Loan Ranger

Dating to 1898, the unusual building at the centre of Anakana Schofield’s latest novel is old by Vancouver standards. Situated in the Mount Pleasant neighbourhood, the fantastical Library of Brothel represents an increasingly threatened world view, one that values expertise, rejects conformity, and eschews the internet.

The Library of Brothel is a “human library,” meaning that experts staff an impressive collection of themed rooms, available to be booked for a fee and each bearing a hyperspecific name. A small sampling: the Men Recovering from Being Born in the 1950s Room, the Astrology for Houseplants and Horses Room, and the Dreams, Despair and Dismissal: The History of Pakistan’s Cricket Team Room. Like Jorge Luis Borges’s Library of Babel, with its possibly infinite spaces, this is a structure with elastic dimensions. As the narrative unfolds, more and more rooms are revealed, including the Thirty Years’ War Rooms, which take up an entire corridor. Visitors can also reserve the Disappointments Room, where they’re therapeutically treated with a cattle prod, the Napping Chamber, and the Human Car Wash Room, which is notable for having “no intellectual component” but plenty of soapy water.

A lack of intellectualism is noteworthy because providing esoteric knowledge is the library’s raison d’être, at least these days. In the ’70s, the building was a haven for free love and booze, but now the libidinal element, while still very much in play, is channelled first through the mind. “Do not anticipate anything except intellectual stimulation,” the house rules state. “Physical contact is at the discretion of your Host.” The institution’s workers — experts in giraffe mating, eighteenth-century tax ballads, accidents in civil aviation, and more — are there to “preach the prophecy of having more sex by being less stupid.”

Other goals, offered elsewhere, are to counter the effects of the internet (“We welcome you to come here, offline, and feel alive”) and the anomie of modern life (“We are necessary because humans no longer look at each other”). Schofield — who has previously centred characters marginalized by mental illness, poverty, age, and gender — is keenly attuned to existential challenges. Surrounded by properties marked with land assembly signs, the Library of Brothel is under threat: “The developers have their sniper eye on it.” Vancouver’s affordability crisis means several employees live out of their vehicles in the back alley, to the chagrin of some of the neighbours. As the narrator puts it, “The city is swallowing itself and eating the poor for breakfast.”

As the library reckons with the larger economic forces that jeopardize its existence, it tackles the problem within its rooms, namely “the disaster that is the human attempting to relate to the human,” with resourcefulness and energy. However, inculcating the desire for arcane knowledge, facilitating eclectic experiences, and managing a seemingly boundless ecosystem full of staff and clients is complex, messy work. Despite its preference for unpredictability, the whole system depends on rules — a lot of them. The novel begins with the house rules, which forbid certain objects and behaviours, such as dogs, guitar playing, mouth organs, instant noodles, and sniffing, but new rules continuously crop up: “We have implemented an outright ban on dermatologists with wispy-looking hair.”

Workers complain, go on sick leave, and feud with one another. Visitors are occasionally ejected or banned but mostly tolerated, eccentricities and all. Equipment fails, accidents happen (beware the Human Car Wash Room), and people’s boundaries are crossed. The microcosm is an imperfect, dynamic experiment in connection.

As Schofield frames it, some friction is necessary to “feel alive.” The library doesn’t promise harmonious coexistence among its community, nor do its rooms offer an easy or purely pleasurable path to knowledge. Indeed, the experience often contains surprises, disagreements, and even chaos. In other words, it’s a deeply human space, where negotiating these challenges is as integral as anything else.

The book is constructed like a series of rooms we dip in and out of, guided by one collective voice, presumably that of the employees. We are being addressed not as readers but as prospective clients. The narrator is at once cajoling, bossy, and winsome, declaring the dos and don’ts with authoritative vehemence one moment (“Nobody is permitted to leave their coat on the Coat Rack”) and celebrating the library’s idiosyncratic spirit the next (“We remain aged cheddar to the slippy-slappy slice”). This voice is alive with Schofield’s unique brand of irreverent wit.

As for individual characters, we’re introduced to a variety of them, like the expert from the Henry George Room, named for a nineteenth-century economist and proponent of land taxation, who reluctantly works the Emperor Nero Room when a colleague calls in sick. “I’m not sexy!” he objects. “I don’t know how to look Roman. I’m from Taiwan.”

Then there’s Scrabble Woman, whose happiness is directly tied to the Scrabble Room. The game is “the only pursuit that has called her in this lifetime,” and the rewards of her vocation are clear: “She is pleased to simply be in a room with the possibility of seven letters and a triple word score.” In order to ensure the continued existence of her employer, she has become an adept problem solver. Along with the equally capable Security Officer, she essentially runs the entire organization, even if she technically has a boss, Noble Leader. “Like many bosses,” Schofield writes of the cheap and selfish supervisor, “she isn’t very useful if you have a problem. But she wants to make sure you hear and rehear her. The weaponization of greeting.” As much as we sympathize with Scrabble Woman while rapacious developers and venture capitalists encroach on her world, we never really get to know her.

Schofield’s other novels are Malarky, from 2012; Martin John, from 2015; and Bina, from 2019. Each is driven by individual characters and voice, achieving profundity by way of the absurd and darkly comic. What Library of Brothel lacks in emotional intensity and intimacy, it makes up for with its inventiveness. As I read, I thought of Georges Perec’s Life a User’s Manual, which details every room of a Parisian apartment building in maximalist fashion as a way to tell the stories of its inhabitants and pose larger questions about art and meaning-making, and of David Markson’s The Last Novel, which obliquely chronicles an artist’s self-understanding through his anecdotes about others.

“Most people, in reckoning with our enterprise, fail to appreciate that our intentions lie outside the predictable path of consumerist calculation,” Schofield writes. “We aren’t interested in you. Don’t come here. Go elsewhere.” Library of Brothel is perhaps not tailor-made for the demands of the fiction market. It features no star-crossed hockey players, benignly relatable protagonists, or thrilling plot points. But I’d argue that it’s a more interesting work: playful, spirited, and peculiar, buoyed by its love of language and the richness of our world. I’m a convert. I have thrown away my phone, and you can find me in the Experimental Psychology and Mystifying Nature of Eels Room.