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!

Complicity by Iain Banks

       

        Iain Banks’ Complicity places you in the terrible position of—and I’m sorry to tell you this—being a murderer. There are lengthy passages in which you are invading homes, tying people up, abusing them and murdering them in all sorts of grisly ways. Banks narrates these sections with the second person “you”, placing your agency as a reader in a tough spot: do you keep reading, and thereby enacting the horrific murders you are perpetuating? Or do you put the book down, disgusted by your own capacity to be drawn into the killing spree?

I want you to remember that question for later.

For now, let’s take a step back. Running opposite to the narration of ‘you’ is a first-person narration from Cameron Colley, a journalist with a penchant for the “big story.” In this case, he continues to receive phone calls from a mysterious Mr. Archer, who sends him names to investigate. Meanwhile, Cameron is trying to engage in counter-culture journalism, suggesting a corporate conspiracy in a would-be local interest story about the brewery. He’s also a drug addict, having an affair with his friend (who happens to be another friend’s wife), and he is a chronic masturbator who loves playing a computer game called Despot, which sounds like a more heavily sentient Age of Empires.

In the first half of the book, it’s perverse, but the most engaging parts are the murders and conspiracy that Cameron is trying to uncover. The hypermasculinity and hedonism is absurd, ridiculous, and gets boring pretty quickly. The transgressive nature of the text recalls works like American Psycho or perhaps Fight Club, but has that distinctly mid-80s to mid-90s  ethos of hyperreality popularized by works like William Gibson’s Neuromancer. It’s a work of profound excess.

I would say until the last fifty pages or so, I was a sceptic. But Banks’ conclusion delivers and justifies so much of what came before.

Around the halfway point of the book, something happens. I will try not to spoil too much here, but it’s worth noting that Cameron is pulled in for police questioning. He’s being interrogated for the murders. As it turns out, the victims are all important figures that have been specifically denounced in some of Cameron’s articles. He is forced to watch the videos of a gorilla-masked figure as he sexually abuses his male victims, severs peoples’ limbs, injects them with the HIV virus, and other more spectacular murders. After being sick, it is then that Cameron begins delving into memories. He is told to think of who else could have—might have—committed the horrific crimes.

The text devolves into a stream-of-consciousness panic before revealing backstory through flashbacks to Cameron’s youth. I think the best way to experience the book is going in ignorant, so if you’d like to preserve the sanctity of the secret, now is the chance to navigate away.

Through a series of flashbacks, we are invited to witness Cameron’s various failures. He lets his friends down in a number of ways, and it’s alluded to that there are two times Cameron abandoned a particular friend. Once, when he nearly drowned under a frozen lake, and the second—well, it’s a little ambiguous. The plot slows, somewhat, abandoning the high-octane whodunnit approach for a more ruminative exploration of old friendships. The section does a lot to humanize Cameron, which the novel desperately needs following his drug-fueled binges of self-indulgence. For example, in one scene, Cameron is enticed into performing a sex act on his slightly older male friend. An adult man then confronts them, having witnessed the act, and Cameron fails to defend his friend as the man rapes him. They then are able to attack and kill the man and hide his body. That bit of backstory gives a bit more depth to Cameron and his friend.

Banks offers effective twists and tensions throughout the book, both in the ‘present’ of the story and in the past. New details come to light and the filmic delivery of the book allows for some jump-cutting into different moments for greater impact. The tension heightens with interrogation scenes and Banks offers a great deal of impact through dialogue and sparse narration. The uncertainty of motivations, including for Cameron himself, is an excellent device for creating the atmosphere of the book. Even in the sections where ‘you’ are the narrator, your own motivations are not directly stated, which makes the project seem, at first, senseless.

When the murderer is revealed, Banks repeatedly layers the killer’s intentions. There are personal motivations, political ones, moral ones, and a healthy dose of nihilism. In the first half of the book, Banks develops a finely wrought political paranoia. It reads like a conspiracy and entices us in—just as it entices Cameron. The genius of this is that Cameron is so susceptible to paranoid fantasies that he is rendered oblivious to more obvious motivations in front of him. Through a finely crafted red herring, we, too, are pulled into the falsehoods, allowing ourselves to be deceived. It’s an odd situation where the conspiracy is a lie, but still serves its intended function and has the internal coherence of a bona fide conspiracy.

The whole situation sets up a paranoid mood, which only intensifies as the cat-and-mouse game progresses. We are led through the chase, the traps, the hunt. Even when you recognize the killer has been three steps ahead at every turn, there’s still the genuine horror of discovering the depth of the plan and the accounts of murdered and dismembered bodies are genuinely disgusting. Take that for what it’s worth from a literary perspective. As the book progresses, the ever-present killer stalks his prey and you start looking for him everywhere. In fact, the book easily could have resolved with him apologizing, disappearing, and with Cameron suspecting that he sees the murderer everywhere. That would be almost as chilling.

Some of the more superfluous aspects of the book take on a deeper significance in light of the killer’s omnipresence. For example, when Cameron describes his favourite video game, Despot, he talks about how he builds civilizations from scratch. He hops from individual serfs into other bodies and eventually takes on the power of a governing deity. Ironically, the game gets to know so much about your play style that if the game is on, it will play for you, though in a slightly degenerating way where your civilization slowly reverts. The game serves as an effective microcosm of all kinds of elements of the book. For instance, the fact that Cameron hops between bodies is like us at the start of the book, hopping into the body of the serial killer before shifting into an “I” and eventually taking on the position of the police department on the hunt for a killer. The omnipresence of the killer reads like the player of the game, able to manipulate the situation as he sees fit. The book also addresses themes about civilization, degeneracy, and the maintenance that is constantly needed in order for society to sustain itself. There’s something about a fictive video game that can give voice to so much.

Returning to the idea of paranoia, towards the end of the book, the serial killer is on the loose with the promise of behaving. But we all know it’s a lie, don’t we? There’s an excellent scene where Cameron’s car breaks down and someone pulls over to help him. The description does not at all match that of the killer—at first. From a narrative standpoint, though, we know that such a tense moment is likely to result in disaster, so our tension is heightened. Cameron, too, starts to recognize clues that are similar to the murderer—plus, we know that he puts on accents, has disguises, and so on. So we have this moment of a confrontation and it’s not initially clear whether it’s really the murderer. There’s a tension where you think that Cameron is in a rough enough place that he might attack or even kill this man, perhaps mistakenly. There’s a part of me that wanted to see it go that way—to see Cameron murder a man out of the lingering paranoia of a threat that no longer looms over him. That tension was just excellent.

The final confrontation with the killer is a bit super-villain-ish. It’s like the scene in every James Bond movie where, feeling he has the upper hand, the villain explains the plot in full. The killer reveals the full intentions and the message of his “work.” The philosophy teeters on the notion of a kind of Nietzschian claim to the Overman or an opportunistic Social Darwinism. The murderer, though, frames it as the natural extension of Cameron’s leftist beliefs. The rich people who exploit and kill others through their own negligence (either directly or indirectly) deserve to be killed themselves. The killer suggests it is no different that an oil baron, for example, kills any number of people through ecology than him taking one life to shock the system back into order.

The dialogue itself is a little on-the-nose, but the delivery is redeemed by giving Cameron an impossible choice in which both options are philosophical losses. Cameron could call the police to apprehend the murderer, which is the morally right thing to do, perhaps, but also would be to admit that his leftist politics (or at least the popular understanding of them) are a lie. Alternatively, he can let the murderer go free and admit that we are all complicit in a system which produces death. This is the kind of paradox I could see emerging in the work of Mark Fisher or Slavoj Žižek, if he hasn’t analyzed this book already. The seeming hypocrisy at the core of the philosophy is a profoundly challenging notion to grapple with.

I also loved the way Cameron approaches the phone call. Banks dramatizes Cameron’s inner conflict effectively and the choices of phone call on the killer’s cell phone are fantastic. First, Cameron calls his parents and receives an answering machine. Second, he calls his doctor to check if he has lung cancer. It’s a great moment that reinforces Cameron’s self-interest. He wants to know, in my reading, “am I going to die?” The answer to that question seems to impact his choice to call or not call the police—-which way the answer influences his decision is left to your own interpretation.

The ending of the book, despite the villain’s monologuing, is excellent. The final chapter shifts back to using the second person, but it’s a different second person than before—or is it? “You” used to be the murderer. Now, “you” are (seemingly) Cameron. The implications of that shifting “you” are intriguing from a political, moral, and literary standpoint. Essentially, “you” are complicit at every stage of the project. It’s an experiment in narrative culpability.

I’m not quite sure where to place Iain Banks in the literary canon. At times, Complicity feels like a conceptual literary work, at others a pulp whodunnit or political thriller. Plot-wise, I would say I was pretty consistently engaged, especially past the halfway point of the book. From the point of view of characterization, I can’t say I actually loved the characters, but Cameron’s consistency was finely achieved through his response to extreme situations. You may recall that a few months ago I reviewed John Updike’s Terrorist. This book is what that book should have been: stunningly paced, finely-wrought tension, more dialled-back misogyny, and more consistent characterization with a plot that had actual events. It has its flaws as a text (psst, your 1990s are showing), but it still feels at least somewhat relevant thirty years on.

 

Keep fighting the good fight and happy reading!

Trilogy by Jon Fosse

Earlier this year I read Jon Fosse’s Septology, an absolutely beautiful and heartbreaking masterpiece. So, when I found Trilogy in the Harvard Bookstore in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I felt I had to read it and, while it didn’t quite reach the same highs of Septology, it was still an excellent work that is probably a better entry point to Fosse’s work for the uninitiated and intimidated.

The plot of Trilogy is much more straightforward than that of Fosse’s longer work. Wakefulness, the first book, is about a young couple, Asle and Alida, who are about seventeen years old and who find themselves expecting a child. They have fraught relationships with their families and are seeking somewhere to live, which proves difficult when people see Alida’s swelling stomach. They need to make use of Asle’s deceased father’s boat, but another man with claim to it arrives, preventing them from leaving. Fosse applies a light touch and has Asle kill the man off-page, hiding it from Alida before stealing the boat so that they can escape to Bjørgvin. When they arrive, they expect to find easy boarding, given the higher population and number of houses, though in fact they are continually turned down, first by an old woman, then a young woman, and then others in between. Ultimately, Asle kills once again when they return to the first old woman’s home. They occupy her home and when it is time for Alida to give birth, they discover a core irony, alongside the audience, that Fosse delivers beautifully. A man from town tells Asle where the midwife lives—the home where Asle and Alida are now staying—and so Asle has to lie and say nobody answered. Then, a second midwife needs to be brought in and Asle’s guide is confused when he brings the new midwife to the home of the old midwife. Asle and Alida then have their child, Sigvald.

In Olav’s Dream, the second part of Trilogy, Fosse continues the story in a mostly linear timeline following the previous book’s events. Olav’s Dream is probably the most interesting part of the three. It begins with the revelation that Asle and Alida are now going by the names Olav and Åsta. Alida seems to go along somewhat blindly to the plan, which is odd given that she supposedly is unaware of Asle’s murders. In any case, Asle / Olav is clearly haunted by guilt and is aware that they could be caught at any moment. The tension of the book escalates when an old man starts following Olav, calling him Asle, implying that he knows what he has done and is ready to expose him. Meanwhile, Olav sees a man who has purchased a beautiful yellow and blue bracelet and he decides he needs to buy one for Alida. The old man asks Asle to buy him a drink, essentially blackmailing him into silence, but Asle ignores him, refusing to accept his name. Instead, the man guides him to where he can buy the same bracelet. He is successful in getting the bracelet, but ultimately loses it when he is intercepted and drawn before a court, tried for multiple murders, and executed on the spot.

The third section, Weariness, peters out somewhat. In Olav’s Dream, Alida expresses deep concern that Asle will not come back. She has a terrible premonition which comes true; it’s a parallel to her father, who also disappeared. In Weariness, we find that she is alone with Sigvald. When she goes looking for Asle, she hears for the first time that he is deceased. She then finds a yellow and blue bracelet—the same that Asle had purchased—and immediately knows that it is a gift to her from Asle. It solidifies their connection across time and space and the border of life. Then, Alida meets a man who offers her a place to stay in exchange for her being a servant to him. She debates before agreeing and the novel ends with their journey to his home.

While the story is straightforward, what shines in Fosse’s work is his style. There’s repetitiousness in the phrasing that gives the work a beautiful cadence. It also elevates the doubling that happens throughout the book—doubling of names, doubling of crimes, doubling of circumstances (like Asle and Alida’s father both disappearing), doubling the bracelet, doubling a fiddle, and so on. Conceptually, the work is delivered immaculately.

Actually, to return to Olav’s Dream for a moment, there’s a moment of doubling that is presented with such a sinister tone. In the first book, Asle and Alida seek shelter in the home of a young girl. She returns in the second part, recognizing Asle and attempting to seduce him in front of her mother; she exposes herself to him and tries to coax him into staying. The way she returns and tries to draw Asle away that turns the screw to make her all the more villainous and foreboding, especially because the old man is already there as a threat, as well.

In fact, the section Olav’s Dream works so well because there is a kind of dream logic that governs it. There’s no explanation for why the old man knows who Asle is. The timeline becomes somewhat fraught, given that the young woman from earlier returns now, seemingly as an adult. The fact that Asle is brought before a jury and executed within a few pages—it’s a Kafkaesque collapse of time. It’s hard, actually, to identify what part of Olav’s Dream is a dream. The old man seems to be the kind of figure that emerges in our dreams to haunt us, appearing out of nowhere. There’s a kind of dream logic where the repetitiousness just sort of works out. Asle meets the old man, goes and buys a bracelet, and returns and finds that the old man is still there, begging for a drink. Even the fact that the main characters have new names seems to emulate that experience I’m confident we’ve all had where we’re in a dream and “it was me but not me” and “you were you, but didn’t look like you.” It’s these strange essences that seem to percolate throughout the entire text so much that it appears to be entirely a dream or entirely real—and perhaps the word “dream” of the title is Olav’s ambition to get Alida a bracelet to marry her in spirit.

Fosse’s lack of punctuation and narrational style also contribute to the surreality of the text. I’ll point to a moment in the dialogue where the use of pronouns conflates identities and confuses sense in a way that allows a singular text to expand in ambiguous registers. Here’s the moment when Asle responds to the old man’s taunting:

My name isn’t Asle, Olav says

and he hears the Old Man saying that no, no it isn’t, of course his name isn’t Asle, he says
No my name is Olav, Olav says
So your name’s Olav, the Old Man says
Olav, yes, Olav says
Yes Olav’s my name too, the Old Man says
I’m the one who’s called Olav, not you, he says
and he holds up his tankard to Olav
Me, he says
Yes, Olav says (74)

The reason I find this so compelling is because Fosse does not rely on standard patterns of dialogue, so it confuses and doubles identities. The narrator states that Olav says his name isn’t Asle, giving credence to the idea that he is literally Olav. The first few lines of dialogue here seem to go back and forth, but when the Old Man reveals that his name is Olav too, it forces us to re-read “Olav, yes, Olav says” immediately before: which Olav do we have here? Also, notice how Fosse forces us into a non-linear reading; the future revises the past. But, when we get to the line “I’m the one who’s called Olav, not you, he says”---who is the “he” of this sentence? Is it the Old Man reasserting that he knows Asle is not named Olav? Is it Olav accusing the man of lying? I’m tempted towards the former, especially because of the “and” of the “and he holds up his tankard to Olav.” Then, “Me, he says” and “Yes, Olav says” seems to be an admission of sorts—unless it’s a repetition. Perhaps all four of those final lines cited above are all about the Old Man.

It’s those kinds of ambiguities I find so exciting in Fosse’s work in general. Further, there’s a circularity that comes about in his work. For instance, in Weariness, we get this passage, now being focalized through Alida’s daughter, who seems to have seen her ghost:

it was as if everyone really wanted to tell her what kind of man her mother had been with, and what was true and not true of what they told her was difficult to tell, of course, for they talked about Asle in Dylgja, that he was a fiddler, like his father before him, that he had taken her mother by brute force and gotten her pregnant, although she was only a chid herself, and that he had taken her with him after first having taken the life of her mother, that is, her own grandmother, that’s what they said, but if that were true, no nobody knew, that’s what they said, but if that were true, no nobody knew, and no it couldn’t be like that, it was probably just the sort of thing people made up and talked about, Ales thought, and then, they said, the gossippers said, he strangled a person of his own age so he could steal his boat, that was supposed to have happened at the boathouse where his father had lived, in Dylgja, and then, in Bjorgvin, he’s supposed to have strangled several others before he was caught and hanged, that’s what they said, but it couldn’t be true, her mother, Alida, could never have been with a man like that, a brute like that, never in this world [...] (128)

In this passage, there is another review of some of the similarities in the central characters’ lives. It’s as though there’s a fatedness to their existences that is handed down. What is also notable is that Asle struggles with the storytelling practices that give her access, or perhaps don’t, to truth. The boundary between true and untrue “was difficult to tell.” Some of the details seem to be confirmed by the narrator—Asle was a fiddler, as was his dad. Other details seem more questionable; the narrator does not specifically say that Asle took Alida by force, and Alida’s own inner monologues seem to suggest a genuine love. The fact that there are “gossippers” that tell the awful stories about Asle is intriguing, particularly because the murders happen “off-stage,” as it were. Asle says he is going out and comes back wet, probably having killed the man with the boat. Asle tells Alida to go into a room and she picks out and sees his hand covering an old woman’s mouth. These synecdoches seem straightforward enough, but there is no certainty when the narrator refuses to actually show the violence directly.

When Ales imagines her mother, Alida, in the home she now resides, she can picture all of the furniture and the kitchen set up, and so on. There’s a sneaky line that seems to resonate beyond itself in that narration. Ales’ narration states, “that, that’s so long ago, something that doesn’t exist, something that has never really existed even if it has and Little Sister lying there so pale and gone and never will her pale face, her open mouth, her half-open eyes, disappear for her, she will always see it, because Little Sister became ill and died and everything went so fast” (127). Fosse deals with time in a compelling way, as I tried to outline above, where things that are in the past might as well not have existed—so much so that it is “something that has never really existed even if it has” (127). That single line is so evocative for assessing the narration of the text. It points to that obscure boundary between truth and falsehood. The coincidences and resonances between space and time never really existed, even if they had. It’s an intangible uncertainty toward what exists and yet doesn’t. There’s a coincidence about Alida finding the bracelet as a gift from Asle, for example, and yet it is precisely what it was intended for—it both is and isn’t what was and wasn’t.

I fear at this point I’m beginning to spiral into conjecture of some kind of extranarrative truth that devolves into ambiguity. Trying to put it together logically is not likely to be successful, though Trilogy remains less obscure than Septology, but the ambiguity is productive and engaging in its own right. Jon Fosse’s book is wonderful. There is so much to talk about and it would be well worth studying the book in-depth. While it lacks some of Septology’s emotional core, the focus on plotting a story is an interesting shift to witness. I imagine this text will resonate with more people and I definitely encourage you to read it.

Happy reading!