Barney's Version by Mordecai Richler

        In the opening pages of Barney’s Version by Mordecai Richler, the titular narrator struggles to come up with the word for a pasta strainer: colander. It’s not the only thing he struggles to remember. As he recounts his life and the history of his three wives, he routinely gets details wrong. Timelines are off; dates don’t align; certain facts are missing, suspect, or unverifiable. It makes a colander the perfect symbol for a failing memory. As much as we try to retain, our memories leak out.

Luckily for us, one of Barney’s sons adds footnotes to correct the record, which, incidentally, is what Barney is trying to do. There’s a mystery at the core of the text: what happened to Barney’s friend Boogie? We find out early on that Barney was accused of his murder, put to trial, but has clearly escaped mostly unscathed (although one of his ex-wives most assuredly does not believe him.) The rest of the book is a slow unravelling of Barney telling his side of the story, in which he continually professes his innocence.

Barney isn’t an easy person to believe. He makes assertions that are clearly incorrect, repeatedly shows himself to be a mischievous rabble rouser with a penchant for sending fake letters, and admittedly lies in his initial testimony to the police. He’s also misogynistic and racist in that 1960s literati way. 

In the moment, there appeared to be a lot of ‘fluff’ to the book—scenes that did not really contribute to the overarching narrative of the book, but to Richler’s credit, the different arcs culminate beautifully. The book is structured around Barney’s different wives. The first wife, Clara, is part of a thriving 1960s expat arts and literature group in France. Others warn Barney of her being unstable but he pursues a relationship anyway. I feel like Richler captures the rebellious spirit of the writers at the time and lampoons (through Barney) the experimental poets of the period. In the tumultuous whirlwind of Barney’s first marriage, we see Clara give birth to a baby who, by its skin colour, is revealed to be Boogie’s child. Then, a tragic fallout and sequence of events sees Clara deceased by suicide. After her death, her art work takes on a new significance and Barney helps to ensure that it is published and exhibited; as it turns out later on, he was donating all the funds—an amusing and surprising turn given his record of misogyny and bias against women’s art.

In the second section, Barney recounts the story of his second marriage to a woman he consistently refuses to name. This section was probably my least favourite, but it still culminates beautifully. Barney narrates how he fell in love with his third wife the night of his second wedding; he tries to run away with her and leaves his wedding to be with her. It doesn’t work out at the time, but it’s a wonderfully romantic (and terrible) moment. Barney then proceeds to woo her over years.

This is where things get wild. I apologize if this review is reading more like a summary, but the plot is so wonderfully crafted that all of the pieces need to be lined up before seeing it all come together. Not wanting to be with his second wife, Barney concocts a plan with his lawyer to get her to agree to a divorce. Essentially, the lawyer will pay to have someone sleep with Barney so that his wife can catch them in flagrante delicto. They talk through the specifics of the plan and then when Barney returns home, everything works out beautifully for him—he arrives to find his second wife in bed with (who else but) Boogie as he recovers from his drug addictions. This gives Barney the ground to leave her and pursue Miriam. His second wife leaves immediately and then he is left alone with Boogie. This is where the record gets uncertain because Barney and Boogie are left alone together—and Boogie is never seen again.

Barney admits to certain things in his version. He explains how he wanted Boogie alive so that he could have a witness that agrees to Barney’s account and thereby justifies the divorce on Barney’s terms. Remember, though, Barney has reason to hate Boogie for having slept with both of his wives. When Boogie, feeling used, says he wants to have a swim to think about the situation, Barney tells him he’s too drunk to swim and shoots a gun above his head to scare him into staying.

However, when police come investigating, there are all kinds of details Barney cannot account for. For instance: why does he have rough hands? He suggests to the police it’s because he was digging Boogie’s grave—as a joke, surely, but… He confesses to shooting Boogie in the chest and cleaning up all the blood, but that’s also a joke…right? Richler crafts the voice so wonderfully that it creates dramatic tension: Barney is always sarcastic and joking and so the truth becomes more obscure. This, combined with the fact that he can’t remember the dates and details make him an unreliable witness. Even worse: in his old age he develops Alzheimer’s.

The entire closing sequence of the book is simply fantastic. It’s heartbreaking and beautiful and terrible all at once. We can watch Barney’s descent into worse and worse Alzheimer’s. Details become even more unreliable and obscured. It’s heartbreaking when he starts to piece details together and realize that he has Alzheimer’s and when he’s truly at his worst, he can’t even clothe himself properly. He goes for dinner with Miriam after a prolonged estrangement (did I mention that he cheated on her and she left him?) and the disconnect between his own belief of how things will play out and the reality is tragic. He’s convinced that they can reunite; he gets flashes of their first meeting; he thinks they’re still married. It’s really rough and I loved it.

In a moment of lucidity, Barney is able to recollect the details of what happened the night of Boogie’s death and reaffirms his innocence. He explains what happened but admits that there was a detail he left out before. As it turns out, the fight was not so amicable. Boogie, a friend he has long professed to admire, actually has harsh words about Barney’s wives, particularly Clara. He says that Clara dying was the best thing she could have done for her career and, after almost four hundred pages, we finally get a redemptive moment from Barney, who defends her honour. This adds to the tension of the mystery; it’s one more reason for him to kill Boogie—although his body was never found.

As a comedic work, Barney’s Version works reasonably well. As a dramatic work, I’d argue, it works even better. The character and voice of the text is so finely wrought and the storyline is so finely crafted that it feels so satisfying when everything comes together in the end. Even the epilogue has something to offer that allows the audience to reconsider the rest of the story. Even to the last page there are revelations about Boogie’s unsolved disappearance. Despite all the ambiguity, the ending was extremely satisfying.

Due to a friend’s recommendation, I had been intending to read Barney’s Version for years and I’m so glad I finally got to it. It was well worth the read and I finally understand why it’s a sort of CanLit classic. Like Barney, I’m sure I don’t remember all the details, but the broad strokes are enough to solidify itself in my memory as a really positive, worthy reading experience.

Happy reading!

The Haunted House of Plautus

    The first time I moved into a house that was not my parents’ was around 2009. It was an attic bedroom in a student house in Kingston, and when I went into the closet I discovered a set of history textbooks someone had left behind, sometimes with post-it notes still embedded. One of those books was an anthology, Classics in Translation Volume II, edited by Paul MacKendrick and Herbert M. Howe. I don’t know what compelled me to pick up the book so many years later, but the first play in the collection is The Haunted House of Plautus, elsewhere titled Mostellaria.

    Most of us, I think of classics as exclusively Greek tragedies, but Plautus offers here a Latin comedy. You know that trope in movies and TV where the kids are having a house party and then the parents come home unexpectedly and everyone has to hide and pretend there was no party? Well, that’s The Haunted House. Philolaches is a young man whose father, Theopropides, has been abroad for three years. While he’s been away, Philolaches has been engaging in debauchery with his friends, hosting alcohol-fueled ragers. He has also paid to have a sex worker become his exclusive mistress. When they discover that his father has returned, the house goes into a panic and Tranio, one of their slaves, has to take action.

    Tranio develops a plot that requires more and more effort to sustain. He tells everyone to lock themselves inside the house and then when Theopropides returns, Tranio emerges to warn him that the house is haunted and that by even knocking on the door, he may be cursed. It’s like an episode of Fraser from there, where one lie requires another, requires another, requires another, requires another. Tranio is nearly a comic version of Iago, praising the value of lying as he digs himself in deeper. Philolaches owes a lender money for all the booze and Tranio develops a plot to have Theopropides pay off the debt because—oh, it’s not for booze or buying the freedom of a sex worker—it’s because the house was haunted, so they bought the neighbour’s house at a huge discount. When Theopropides wants to go into the house, Tranio has to approach the neighbour and say that Theopropides is looking to do some renovations and wants to inspect the house. Luckily, he’s able to get in and inspect without too many questions, but the tension of the play is that the lie is ready to unfold at any moment. It’s a fun, short little piece that tells an essentially sitcom-esque story. I think it’s hard to genuinely connect with a piece so old. Our expectations of stories have changed over time, and so there’s always a bit of a distance (cf. Irving Howe’s History and the Novel). I think comedies in particular are difficult to sustain over a long period, but the comedy comes primarily through the situation rather than the language, so The Haunted House maybe has an advantage in that respect.

    Structurally, the play is pretty interesting. The opening scene of the play is an interaction between the city slave and the country slave to set the stage. Throughout the play, we get songs (?) where characters offer their life philosophies. There are also tangents that take up a significant amount of time, the most notable of which is a lengthy exchange between Philematium (Philolaches’ mistress) and her elderly maid Scapha with Philolaches eavesdropping. It’s a comic moment where Philolaches offers comment on Scapha’s advice and he’s getting increasingly annoyed with her.

    Other than Tranio, Philolaches is probably the character about whom we learn the most. In his life philosophy song, he explains how life is like a house that needs constant repair. He displaces responsibility from himself and blames his father for not maintaining him well and allowing cracks to form in him. In those cracks, love seeps in and now he sees himself as no good, giving up his life for his lover. It’s an insight into Athenian life, which is also noted in the introduction by the translator, about how much influence parents ought to have on their children.

    I wouldn’t put Plautus on the same level as current playwrights, but I was surprised by how ‘modern’ the work seems relative to other narratives. Perhaps it’s because the play had to appeal to lowest common denominator, but it actually has stayed an entertaining premise, even if it’s not going to change my world.

    Short play, short review. Happy reading!