Next to you, Dumbledore was the only one you-know-who was afraid of...
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A lovely Saturday morning in Victoria. Headed out for breakfast, then off downtown (used bookstore prowl, setting in some Bradbury for the fall).

In the meantime, two (count 'em, two) reviews this morning.

First, from the Vancouver Sun, my review of Anne Fleming's Anomaly:

Two girls, two women, too many questions
Anne Fleming writes vividly of intertwined lives, but misses details

Robert J. Wiersema
Special to the Sun -- September 24, 2005


ANOMALY
BY ANNE FLEMING

Raincoast Books, 477 pages ($32.95)

DEBUT NOVEL I It's too bad Alice Munro has already claimed Lives of Girls and Women as a book title. It would have been perfect for Vancouver writer Anne Fleming's first novel.

Anomaly comes six years after her Pool-Hopping and Other Stories, a finalist for the Governor General's Award and two other prizes. It follows the lives of four characters: sisters Carol and Glynnis, who come of age in the 1970s and '80s; their mother, Rowena; and an elderly neighbour and family friend, Beryl Balls.

The novel focuses on the inner lives and interrelationships of these girls and women in three distinct time settings: 1972, 1977 and 1982.

The 1972 section clearly establishes the characters and the conflicts between them. When Carol pushes a piano on to her sister during a Brownie meeting overseen by their mother, causing an injury that will mark Glynnis for the rest of her life, the rift between the sisters becomes deep and seemingly irreparable.

The conflict raises significant and spiritual questions in the mind of their mother, who begins to explore the idea of entering the United Church ministry.

The incident draws Miss Balls closer to the family and allows her to return to the world of Guiding, a long-held passion which was denied her, following racist comments.

The incident with the piano colours the remainder of the characters' lives and, in both subtle and dramatic ways, shapes the whole of the novel.

Fleming has a keen eye for dramatic scenes and a good ear for dialogue. She ably captures the adolescent sisters' post-hippie patois (and, later, their post-punk snarl), Rowena's constant questioning and searching, and the simultaneously self-righteous and self-doubting attempts by Miss Balls to reconcile her past, including her service as a nurse during the First World War.

Isolated scenes impress with keen drama and a vivid prose style. The piano incident, for example, is vividly rendered from every character's perspective.

Unfortunately, too often the novel is lost in generalities, rather than rooted in scenes. The dictum "Show, don't tell" is perhaps one of the most abused in the creative-writing handbook, but it's appropriate here: Fleming "tells" too much of the story, rather than letting the reader experience it directly. She summarizes developments and describes situations that would have had considerably more power as scenes. As a result, the novel seems uncertainly paced, shifting awkwardly between the immersive and the lightly described.

The over-all shape of the novel is also problematic. Early events, including the piano incident, are exacting in their detail and almost exhaustive in their length, although the stakes are relatively low. (Yes, the events are important, but they are of less significance than later events.)

Because of this, these sections feel overwritten and overemphasized, while later events (including several life-changing decisions which I won't reveal here) are dealt with in mere paragraphs.

There is almost a rush to finish the book, with significant events shortchanged in order to arrive at epiphanies that end up being robbed of much of their power.

The final scene should be emotionally resonant and affecting; instead, it feels short and clipped.

For this reader at least, there is also the issue of historical verisimilitude. Although Fleming writes in her author's note that "the perspicacious reader will notice certain historical liberties taken," several inconsistencies seem too jarring to be deliberate.

Following the piano incident, for example, the girls' brother attempts to make peace between them. At the beginning of a lengthy sequence, Jay says that "if you want peace, you've got to have peace talks, like at Camp David. Otherwise you'll be at war forever, you'll be like the Middle East, an eye for an eye..."

Unfortunately, the Camp David peace talks didn't take place until 1978.

Similarly, there is a conversation in the 1977 section about Miss Balls' dog, Mortimer, whose soccer skills several boys suggest "should be on That's Incredible," a TV series that didn't debut until 1980.

These may be picky points, but such glaring lapses force the reader out of a novel's world, calling the credibility of the author -- and of other aspects of the book -- into question.

This may sound overly pat, but I hope Anomaly is just that. Fleming has proven herself a fine writer in her short fiction and in parts of her debut novel. That there are problems with some aspects of it won't keep me from reading her in future.

Anne Fleming will appear at The Word on the Street festival, 12:40 p.m. Sunday in the Authors' Tent, corner of Georgia and Homer.

Robert J. Wiersema is a Victoria writer, critic and bookseller whose first novel will be published next year.

And second, from the National Post, the previously mentioned review of Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys:


Mythical fantasy tale defies categorization

Robert Wiersema

Weekend Post -- Saturday, September 24, 2005


ANANSI BOYS
By Neil Gaiman

Morrow/Harper Collins
336 pp., $36.95

- - -

With Anansi Boys, his first adult novel in almost five years, Neil Gaiman turns away from the epic, apocalyptic fantasy of American Gods in favour of a smaller story, a frequently humorous, occasionally emotionally fraught family drama about the sons of a God and the trouble they get themselves into.

What, you were expecting Terms of Endearment? This is Neil Gaiman I'm talking about here. He is the former journalist who, in the late 1980s, created The Sandman, a 75-issue comic book series that not only revolutionized and reinvigorated that genre but also stands as one of the great novels of the 20th century. His last adult novel, American Gods, was a groundbreaking New York Times bestseller, and his subsequent children's novel, Coraline, sold millions of copies while thrilling children and scaring the hell out of the adults around them. Gaiman, a transplanted Englishman now living in Minneapolis with his family, has made a successful career out of defying expectations and channeling a world of myth and tale back into the contemporary consciousness.

Anansi Boys is no exception: A rich repository of myth and story masquerading as a fantasy novel, it defies easy categorization. Gaiman describes the book as "a magical-horror-thriller-ghost- romantic-comedy-family-epic." It's as good a description as any, although he notes that it "leaves out the detective bits and much of the food."

As the novel begins, Charles "Fat Charlie" Nancy, an expatriate American, has made a solid if unremarkable life for himself in London. He's got a job he dislikes at a second-tier talent agency (run by the oily Grahame Coats, who makes Ricky Gervais' character from The Office seem well-adjusted) and a sweet fiancee, Rosie, whose mother dislikes him intensely.

When he returns to the United States for his estranged father's funeral, Charlie makes two discoveries that overturn his life of quiet, if comfortable, desperation. First, he learns from a group of neighbourhood women (who have, it should be noted, secrets of their own) that his father was not just the irritating, too easygoing, feckless figure of his memory (his mother left Mr. Nancy when Charles was a boy and took him to London) but, was, in fact, the human incarnation of Anansi, the Spider God of West African folktale, both trickster and culture hero.

Fat Charlie also learns that he has a brother, Spider, who is his opposite in every way. Confident where Charlie is meek, smooth where Charlie stumbles, gleefully narcissistic where Charlie is insecure, Spider is very much his father's son. When the brothers meet, they set off a chain reaction of events that includes infidelity, murder, romance, torture, suspenseful chases, jail breaks, bird attacks, awkward dinners, Caribbean cruises and karaoke. Ah, those kids.

While Anansi Boys is tangentially related to American Gods (Mr. Nancy was a minor character in the earlier book), it is a marked departure in tone. Sly and understated, it is a novel rich in Wodehousian humour inflected with just enough Pythonesque bizarreness to remind readers that Gaiman more than held his own with British fantasy humorist Terry Pratchett in their collaborative novel, Good Omens. One can almost picture a young John Cleese as Fat Charlie, deadpanning his way through the increasingly surreal and disturbingly amusing (or is it amusingly disturbing?) events of Anansi Boys.

Gaiman draws that humour, at least in part, from the tone of the original Anansi stories, which he threads through Anansi Boys. These stories depict Anansi as the consummate free-spirited trickster, creating and spreading wisdom almost by accident, as a by-product of his own desires. He is also the father of stories ("All stories are Anansi stories," Gaiman writes. "Even this one.") whose words give shape to reality. When he passingly calls his slightly chubby 10-year-old son Fat Charlie, for example, the nickname sticks. In a running gag, Charles Nancy, even as a relatively lean adult, will always be Fat Charlie.

In spite of the humour and the fantastic trappings, Anansi Boys is firmly rooted in the domestic and the realistic. While its characters initially seem broadly drawn, they quickly reveal surprising depths and contradictions that defy our expectations. We expect Spider, for example, to wreak havoc on Fat Charlie's organized life: We've seen this type of character and narrative arc before. What we don't expect is for Spider to reveal a yearning for the mundanity of Fat Charlie's life; we don't expect our trickster figures to want to settle down.

Nor do we expect the psychological depth Gaiman brings to Fat Charlie himself. We've seen this sort of milquetoast figure before; we expect his growth but not its particulars. Gaiman routinely defies expectations and Anansi Boys resonates with a human verisimilitude, even when the going gets strange.

Gaiman doesn't just draw from the folktale tradition, he also returns to it. Anansi Boys can be read, if one so chooses, as a new Anansi tale: the story, beginning with a song, of what happened the time that Anansi died and his boys finally met. Which, I suppose, would make Neil Gaiman a cultural elder, a storyteller whose tales resonate with secrets and deep truths. That sounds about right.

Robert J. Wiersema is a writer and bookseller in Victoria, B.C. His novel Before I Wake will be published next year by Random House Canada.


And I do need to write something about reviewing... not now, though. Breakfast calls.
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