Blazing Literati

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 books. They are also at the core of the shelf monkeys, an assortment of shop assistants, librarians, book reviewers and other social misfits described by their cultish leader Aubrey Fehr as bibliobibuli, “people who believe in the sanctity of the written word, and despise those who would abuse the privilege.” They meet on a regular basis, adopt twee literary pseudonyms (Gandalf, Offred, Queequeg), hold trials of books that any member abominates (called “montages” to recall the protagonist in Fahrenheit 451), then burn a token copy of those titles unanimously condemned in what Aubrey describes as “an incendiary biblioclasm of soul-soothing proportions.”

This bookish passion is reflected in the novel’s structure, the spine of which, so to speak, consists of a series of emails sent by Thomas Friesen, the group’s acolyte and authorial alter ego, to the very real Eric McCormack, the Canadian fiction writer who also obligingly provides a puff for the back cover. Thomas, failed lawyer and bookstore assistant (Redekop has a law degree and is a librarian in Manitoba), is on the run, pursued by police and media for some unspoken and unspeakable crime against Munroe Purvis, an American talk-show host who promotes and, through his company MuPu, publishes very short, very bad and very conservative novels for a very big profit. Thomas is determined to tell his own story to a real novelist, while interspersed with his emails (dispatched as resourcefully as ever Clarissa’s letters were sent under the nose of the lustful Lovelace) are newspaper, medical and police reports through which we simultaneously discover the progress of the manhunt. That it has something to do with burning, we are never in doubt.

Despite Thomas’s claims to be chronically, pill-poppingly depressed, his epistolary style is positively jaunty and his descriptions of the weekly coven initially suggest something rather more sophomorically nerdy than threatening. Even the agonies daily endured at READ under the dictatorial rule of the acidic Page Adler (too obvious a name, too melodramatically villainous a portrait), where “the Purv’s” giant head, like a polystyrene Big Brother, oversees the hot-selling books recommended on his television program, strike a quintessentially comic note. Aubrey, white but dreadlocked, Danae, the zaftig deputy manager with whom Thomas falls deeply in lust, and Warren, a muscled giant who supplements his income by testing new cosmetic medications, are deft with the smart remark, if sometimes of a sitcom variety, and Redekop self-consciously showers their conversation with authors, characters and book titles. These are people, we are repeatedly told, who are in retreat from a philistine world in which their love of books has subjected them since childhood to humiliation and abuse, and although READ is hell, at least it’s their hell.

Indeed, this vast world takes on its own topography: “Aubrey faked a left at Hockey, went right instead down Football/Soccer … [through] the U.S. History/Performing Arts Criticism cloverleaf, and … began to lose steam at the Spirituality/Self-Help junction,” and as Thomas wanders through the bookshelves, every book suggests sexual fantasy: “Tom Clancy sex was … very technical, dry and republican, heavily reliant on manuals … Orwellian sex was clinical yet desperate, alongside a picnic of fresh jam and coffee … Danae fondled my Balzac … I’d move my attentions south towards her Anaïs Nin, and she’d reciprocate by stroking my Dickens.” It is a world in which books are people and more insidiously, as we are to discover, people can be treated as books.

This intermingling of life and literature, hitherto lightsomely expressed, lies at the centre of the narrative, the fulcrum of which is the successful disruption of the appearance at the store of MuPu’s star author, the hapless Agnes Coleman, author of the best-selling My Baby, My Love, a work described in the New York Times as “almost staggeringly idiotic.” After the revelations this provokes, events take on a darker hue and the issues of value, judgement and responsibility that Redekop has been scratching at throughout the book take on a larger dimension: initially, he has dwelt on questions like “what makes a good writer?” and “do you think we’re snobs?,” but these are now subsumed into a larger argument when Aubrey assembles the shelf monkeys to declare a fatwa on bad writing. “We’re elitists, that’s all,” Thomas protests. “We’re not terrorists.” “Why can’t we be terrorists, Thomas?” asks Aubrey. “What’s the difference between us and them?” When Thomas flippantly replies, “At least terrorists, they get the job done,” he realizes that he might just as well have “signed [his] own death warrant.”

The historical resonances of the burning of books are obvious enough and Redekop consistently invokes them if only to contrast the small scale of the group’s activities with the larger political and religious atrocities of the past. The participants in the book-burning ceremonies resort thinly to comments like “It’s just for fun” and “it’s all symbolic,” but although Warren also describes them as “a campfire sing-along,” he then adds “with the cultish overtones of Jonestown,” and in the latter half of the book Redekop is striving mightily to convince us that this hitherto self-absorbed group of bookish fanatics can convincingly migrate from the world of Catcher in the Rye to that of Lord of the Flies.

Inevitably, he pays the price of the earlier self-deprecating humour as Thomas searches for explanations of why he and the shelf monkeys would fall prey to the very mass hysteria he had so contemptuously witnessed at the Agnes Coleman book signing. His account of the climactic events becomes ever more shrill and insistent as Redekop, too astute an observer not to recognize the shaky ground on which he is treading, tries to counter the obvious objections. Although his desire to broaden the scope of the novel is admirable, one is left wondering whether he is unduly relying on the definition of a good writer that he had earlier put into Thomas’s mouth: “Style. Characters. Plot. And the ability to abandon all three when necessary.”

With typical circumspection Redekop allows this prescription to apply to a bad writer too, but he is certainly not that. Nor need he dwell, as does his alter ego early in the novel, on the “almost factor”: “I was almost a lawyer. Almost successful … In school, almost invisible … By girlfriends, almost loved. I was almost. Winnipeg was the perfect location for me. Almost the longitudinal centre of the country. Almost big. Almost important. Almost more than a punchline on The Simpsons…” Shelf Monkey may be his first novel, but it’s decidedly more than almost.