The Neverending Story without a Name

A follow-up to Monday's very long post on The Story without a Name. Was it the longest? I can't be sure. This one will be shorter. Promise.

Meet Laverne Caron, winner of the contest to give name to the story without a name… or is it that he renamed The Story without a Name? Anyway, he won with Without Warning.

Pauline Pogue of Ulvalde, Texas, placed second for Phantom Powers. Third prize went to Victor Carlyle Spies of Barrett, California. He suggested The Love Dial, which was easily the worst title of the lot. Yes, worse than The Courage of Alan Holt, The Secret of Alan Holt and The Adventures of Alan Holt, all of which made the short list and were awarded cash prizes.

Thomas M. Malloy of Quebec City was the lone Canadian winner. I regret to report that his suggested title, Rays of Death, wasn't terribly imaginative; after all, the story revolves around the invention of a death ray. The Death Beam was another finalist.

Laverne Caron deserved to win. Without Warning was by far the best title. It suggests immediacy, action, and – bonus – recycles a word from The Story without a Name.*

Photoplay, September 1926

The $2500 award allowed Caron to quit his job as a machinist and devote his life to writing. The January 1925 issue of Photoplay was most enthusiastic:

In spite of his youth, Mr. Caron has already won a prize in the Author's League contest. He used the money won in that contest to take a course with the Palmer Institute of Authorship.
     His ambition is to obtain a position as a staff scenariast and make picture-writing his life work.

And that's the last we've ever heard of Laverne Caron.

Russell Holman had a better time of it. An ad man, he had a steady gig at Paramount that lasted well into the 'fifties. The Story without a Name was his second and final collaboration with Arthur Stringer. As with the first, Manhandled, the Canadian provided the basic story and a few chapters; Holman did the rest.

Stringer's initial contributions, untouched by Holman's hand, ran August through November 1924 in the pages of Photoplay. Neglected American illustrator Douglas Duer provided the pictures. He did a good job in capturing the melodrama of it all, though I do wonder about that second October illustration. Could be that he saw the episode as just too silly. I know I did.

Enjoy!

August 1924

August 1924

September 1924

September 1924

October 1924

October 1924

November 1924

November 1924

A Bonus:

19181 Dunbury Ave, Detroit, home of the man who named The Story without a Name.

* Might Caron have been influenced by the conclusion to chapter eleven (of twenty-six)? Seems a stretch, but I'm putting it out there:

"Better grab some sleep now, buddy," he said grimly to Alan. "Because you're in for a big day. And no more monkey-shines or I'll blow your head off without giving you the warning I did the last time."

Related post:

Jazz Age Death Ray, Baby!

Jazz Age Death Ray, Baby!

The Story without a Name
Arthur Stringer and Russell Holman
New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1924

The story without a name is not nearly as important as its title. Any old story would've done. It's pure product, born of Hollywood, conceived as a gimmick: release a film "without a name" and offer cash for title suggestions.

How closely the novel matches the product is anyone's guess; it's a lost film. And because it's a lost film, I'll be posting all eight stills featured in the book. And because you're unlikely to read the novel – there's no reason why you should – I'll be sketching out the plot from beginning to end.

This is the second Stringer I've read this year to feature a car crash. In the first, The Wine of Life (1921), a spurned lover sends his auto flying off an embankment into Lake Erie. The incident in this novel produces a much happier result, bringing about the meeting of Mary Walsworth and garage mechanic Alan Holt.

"Fresh and fragrant as apple-blossoms in cool summer white", Mary happens to be the daughter of Admiral Charles Pinckney Walsworth, head of the Naval Consulting Board in Washington, DC. Quite a coincidence this, as Alan is working on an invention he hopes to present before the selfsame board: "a device for triangulating radio rays, concentrating them into a single ray of such tremendous force that it would sink ships and set fire to cities."

Admiral Walsworth is unimpressed. "I've had exactly twenty 'death-ray' inventions offered me in the last seven months," he grumbles. "None of them is worth anything. The thing is simply impossible. And stay away from my daughter!"

That last bit in italics is mine; it doesn't appear in the book, though it could have.

Oh, Alan seems a nice enough fellow, and he has been awfully helpful, but Walsworth would remind Mary that he's "a garage-employee in a country ex-blacksmith shop". The admiral cares not one wit that the lad served in his Navy during the Great War, and ignores the fact that Alan's prototype actually works. The rest of the Consulting Board isn't so prejudiced, and offers the young inventor funds to perfect "the most important invention since wireless had been discovered".

Would that security had also been offered.

As Alan works on his death ray device, dark forces gather. Walsworth falls under the spell of a femme fatale, a mysterious tramp wanders outside the grounds and two thugs pose as government agents. All are in the employ of international criminal mastermind Mark Drakma, who intends to sell Alan's invention to a foreign power.

Mary is kidnapped, bound, and thrown into the tonneau of a touring car. Alan too is kidnapped, but as bondage plays a lesser part he's afforded numerous opportunities for escape. One involves an aeroplane!

Sadly, our hero fails at every turn. He and Mary are reunited on a ship somewhere in the Atlantic, where Drakma demands Alan make him a death ray device. If he refuses?

"I've some choice specimens in my working crews off the islands. You'd rather see her thrown into a cage of tigers, I fancy, than passed on to one of those gangs of rum-swilling cutthroats. But as sure as you're standing there I'll put her aboard the foulest schooner I own and leave her there until even you wouldn't want her!"

Drakma's words fire the inventor's imagination:

The helpless youth raised his stricken eyes to the face of the woman he loved. In that face he saw pride and purity. She impressed him as something flower-like and fragile, something to be sheltered and cherished and kept inviolate, something to die for, if need be, before gross hands should reach grossly for her.

Alan agrees to master criminal's terms, but is overturned by Mary, who gives a rousing speech about love of country. A real trooper, she displays great optimism in the face of grossly groping hands:

"It can't be for long, Alan," broke in the girl, her head poised high and her hands clenched hard as she was seized and thrust toward the rail-opening. "And we're doing it for the flag, dear, that men like this daren't even fly!"

Alan is dumped on a remote cay and is told that he'd better get to building that death ray device if he wants to keep Mary inviolate. The flaw in this plan will later be made evident when Alan builds the thing, then uses it to down one of Drakma's aeroplanes.

Now, to be fair to the criminal mastermind, it could be that he expected the cay's other two residents, Don Potter and his "spiggoty" lady friend Dolores to keep a watch on the young inventor.

Potter stands out as the lone character with a bit of flesh on his bones. A bitter and bloated Harvard man, he served valiantly during the Great War, only to be betrayed by his country. "Come back and found they'd taken my liquor away from me", he tells Alan. Short years later, Potter's in charge of Drakma's rum-running distribution centre. Just the occupation for a boozehound.

The shadow of the Great War hangs over this novel. Alan had secured his widowed Quaker mother's blessing to fight overseas by selling the conflict as the War to End All Wars. He couldn't have been more wrong, of course, which must have made dinner conversation about his death ray all the more difficult.

"Once I've got it into shape," he outlined his intentions to her, "I'll offer it to the Navy. If they take it, this country will be placed in a position where the rest of the world will be afraid of us. And the United States will be able to prevent wars between other nations simply by threatening to jump in with the death ray and burn the offenders off the face of the earth."

I wasn't at all convinced.

Being a drunk, Potter never notices the crashed plane, nor does he glom onto the fact that his prisoner is building a raft at the other end of the cay. Alan escapes, taking the death ray device with him. He makes for the foul schooner on which Mary is being held captive, and is quickly overpowered by rum-swilling cutthroats.

If only he'd thought to use his death ray device.

A fire breaks out, as fires do in adventure stories. In the ensuing confusion, Alan and Mary escape on the raft. Drakma's ship gives chase until the US Navy shows up and kills all the crooks.

Again, death rays do not figure.

This brings me to one of the most disappointing and mysterious aspects of the novel. For reasons perhaps known only to Stringer, Holman and Paramount Pictures, Alan never uses his death ray device when in danger. Only once, when downing the aeroplane, does he aim it at the enemy. Other than that it's used to pierce a hole in a small metal plate, destroy a fresh tub of ice cream and give an innocent, unsuspecting old man a series of heart attacks…

You know, maybe Alan isn't such so nice after all. What kind of guy wastes ice cream?

The book disappoints further in that not one of the images from the film shows Alan's death ray device. Tech geeks have to settle for actors staring at a radio.

Another novel that ends in a wedding, I'm afraid. Stringer and Holman forget about the Holts' Quakerism by holding the happy event in "the little elm-shaded church in Latham where Alan and his mother had always worshiped." One sentence begins, "As the old clergyman droned…" I nearly gave up at that point, but stuck it out.

There was less than a page to go.

A Bonus:

Mary, Alan and the death ray device (Photoplay, July 1924)

Bloomer:

"She nearly cost us your 'death-ray' machine and she tried to lead me to an ambush at Drakma's that might have cost me my honor, if not my life. She made love to me with one hand, so to speak, while she attempted to pick my pocket with the other."

Trivia I: The winning suggestion, Without Warning, was announced in the January 1925 issue of Photoplay. Both film and novel were rereleased under this title.

Trivia II: Unreliable and unstable science fiction author F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre claimed to have seen The Story without a Name. His captious review features in the film's IMDb entry.

Trivia III: Forgotten film stars Antonio Mareno and Agnes Ayres were cast as Alan and Mary. The villain Drakma was played by Tyrone Power, father of the more famous Tyrone Power. The senior Power died – quite literally in his son's arms – while filming the 1932 remake of The Miracle Man, based on the novel by Montrealer Frank L. Packard.

Object: A 312-page hardcover supplemented by eight plates depicting scenes from the Paramount Pictures picture. I purchased by copy in April from a bookseller in western New York. Price: US$15. Is it a first? One never really knows with Grosset & Dunlap. I've seen a red-boarded variant.

Access: Though not plentiful, copies of The Story without a Name begin at the low price of US$10. Copies with dust jackets – there are three – can be had for as little as US$60.

Copies of Without Warning are less common. That said, all four currently listed online have their dust jackets. Strange but true. Prices range from US$60 to US$85. Condition is a factor.

A warning about Without Warning: This edition features only four of the plates featured in The Story without a Name.

Twelve of our academic libraries hold copies, as do public libraries serving the residents of Toronto and London.

Related post:

The Neverending Story without a Name
Gloria Gets Groped

Pornography Dressed Up as a Cautionary Tale

Death by Deficit: A 2001 Novel
Richard Rohmer
Toronto: Stoddart, 1995

There are plenty of villains in this novel – Quebecers, bankers, the Japanese, a CBC reporter with beer on his breath – but only one appears more than fleetingly. This would be the unnamed former prime minister, a "burned-out politician" whose "lined round face was recognized by everyone in Canada."

I recognized him as Paul Martin, our twenty-first prime minister.

Rohmer's twenty-first prime minister is one of "the architects and the builders of the crisis." The emphasis, mine, is wholly justified. Death by Deficit is set in an imagined 2001, a future past, during the earliest days of the greatest crisis Canada has ever faced. Rohmer's twenty-second prime minister – known only, perhaps tellingly, as "Richard" – has just been sworn in when the economy collapses.

Not his fault. Blame Paul Martin, Jean Chrétien, Brian Mulroney, Pierre Elliott Trudeau and their years of reckless deficit spending. As the country's accumulated debt approaches one trillion dollars, the Japanese get jittery and start dumping their Canadian bonds and securities. Richard announces to the assembled media that he is certain the Americans and Europeans will do likewise.

Which they then do.

Which is meant to show how smart he is.

This reader thinks he's an idiot – and not just for that self-fulfilling prophecy. I'm sure the author wouldn't see it that way. Rohmer's Richard is a hero. The leader of a new party created by the merger of Reform and the Progressive Conservatives, he sees crisis as an opportunity to do whatever the hell he wants: slashing the civil service, privatizing Crown corporations, ending foreign aid, giving "Indians" the what for and, of course, slamming the door on immigration.

I once wrote about this type of story in reference to a fantasy Preston Manning published in the Globe & Mail. Masturbatory to those who favour the right, I called it porn. It is. The U of T's Sylvia Ostrey can hardly contain her excitement: "As usual, Richard Rohmer tells a gripping tale – but this time about fiscal policy!"

Former Progressive Conservative MP James Gillies joins in: "Death by Deficit uncannily captures the atmosphere which dominates the House, the caucus, and the Cabinet when there is a crisis."

Bullshit.

There's never been a crisis in which a PM has called for the RCMP to be brought in to House of Commons to quell dissent.

Not yet, anyway.

Richard snubs his Cabinet and meets with his neophyte caucus only to deliver a false primer on "the parliamentary principle of party discipline."

Enter that beery-breathed CBC reporter, who dares make the very observation that Richard did behind closed doors:

"You have a new, inexperienced Cabinet filled with people who don't even know how to find a washroom in this place, let alone how to handle this crisis. Don't you think you should get some help, call in the best brains in the country?"

A fair question, it's followed by others until Richard changes the channel (pun intended):

"There is no longer any justification for the continuation of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and its enormous drain on the public purse."

So ends the CBC. Cut the mike.

The prime minister never calls in "the best minds in the country", rather he phones Allan Greenspan Al Weinstock, Chairman of the Federal Reserve of the United States.

Weinstock states the obvious:

"…you'd better open the IMF and World Bank doors. At least knock on them and let them know you're coming."

As if he hasn't already helped enough, the Chairman of the Fed gives Richard some phone numbers.

Accompanied by Abbi Black, his very hot "director of international studies," Weinstock flies to Ottawa, susses out the situation, and presents the "Weinstock Solution": Washington will take on Canadian debt in exchange for free access to the country's fresh water, abrogation of cultural protection and unobstructed negotiations that would see British Columbia absorbed by the United States.

Richard accepts the proposal with thanks. No negotiation necessary. No need to call the President.

God, what a mess. It's not like we didn't see it coming.

Remember that 1993 episode of W5 devoted to New Zealand's meltdown?

Sure you do. After all, the reporter was "one of Canada's best, probably the best, TV news magazine producer, Eric Malling." American Abbi Black thinks so much of the show that she presents the entire transcript to Richard, his Minister of Finance, the President of the Treasury Board and, ultimately, the reader. Thirty pages of disjointed prose follow.

"There's been some criticism of the program," hot Abbi acknowledges, "but it's okay for our purposes."

Criticism? Well, yes. In fact, Malling's report inspired Linda McQuaig's Shooting the Hippo: Death by Deficit and Other Myths, which laid bare Malling's… let's say "stretching of the truth."

Published six months before Rohmer's novel, McQuaig's Shooting the Hippo: Death by Deficit and Other Myths dominated the 1995 bestseller lists and was shortlisted for a Governor General's Award for English-language Non-Fiction.

Rohmer's Death by Deficit is, of course, pure fiction. You can tell because he inflates Canada's 1993-94 debt, has it that Employment Insurance is a drain on our taxes and repeats that old saw about Francophones controlling the civil service.

Think of it all as a novelist's prerogative.

Still, I can't help but think that Rohmer believes these things, just as I'm certain he believes the PM's warped version of parliamentary democracy is spot on. Death by Deficit is our world, but a little off, like cheese that's been left out too long smeared over the pages of The Plot Against America. In Richard Rohmer's Canada a female Governor General delivers the "Speech From [sic] the Throne" decked out like Eliza Doolittle at the Embassy Ball.

Death by Deficit predicts a Chrétien government that paid no attention whatsoever to the growing national debt, when in fact it began paying off same with record surpluses. Credit belongs to Paul Martin, who is referred to in the novel as a "lying bastard".

I'll hand the author this: Paul Martin did indeed become our twenty-first prime minister. What's more, our twenty-second, Stephen Harper, leads a party born of a merger of Reform and the Progressive Conservatives. What Rohmer gets wrong is that the Harper government has run the largest deficits in Canadian history, raising us to unprecedented heights of public debt.

What he gets right is that, like Richard's party, Stephen's votes as one.

Sheep.

Trivia: In Generally Speaking: The Memoirs of Major-General Richard Rohmer, the author describes Paul Martin as "a good friend of mine." Rohmer isn't mentioned in Hell or High Water, Martin's autobiography.

Best passage:

It was Abbi Black who was the sight to behold. The PM's male hormone computer told him she was one of the most strikingly beautiful women he had ever laid eyes on. His computer went up a further notch when she slipped off her heavy coat and white scarf. This tall, high-healed, long-limbed, slim beauty was wearing a tight-fitting black woollen sheath with a gleaming row of golden buttons running down from the discretely low-cut bodice that covered her firm breasts (just the right size, according to his computer).
     His eyes took in the cascade of wavy ebony hair and the smooth, unlined forehead, the black, well-shaped eyebrows arched over eyes that held deep-brown pupils in their centres. Her nose was perfectly shaped, her high cheekbones led to a wide, full-lipped mouth with exquisite teeth.
     The PM liked – very much – what he saw, but there was serious business at hand, and he switched off his internal computer as he shook Abbi Black's soft, well-manicured hand.

Highest concentration of hyphens in Canadian literature (but that's not why I point it out).

Bonus:

The doors of the Speaker's chambers opened. There the Right Honourable Pearl McConachie stood in radiant white, her long form-fitting gown reaching to the scarlet carpet. He sleeved arms were partly concealed by a purple cape that sat on her slender shoulders. The wavy blond hair was fetched upwards, seemingly encased in a delicate, glittering tiara.

Object and Access: A well-padded 234-page hardcover in Tory blue boards, my copy set me back 60¢ last summer. Online booksellers offer a dozen or so at prices ranging from $4.11 to $38.74. Condition is not a factor. Pay no more than 60¢.

Death by Deficit was printed only once and has never come out in paperback, meaning all copies out there are first editions. Pay no more than 60¢.

Thirteen of our academic libraries have copies, as does Library and Archives Canada. Public library users will find the book in the Calgary Public Library, the Red Deer Public Library, the Medicine Hat Public Library and the Toronto Public Library.

Death by Deficit was read for Reading Richard Rohmer. 

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Resolved to Reading Richard Rohmer

Richard Rohmer Recycles (Again)

Starmageddon
Richard Rohmer
Toronto: Irwin, 1986

Starmageddon takes place in a future past. We know this because the Office of the Vice-President of the United States is held by a woman. The president calls her a bitch, primarily because she never supported Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative. It's the year 2000, seventeen years have passed since The Gipper initiated the program and – glory be – the thing works! Doesn't the VP have mud on her face!

Time, 4 April 1983

When an American general insults the South Koreans, the lady vice-president is sent off to do damage control. Air Force One has been booked by the Secretary of State, meaning she and her staff have to travel on a commercial airliner. Seats are booked on a 747 that will follow the very same route taken in 1983 by doomed Korean Air Lines Flight 007.

What could go wrong?

Plenty.

The captain is distracted by the vice-president, another pilot is distracted by the hot purser, and the first officer is legally blind. As a result, the wrong coordinates are entered into the navigation system and the 747 flies over a site where the Soviet Union is at that very moment testing its own strategic defence system.

Well, you can imagine.

Starmageddon is the twelfth book tackled as part of the Reading Richard Rohmer project. By now, I've come to expect a fair amount of self-plagiarism in the author's books. For the most part, this takes the form of passages, speeches, chapters and fictitious documents lifted from previous novels. Separation Two, the most egregious act of self-plagiarism in Canadian literature, is the most extreme example.

Starmageddon is something else altogether. Here Rohmer lifts and tweaks page after page from Massacre 747, his 1984 book on the Korean Air Lines disaster. Behold, fiction born of non-fiction:

Like a lumbering elephant, Flight 315 began to move down runway fourteen, accelerating rapidly toward the computer-precalculated speed of 196 miles per hour. When the speed was reached, the co-pilot called out "rotation"and the captain, both hands now on the wheel of the control column, hauled back smoothly and strongly. Instantly, the nose rotated up into the climb position, and the enormous aircraft, 196 feet between its blinking wingtip lights and 232 feet between nose and tail, leapt gracefully up into the black night. It was 2:02 on the morning of August 29.

— Starmageddon 

Like a lumbering elephant, Flight 007 began to move down runway 31L, accelerating rapidly toward the computer-precalculated speed at which the co-pilot would call for rotation. When the rotation came, the captain, both hands now on the wheel on the control column, hauled back smoothly and strongly. Instantly, the nose came up into the climb position, and the enormous aircraft, 196 feet between its blinking wingtip lights and 232 feet between nose and tail, leapt gracefully up into the black night. It was 12:24 on the morning of September 1.

— Massacre 747

August 29, not September 1. The flight and runway numbers are different, too. Again, Starmageddon is set in the future; albeit a future in which the lessons of Flight 007 are forgotten. Oh, people still remember the disaster, its a real topic of conversation, but that doesn't prevent this from happening:

At 5:53 the Soviet pilot reported: "804. I have executed the launch."
       In one second the lights of the rockets, as burning propellants thrust the missiles ever faster toward the target, had become mere pinpoints in the distance. The rockets headed unerringly for the brilliant navigation lights and the red rotating beacons of the target.
       Pilot 804 knew this his heart-seeking missile, if functioning properly, would have locked onto one go the river of intense heat that the target's huge engines pouring out into the frigid high-altitude air.

— Starmageddon 

At 18:26:20 the Soviet pilot reported: "805. I have executed the launch."
     In one second the lights of the rockets, as burning propellants thrust the missiles ever supersonically faster toward the target, had become mere pinpoints in the distance. The rockets headed unerringly for the brilliant navigation lights and the red rotating beacons of the target.
       The fighter pilot knew this his heart-seeking missile, if functioning properly, would have "locked on" to one go the target's huge engines pouring out a river of intense heat into the frigid high-altitude air.

— Massacre 747

One can understand Rohmer's temptation; Massacre 747 is one hell of a book, and it contains some of his very best writing:

The mortally wounded 747 cut through the night sky, illuminating it for miles around. With only one wing it slowly began to roll. It was like a comet. Its long, distinctive humplike cockpit and nose thrust ahead and clear of the ball of flame as if trying to run away, to avoid being consumed. Inside the roiling fire all was being engulfed or spit out by the explosion into the icy air. Bodies were torn apart. Blankets, luggage, seats, toys – everything movable or ripped away from floors and ceilings at the rear of the massive aircraft – were spewed out the hole where the tail had been.

— Massacre 747 

The flaming and mortally wounded 747 cut through the night sky, illuminating it for miles around. With only one wing, it slowly began to roll. Its long, distinctive humplike cockpit and nose thrust ahead and clear of the ball of flame, as if trying to avoid being consumed. Inside, the roiling fire engulfed all that was not spit out into the icy air by the explosion. Bodies were torn apart. Blankets, luggage, seats, toys – everything that was movable or had been ripped away from floors and ceilings at the rear of the massive fuselage – were spewed out the hole where the tail had been.

— Starmageddon

Who wouldn't want to revisit those images. Besides, it gave opportunity to fix that awkward sentence about the roiling fire.

Did anyone notice?

Books in Canada, May 1986

John Gellner, who wrote glowing reviews of both books for the Globe & Mail, didn't mention the self-plagiarism; as editor of the Canadian Defence Quarterly, you'd think he'd have noticed. But what interests me more is Irwin, which was then in its death throes. Did anyone there know that large portions of their big fiction offering where copied from a book being sold by a rival publisher?

Best sentence:

Pieces of the shattered engine blade penetrated the thin fuselage skin like a knife through gossamer.

— Starmageddon 

Pieces of the shattered engine blade penetrated the thin fuselage skin like a knife through gossamer.

— Massacre 747

Object: A 241-page hardcover in blue binding. The cover art by Peter Mossman reminds me of the very worst albums sold during my time at Sam the Record Man (1983-85).

Access: At eight, I count more copies in public libraries than academic libraries.

The hardcover first edition – there was no second printing – is more common than the mass market paperback. The only cover image I can find (right) comes courtesy of Toronto bookseller David Harris, who offers his copy for all of two dollars.

Worth every penny.

Related posts:

Recycling Richard Rohmer

Beware the Savage Jaw of 1981

Red Maple:
  How Canada Became the People's Republic of Canada in 1981
Kenneth McDonald
Richmond Hill, ON: BMG Publishing, 1975

A few years ago, Preston Manning published a short piece of fiction titled "2018: The new health care" in the pages of the Globe and Mail. It was a fantasy in which the former Reformer imagined a series of fantastical events leading to the abolition of Medicare. Think of those letters of old to Penthouse Forum: the dorm room was Alberta, cancer gave body to the blonde sorority girl and the Supreme Court was cast as her twin sister. George Pepki ignores the tie hanging on the doorknob and Julian Assange comes in for sloppy seconds.

At the time, I called it porn.

Kenneth McDonald's Red Maple is something altogether different. A horror novella, its Randall Flagg is Pierre Elliot Trudeau, the evil philosopher king who within thirteen years transforms an industrious constitutional monarchy into a lazy socialist republic.

Pierre Trudeau with Margaret Thatcher, 4 October 1981.

Its narrator is Alan Tremayne Jackson, the hardworking son of a hardware store owner. Dad dies, or so we surmise, leaving Al a thriving chain of stores and political opinions that date from the time of the Winnipeg General Strike. Fed by the former, blinkered by the latter, Al outlines the series of steps that resulted in the People's Republic of Canada.

At its heart, this is a political novella, which is not to say it lacks romance:

I met Gail about that time [1955] and though we saw as much of each other as we could I was working almost seventy hours a week and she was working, too, so one way or another it wasn't until 1962, six years after leaving university, that we got married.

Gail will be mentioned later, fleetingly, as a travelling companion. The lone image Al provides of the woman with whom he has shared the past two decades places her at a sewing machine in the family's guest bedroom. "We're very close, in that offhand, wholly Canadian way which avoids putting feelings into words," Al tells us.

The most complex character in McDonald's novella is Lester B. Pearson, but this is largely because Al is inconsistent in his portrayal. The hardware store heir first paints the former prime minister as a jovial incompetent, a man suited for nothing more than a life of drudgery within the civil service. Pay no mind to the opinion of the Nobel Committee, the man was a diplomat, and we all know that diplomats are nothing but parrots who repeat whatever governments tell them. Still, Al blames Pearson for setting Canada on the road to socialism. Could it be that Pearson was hiding his true persona and abilities? Might it be that he was in reality a clever, devious, evil man? Al can't be sure.

Trudeau is more of a cardboard cut-out. A man of immense ego who cares not for country but power, this unholy spawn of Quebec is part of a trinity that includes lifelong socialists Jean Marchand and Gérard Pelletier. Al considers Red Tories, men like Robert Stanfield and Bill Davis, to be "fellow travellers". Look not to Peter Lougheed as a saviour, he revealed himself as a socialist through the purchase of Pacific Western Airlines and in leveling "crushing royalties on Alberta's resource companies."

For the most part, the truly productive members of society, by which Al means businessmen, are too busy supporting their families to counter the growing threat. Besides, speaking out only draws further attention from increasingly hostile government agencies. True heroes are hard to find in this novella; I counted six, including John Bulloch (who wrote the Foreword to Red Maple) and Winnett Boyd (who joined the author in founding BMG, publisher of Red Maple). Gail should be jealous of the amount of space Boyd takes up in her husband's story.

Those who have read Red Maple – publishing history suggests there are many – may quibble with my description of the book as a novella. In response, I point out the obvious: Claude Wagner did not win the 1976 Progressive Conservative leadership race, Bell Canada was not nationalized, the country has never funded guerrillas to fight South Africa's Apartheid regime and our press is not controlled by a government body known as the Ministry of Information. The perceptive reader will note that fabrication is not limited to what at time of publication was the future. McDonald takes liberties with past events and one of the two – and only two – references is simply false. The most succinct example of Al as unreliable narrator might be this: "Canada itself had been at one time a haven of relative labor [sic] peace, particularly in the Quebec of Duplessis."

When reading any work of political fiction it s particularly important to keep in mind that the narrator is not necessarily the mouthpiece of the author. When Al expresses resentment towards those who would apply the word "racist" to Apartheid South Africa, we must remember that he and Kenneth McDonald are not one and the same. Not really. Likewise, Al's description of pre-colonial Canada as "an empty land" should not be taken as the author's. McDonald's BMG Publishing gave us Bilingual Today, French Tomorrow (1977) and Immigration: The Destruction of English Canada (1979), but that is not to say that he agrees with the views of bigoted authors J.V. Andrew and Doug Christie.

Remember, this is a work of fiction.

Best passage:

Object: My copy was a gift from Wollamshram of Wollanshram's Blog. A slim trade-size paperback. Nine of its 117 pages are taken up by an edited list of undergraduate courses offered students at York University in the 1974-75 academic year. "I don't think that I'm oversimplifying to read into the content of these courses an undue emphasis on negative factors," says Al. "There was certainly a shocking absence of constructive approaches."

Here's an example of the type of course that so disturbs our narrator:

 

Access: Library and Archives Canada, Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, the Toronto Public Library and most university libraries have a copy or two.

About a dozen copies are currently listed for sale online, most going for under ten bucks. One hopeful American bookseller is offering an ex-library copy for US$193.70.

Related posts:

Bilingualism Today, French Tomorrow and the Bigots of Yesteryear

Tan Ming's Disappointing Post-Apocalyptic World

The new Canadian Notes & Queries has landed, bringing with it another Dusty Bookcase column. The eighth to date, it's a review of Tan Ming, a fantastic, post-apocalyptic, pseudonymously self-published novel by electric organ pioneer Morse Robb.

So dull.

Oh, but doesn't Tan Ming look good? How about that cover!

It sounded good, too. In Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction 1895-1984, Washington State University professor Paul Brians begins his description thusly: "An amusing fantasy in which a department store window dresser falls in love with a robot mannequin and manages to conjure into its body the soul of a princess named Tan Ming from a postholocaust future." The ever-reliable Wikipedia once claimed that the novel inspired Mannequin, the romantic comedy starring Kim Cattrell and Andrew McCarthy.

 

You'll remember Mannequin for "Nothing's Going to Stop Us Now", which topped the American charts back in 1987. The new CNQ comes with music – much better music – in the form of a flexidisc by Al Tuck.

When was the last time you bought a magazine with a flexidisc?

The last I picked up was the April 1981 issue of Smash Hits. It came with a live recording of "Pretending to See the Future" by Orchestral Maneoeuvres in the Dark and "Swing Shift" by our own Nash the Slash.

Not to slight Hazel O'Connor  – or Messrs Lydon, Levine, Wobble and Weller  – but don't you prefer this?

The cover, as always, is by Seth. Inside you'll find Mike Barnes, Michel Basilières, Devon Code, Michael Deforge, Emily Donaldson, Jennifer A. Franssen, Lorna Jackson, Mark Anthony Jarman, Evan Jones, Adrian Michael Kelly, Mark Kingwell, Lewis MacLeod, Marion MacLeod, David Mason, Ross McKie, Robert Melançon, Shame Nielson, Patricia Robertson, Ray Robertson, Sean Rogers, Mark Sampson, Michael Schmidt, Norm Sibum, Dan Wells, Paul Wells, Bruce Whiteman and Robert Wiersema.

At $20 per annum, subscriptions are a great deal. You can get one here.

Remembering the Woman Who Couldn't Die

Arthur Stringer's The Woman Who Couldn't Die might not be one for the ages, but it does linger. The novel has stayed with me these past couple of years, due largely to the mystery surrounding heroine Thera. A Viking Princess and true ice queen, it's never quite clear that she isn't dead. I don't see that anyone has really tried to tackle this question; but then The Woman Who Couldn't Die isn't exactly a well-known work. The 1929 Bobbs-Merrill first edition was printed only once. How the novel came to be resurrected in this October 1950 edition Famous Fantastic Mysteries I do not know.

I probably make too much of the fact that Stringer died in September 1950, but I'm hoping that he might have seen the magazine before the end came. Rafael de Soto's cover image may be garish, silly and nonsensical, but the interior illustrations by the great Virgil Finlay are worthy of applause.

(Cliquez pour agrandir.)

Related post:

That's Entertainment!