one little book review may not amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world, but the excision does beg the question: what else is the Post leaving out of its pages? And why?

I’ve told them I won’t be writing for them anymore, which ends a relationship of 11 years, going back to the earliest days of the paper. I’ve enjoyed it, but I don’t do loyalty tests. But I do have some questions for them. (Mark Medley, co-editor of the Post’s online Books section, told me before Christmas that he was looking into what happened, but the rest has been silence.) They are: Who removed the review? Were they told to do so? If so, by who? And, regardless, why was it removed?

I’ll let you know if they have anything to say. Or, of course, they can always use the Comments section below to reply. I promise not to delete it.

Meantime, I have posted the review in backofthebook’s Arts & Books section. And if you’d like to see the web page that The National Post would rather you didn’t, I’ve posted it here. Because if there’s one thing the Internet has taught us, it’s that if you want to suppress information, you’d better do it before you publish it.

An infinite number of bloggers on an infinite number of netbooks blathering for a handful of years have produced an entirely new face for marketing.  Whereas widely-spread opinions could once only be held by those with credentials, now anyone with dial-up can wax judgmental about any old thing.  And it’s driving some people mad.

It must be unendurably painful for someone who has fought to be published see their baby one-starred-and-feathered on Amazon.  But nothing so thoroughly hoists an author by their own petard than trying to enlist the internet to attack itself.  Last year, Alice Hoffman twittered her fury over a review in The Boston Globe, calling in her troops to harangue the reviewer, and all it earned her was a hefty serving of scorn.  Alain de Botton made a resoundingly misguided (though sort of hilariously angry) comment on a critic’s blog, later admitting that this was “clearly an insane thing to write in a new public age.” While the internet has opened its arms to everyone’s $0.02, it has also cheerfully created space for the occasional train wreck.

The latest author to go all Hulk! Smash! on a nay-sayer is romance writer Candace Sams.  After Amazon reviewer L B Taylor posted a disappointed handful of paragraphs warning people off of Sams’ Electra Galaxy’s Mr Interstellar Feller, the author (under the pseudonym “Niteflyr One”) rose up in a lather of fury and excuses.  Clearly, she said, the reviewer was herself a failed romance writer.  Clearly she didn’t understand how little control writers have over the cover (natch), “sequencing of scenes” (?) or the “language used in dialogue” (!?!), all of which are apparently dictated on high from the editor.

The twitternets and bloggotown were alive with elbow-nudgings and note-passing almost immediately, and before long a crowd had gathered in the comments section.  Taylor quickly backed away from the maelstrom, but Niteflyr responded with SPEED and VIGOR (if maybe not sense) to all comers.

And it isn’t so much that she responded to a negative review in the first place (which is like making out with an alligator [in that it rarely ends well]), but that she sounded like an illiterate loon.  Her insistence that Taylor could dish it out but not take it, combined with her repeated inability to “take it,” make for some dizzyingly circular arguments.  Her bottle of whine about how careless reviewers can fillet an author’s career WITH IMPUNITY suggest that the reading world owes her a livelihood just. because. she writes.  Or puts letters down, anyways.  Because it’s “beseech,” not “beseach,” and although she might (sadly) “loose” more contracts on the world because of this controversy, my spidey-sense tells me that she meant “lose.” Maybe she should call up that publishing house she hates so much (and so publicly) and have them send someone to tinker with her tirades.

What seems to be at play here (besides a completely skewed sense of entitlement) is a misunderstanding of the way the internet works.  As Sams herself admits, once authors sell their work they “leave themselves open for attack.”  Where Sams has dun it rong is by not seeing that those attacks no longer extend only from friend to friend, but across the webiverse.  The Amazon reviews and their comments are not an author’s personal parlour, but a forum designed for promoting good products and warning people away from bad ones.  Any old idiot can say whatever they want, but these days any old idiot has that right.  There is no point in kicking against the goads because the goads are legion and probably have more time to kill than you.

Sams is past the point where she could (like de Botton) apologize profusely and sincerely, or (like Hoffman) attempt to rub the mess out.  To date, Amazon has deleted eight of her comments from the thread, but I’d bet my bottom dollar that someone(s) has screen-captured all 20-odd pages of rant.  Some new scandal will rise up in 20 minutes and push this to the back-burner, but like authorial missteps made before it, it will never be fully expunged.  The internet is forever.

Review by Frank Moher

Halfway through The Day the Falls Stood Still, a first novel by Toronto author Cathy Marie Buchanan, I thought it might be a worthy companion to Timothy Findley’s World War I novel, The Wars — a sort of distaff variation on themes of violence and love. By the time I was through, though, I realized that did it a disservice. In writerly terms, it is a better novel than The Wars — more convincing, less grandiloquent. And its reach is both broader and deeper. Beneath its domestic surface, this riveting novel paints death not as a faraway phenomenon but as an ongoing, even comforting fact of early Canadian life, as constant as the Niagara River.

Its heroine is the deliciously named Bess Heath, a young woman prematurely catapulted from the private academy which has been her world when her father is fired from his job at an electric company. Gone, suddenly, are the accoutrements of upper middle-class Ontario life: the household help, the lazy days in the garden, the steady supply of new dresses. Instead, Bess’s mother must return to her own previous life as a seamstress, taking in orders while her husband drinks away defeat in a local tavern.

Her destitution, though, reaches only modestly Canadian levels before she meets a boy, Tom. The grandson of a local hero celebrated for his river rescues, he is more rough-hewn and sinewy than the family friend whom Bess’s mother would have her marry — and hence irresistible. Their courtship is a delicate exchange of baked goods for natural tokens, ferns pressed between shale and left where Bess will find them. Tom is, of course, the spirit of the wild made incarnate, but never less than fully realized in Buchanan’s sensuous rendering.

They are barely married before he decides he has to go off to fight The Hun. The book stays behind with Bess, and comes into its own as both a testament to the stoic pluck of the women at home, and a portrait of the moment when government finally trumped private enterprise as first mover in Canadian public life. Wielding the slogan “dona naturae pro populo sunt” (”the gifts of nature are for the public”), M.P. and manufacturing magnate Adam Beck convinces the Ontario electorate to build a powerhouse on the Niagara, and its taming begins. But even as light flows to new corners of the province, Bess is ringed by darkness, as Tom’s regiment is shipped off to Passchendaele and she awaits news of his fate.

“I saw the boy who delivers the telegrams pause at the far end of the front walk,” Buchanan writes, of Bess’s first brush with disaster. “He flipped through the papers in his hands, looked up at the house, and then down again. I closed my eyes, pressed my face against my palms, and with every ounce of will I could muster wished away the boy and the telegram addressed to me.”

It works. But Bess lives with the knowledge that the river, too, might snatch away a loved one at any moment, as it already has her sister and countless daredevils and drunks. Buchanan, who was born and raised in Niagara Falls, deftly underscores her novel with their white noise, as if to say that war is just a theatrical version of the brute forces that the women in her novel — bearing children, tending the ill, and worrying when a husband or child doesn’t return for supper on time — face every day.

The Day the Falls Stood Still is an extraordinarily assured first novel. It comes illustrated with period photos and drawings that are, like its events, at once foreboding and darkly beautiful. (I only wish the book was printed on paper that did the illustrations justice.) It is a southern Ontario Gothic of the highest order, and deserves to take its place alongside the best novels of the Great War, and the years that couched it. As it reminds us, not all its battles were fought in Europe.

First published in The National Post.

Review by Frank Moher

Coming-of-age novels are a lot like podcasts: there are too many of them, everyone thinks they can make one, and not everyone is right. They’re also like Twitter messages, predicated as they are on the assumption that just because an experience is universal — bad sex, say, or eating lunch — it must perforce be interesting.

Negative. About the time I stopped listening to Dawn and Drew, two podcast pioneers who somehow convinced hundreds of thousands of listeners (okay, thousands) that their domestic lives were fascinating, I also started avoiding books with words like “awakening” and “quickening” on the cover. Unfortunately, that was also about the time I signed up for Twitter. The bores are always with us.

Fishing for Bacon, however, by Calgary author Michael Davie, is a coming-of age novel of a different sort. First off, its hero, Bacon Sobelowski, is too soft-headed ever to experience an awakening, much less a quickening. Second off, it hasn’t a sensitive bone in its body. Where classics of the genre such as Who Has Seen the Wind? and A Separate Peace treat their protagonists as Faberge eggs to be bubble-wrapped and handled with care, Davie’s exuberant, insistently inventive novel rains all sorts of outrages down upon its, as if to see how quickly he can be broken.

Bacon hails from a town in Alberta’s southerly Crowsnest Pass, where only sharp winds and occasional busloads of Japanese tourists visit. The book’s early pages aren’t promising; the usual small-burg angst prevails, and a stock feisty grandma doesn’t help. Bacon loses his virginity to the other odd duck in school, Sara Mulligan, a teenage battleaxe written with enough brio to suggest Davie hasn’t yet shown his hand. Still, you wonder what could possibly follow; 30 pages in, Fishing for Bacon has exhausted most of the tropes of the form.

What follows is a sudden burst of comic energy that, like a field of canola on the prairie, just goes on and on. Bacon pursues Sara to Calgary, where his first mistake is to repair to a bar rather like the one Ralph Klein used to hang out in. He meets an inordinately friendly young woman who takes a curiously overstated interest in his future. Why, she even offers him a high-end condo to stay in, and stays in it with him. Yeehaw.

It’s fun to see Calgary reinvented as the big, bad city. It’s also fun to watch Davie, whose first novel this is, exercise a love of the unlikely that boots him out of the predictable and into fresher and much suppler territory. Bacon is introduced to his mentor’s unexpected husband, who genially demands payment for her services. Meanwhile, back on the home front (conveniently just a few hours away by Greyhound bus), he falls for a recent arrival from Korea who insists that her English name should be Meryl Streep. “Meryl Streep’s bra remained firm,” Bacon tells us, recounting yet another sexual interlude that puts the “coming” in “coming-of-age,” “so I reached both hands around behind her, feeling about for some kind of clasp, a button or Velcro. Again she spoke to me in Korean. Again I reached for the dictionary, a difficult stretch while keeping my closed mouth to hers.”

Bacon’s erotic accidents eventually force him to flee to Waterton National Park, sort of the poor cousin to Banff and Jasper, where he finds employment as a dishwasher. Here he finally catches a break, in the form of a fellow lodge employee, Woodrat. (Davie, a graduate of the University of Lethbridge, also apparently studied at the John Irving Academy of Whimsical Character Names.) Woodrat is female, but, surprisingly, contact with her does not immediately lead to disaster. Fishing for Bacon aims itself towards a moment of transcendence in the river, as Bacon catches a big rainbow trout that somehow represents something (and once again evokes various previous novels). But its real endpoint is a poignant scene in which Bacon and Woodrat masturbate themselves, side-by-side, prolonging their last night together as best they can. Sex ceases to be a laughing point, and Fishing for Bacon becomes wholly original.

In other words, this eager-to-please, somewhat chaotic novel offers a chance to watch a talented new comic author write himself into being. I also liked its unhip denouement; Bacon rejects the bright lights of Calgary for something nearer his heart. In that, in Davie’s embrace of the tall-tale, and, yes, in starting his career with the saga of a young man’s stirring to something more than animal instincts, he has placed himself squarely in the tradition of various classic prairie writers. If he can keep from being overawed by them, he might just prove a worthy successor.

First published in The National Post

I was chatting with a friend about the high cost of textbooks, and he recalled a young woman of his acquaintance from his university days who made some extra cash by selling photocopies of textbooks. I didn’t ask how she did this. Did she hang around on campus wearing a big raincoat lined with illegal photocopies going “Psst, wanna buy the psych 240 text? Only $40, less than half what the bookstore is charging”? Or perhaps she had a table in a smoky corner of the campus drinking establishment and people would pass her an envelope of cash and the name of books to be copied.

We could do the story of Textbook Tammy as a movie in the film noir style. She is wanted in 20 states for copyright infringement, and is top of the FBI’s most wanted intellectual property infringement list. We could fit it to an appropriate formula, with lots of danger and exciting escapes from federal agents, but if we showed the photocopying at all, it would be in a montage that lasted less than a minute. That montage would represent hours and hours and hours of photocopying, and illustrate that Textbook Tammys have never been a real threat to the university textbook publishers. On a per hour basis, their operation simply wouldn’t be profitable enough to justify the extreme monotony of copying books on a flatbed copier or scanner.

Today, of course, duplicating books is a piece of cake for a large organization like Google, which can afford automated page turning scanners in the five figure range. But that sort of kit is out of Textbook Tammy’s range. Does this age of high tech wizardry have nothing to offer her and other villains seeking to make or save a few bucks off the ridiculous price of textbooks, perhaps in the process doing damage to the spines of the source texts? In the end is low tech print the best form of DRM — totally open, but a royal pain in the arse to reproduce?

Daniel Reetz to the rescue! Turns out you can make a book scanner from odds and ends and garbage you find lying around! Granted, it doesn’t automatically turn the pages for you, but something like this should be in every university library — so much better for books and journals than a flat bed copier or scanner.

 
In making the plans available, Daniel appears to have started something of a movement, the hub of which appears to be the web site http://www.diybookscanner.org/. It has been apparent for some time now that digitized information “wants to be free,” but with this tech in the hands of legions of do-it-yourself types . . . well, let’s just say that if publishers are concerned about Google digitizing everything, their concern may be misplaced.

G-MAN #1: Damn it, Textbook Tammy’s given us the slip once again!

G-MAN #2: Don’t worry, she’ll show up again on some campus somewhere. She’s a bad penny.

[Shot of Textbook Tammy driving on the highway in her little MG convertible, cigarette hanging out of her mouth. ]

G-MAN #1 (voice over): I don’t know if it even matters anymore. With this crazy new technology, what if other kids get the same idea?

G-MAN #2 (voice over): My god, a whole generation of Textbook Tammys!

[Shot from behind of Tammy's MG driving down the highway into the sunset.]