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crackling plot and quirky characters
IF you've ever despaired over the dominance of The Da Vinci Code and the power of Pottermania, first-time Manitoba novelist Corey Redekop has written a book for you.
His novel Shelf Monkey imagines a group of book lovers (bookstore workers and librarians who go by the name the Shelf Monkeys) who strike back against the homogenization of the book world, forming a cult-like group dedicated to punishing the founder of a phenomenally popular televised book club.
Shelf Monkey is a book about bibliophiles, by a bibliophile (the author is the new library administrator in Thompson and a Free Press book reviewer), so it's best appreciated by readers who can catch the many literary references.
It's also a misfit's revenge fantasy. For Redekop's protagonist, Thomas Friesen, who tells the story through a series of e-mail letters to the Canadian author Eric McCormack (the real-life author of the dark fantasy First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women), "reading is more than mental exercise or entertainment.... It is our escape from our tormentors."
And so, when they feel that Monroe Purvis is threatening their refuge with a televised book club that propels quasi-literate saccharine to bestseller status, the Shelf Monkeys become vengeful.
It's a clever premise and there are some laughs in the novel, but the power of Redekop's satire is blunted by his selection of targets.
Unlike that other book-club founder, Purvis is not an ecumenically spiritual, liberal, black woman known for good works like building schools in Africa.
Safe target
Purvis is a populist, know-nothing, right-wing, flag-waving, Bible-thumping white man. Mary Walsh couldn't find a safer target.
There's also a little problem with Redekop's defenders of literacy. They aren't really very good at articulating the power of reading deep, rich books.
Here, for example, is Danae, the novel's love interest, denouncing Candace Bushnell, the author of Sex and the City:
"She's so fake, so facile. I know what she's trying to show, her characters are facile, but does her writing of them have to be as well? Hemingway wrote about the shallow and disenfranchised too, but he made them real, he made you care."
Maybe you could cite F. Scott Fitzgerald in a critique of Candace Bushnell, but Hemingway? Bearded guy? Manly? Liked guns? That Hemingway?
It's too bad that the satire isn't more effective, because Redekop shows some flair for character.
Here's a lovely description of the hard-edged manager of the bookstore where Friesen and several of the other Shelf Monkeys work:
"Miss Havisham without the whimsy... her hair, done back in a severe bun and stretching her skin so tightly the plates of her skull were rearranging themselves to accommodate the stress."
To be fair, these passages of strong writing are balanced by over-written and under-edited sections that may be the legacy of the book's origin in the annual Three Day Novel Contest.
Here, he mixes three metaphors and deploys two clich?s inappropriately in three sentences: "I was a pariah for a day. Warren became a chameleon, blending into the shadows whenever I approached. Danae pulled an H.G. Wells, disappearing completely from my radar."
Overall, though, the crackling plot and quirky characters are enough to ensure that, despite some flaws, no real-life Shelf Monkeys will be targeting Redekop for crimes against literature.
Bob Armstrong is a Winnipeg playwright with a penchant for satire.
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