I can’t entirely decide how I feel about this book. I enjoyed what was there, I suppose, but by the end, even though the plot had run its course, I still felt like things were just getting started. The prose was plain and very much “about the story”, in the sense that there was no formal experimentation or any real effort at elegance. It’s not that the prose is bad; I just have a hard time picturing Hanrahan slaving away over whether or not a sentence was quite right. The long and the short of it is that it was so easy to read that going slowly and chewing over what was happening was pointless; there’s very little here except the story itself, and it simply ran so fast that it exhausted itself early.
I guess that’s maybe the problem. The story is alright, I suppose; I’m sure we all know somebody bent on a sex and drug fueled descent into self-destruction, either at home or abroad (and if you don’t, I suggest that you consider yourself lucky, as people untouched from that sort of strife are becoming more and more rare), but that very fact, that we all know somebody like that, means that the book needed more than an exotic location and the obligatory best-friends-consider-lesbian-sex scene that you find in the movies they play on CityTV late on Friday nights to distinguish itself. It just wasn’t there, and it’s a shame because it always seemed that Hanrahan was on the verge of turning the book into something meaningful. I suppose I should have known better when the cover used words like “edgy” and “hip”. I’ve been on this quest to find Canadian literature with a little blood in it, and though I certainly found blood in this book, it came at the expense of heart and mind.
Next is Thomas Pynchon’s V. (It bothers me that there’s a period in the title of that book; punctuation in titles strikes me as nearly as un-anglophone as not capitalizing anything beyond the first word, and while I have no desire to see the rest of the world conform to anglo rules, I find it comforting when works written in English behave like they were written in English. I find myself becoming more conservative—aesthetically, not socially or politically—with every passing year, and what dismays me the most about that fact is that I’m not particularly dismayed by that fact.)
