A curmudgeon’s return to Britain unleashes bombastic diatribes
April 2008
His mum’s just kicked the bucket in Blighty and his wife’s bonking a painter in Ottawa, so grouchy old Will Prentice, adman extraordinaire, figures that after ma’s funeral and with no pressing reason to return to Canada, he might as well spend some time travelling about England. Will is an ex-pat who’s having a mid-life crisis about whether he truly belongs in…
A burning passion for books creates some heated satire
September 2007
The four central characters in Corey Redekop’s invigorating first novel are bibliognostic bibliophiles, bibliomaniacal and bibliophagic, who work for a bibliopole and indulge in biblioclasm. They probably read the LRC. They labour in the mega-bookstore READ (pronounced both “reed” and “red,” possibly depending on whether you are going in or coming out), an Indigo/Chapters warehouse of soulless commercialism in Winnipeg in which the operative principle is not the value of books but the sale of…
Halley’s Comet inspires a time-bending, heart-stopping tour de force
June 2006
Whether recreating belle époque France in Atmosphères Apollinaire, Marco Polo’s travels in The Lion of Venice, the Tibet of a hundred years ago in Invading Tibet, or Spain’s collapse into civil war in Slow Lightning, Mark Frutkin characteristically displays an astringently lyrical narrative…
An important era in Toronto theatre gets a superficial treatment
September 2005
When Ernest Rawley, Manager of the Royal Alexandra Theatre, wrote in Saturday Night Magazine in 1937 that there was a dire lack of professional theatre in Toronto, he was not referring to Canadian product. Since 1839, when its first theatre was built in a converted carpentry shop at the corner of King and…
A boy from the Black Country’s painful but hilarious search for self
May 2005
Royston Tester’s novel is set largely in the Black Country, an area of industrial development to the north and west of Birmingham in the English West Midlands, comprising a relentless stretch of iron foundries, lock-, chain- and nail-making factories, lime kilns, collieries and canals, “red by night and black by day,” as a local saying has…
Two novels explore the chaos and creativity of the actor’s life
October 2004
Actors. The Greek word for them was hypocrite, Hitchcock called them cattle, but Hamlet said they were the abstracts and brief chronicles of the time, and, since one man in his time plays many parts, theatre folk have proved a useful literary device over the years when it comes to exploring the darker side of the condition humaine…
