Into the Phantom Zone

The Amazing Absorbing Boy is a very funny book. But it is also many other things. Like the best of novels, it is as layered and enjoyable as a profound dream. It surprises, it amuses, it intrigues and it troubles. And, like a dream, it moves simultaneously through the quotidian details of daily life and into the deep levels of the psyche.

At first glance it is a gentle Candide-like satire of Canadian society, specifically Toronto, experienced over a period of two years by a somewhat reluctant would-be immigrant from Trinidad—16-year-old Samuel.

Also at first glance, the book is of a certain genre that has existed since travellers started recounting their travels, which in Canada begins significantly with the journals of the first European settlers—Susanna Moodie’s books are a good example. It is possible to read this book as the tale of an immigrant bewildered by a new land and its peculiar customs. The novel also falls under that wider umbrella that is sometimes defined as literature from elsewhere—that is, literature by Canadians, but from a perspective that is outside the physical and cultural boundaries of the country.

But there is a book within the book, and the naive tone, the comedic situations and the weaving in of references to comic book characters form a masterful construction that frame something profound.

The novel most certainly transcends these genres and builds upon them a universally pertinent and poignant depiction of confusion, melancholy and yearning, where the term “immigrant” means leaving one land for another and also leaving oneself for the unknown.

Seen from that perspective, The Amazing Absorbing Boy is more Bildungsroman than Voltairian satire, for the hero’s real goal is not only to understand Canada, but also to achieve maturity and self-understanding.

The story begins shortly after the death of Samuel’s mother and his subsequent departure for Toronto, to live with his eccentric and enigmatic father, whom he has not seen for ten years. Samuel knows Canada only through Captain Canuck and Wolverine comic books and some dubious information provided by a friend: “Shave ice does fall from the sky. In all different colour. Lime and orange and chocolate.” And “these Cyanadian people have a special gland below they armpit which does keep away the cold.”

In Toronto, specifically in Regent Park, a social housing neighbourhood, home to low-income and marginalized residents, a great many of whom are immigrants, Samuel lives essentially like an orphan, without parents, relatives or companions. His father mostly is not there, and when he is, he remains silent, smoking cigarettes on the balcony or watching episodes of MacGyver. Samuel’s father is one of the marvellous creations in the book, so enigmatic and eccentric that one sometimes wonders if he is real and not some dark presence from the comic book world that Samuel half-inhabits.

Samuel explores, first finding contact in a local coffee shop, not the gentrified kind that serve cappuccino and latte, but one of the chains that cater to the proletariat, places that are cheap and uncomfortable, but are also staffed and frequented by immigrants who find there a social world that is parallel to the one they hope to enter. And when I say immigrants I mean the not white, the not educated, the not affluent, the not fluent in English.

From Regent Park, Samuel ventures into the city, working at a gas station, a junk shop, a video rental store and eventually becoming a college student. He frequents Union Station and the central library, and attends a demonstration at city hall. The picaresque, satirical and humorous qualities of the novel come to the fore as Samuel encounters eccentric characters, both immigrants and citizens, who populate a bizarre world.

At one point he ends up at the Art Bar, a real place as far as I know, where he experiences a pretentious and mystifying bohemia. The author indulges himself here in some gentle mocking of his own profession, where a man in a safari hat reads a poem about his love for rats and weasels, and someone else has been writing a story for seven years but cannot get beyond the opening line. A famous author advises aspiring authors to stop writing immediately and burn what they already have.

The city that Samuel moves through is composed only of public spaces—parks, shops, libraries—yet they are paradoxically places of the utmost isolation. In this isolation Samuel’s mind moves between the town he left behind in Trinidad and an odd parallel universe, derived from comic books, that he sometimes calls the Negative World or the Phantom Zone. He imagines himself touching objects and getting visions of other people touching those same objects and connecting with their thoughts. Through that touching, he becomes Memory Lad or Astonishing Connection Boy. He can thus make contact. “I liked the phrase and it made me feel like a shadowy hero with a secret identity. Shy and often puzzled on the surface but understanding everything, all the confusing Canadian customs and laws, in my hero identity.”

This identity allows Samuel to be anyone he wants to be. Or so he consoles himself. But as much as he can choose to be anybody, nobody is interested. He remembers a schoolteacher telling him that orphans were doomed to become pickpockets and petty thieves, “But I had thought of other orphans, Batman and Spider-Man, and most of the X-Men and the Legion who refused to give in; each evening locating their special power and patiently understanding how to properly use it.”

Samuel’s comic book world gives him courage and brings to the fore qualities that he innately possesses: compassion, humour and, above all, a good-natured hope.

Canada’s vaunted (and rightly so) grand experiment of multiculturalism, when experienced through the eyes of a single individual, not as a sociological concept or political strategy, is a place of many solitudes where identities collide more than coalesce. One night Samuel looks at his ill-tempered and uncaring father, hunched up before the television, worried and frightened. “I wondered what was going through his mind. From his posture I felt he might be repeating, Trapped! Trapped! Not too long ago, I felt close to hating him—now I just felt sorry for him.”

Trying to come up with a description of a typical Canadian, Samuel concludes that it is “someone who fussed all the time. About everything. Toronto was getting too modern and ugly. Toronto was stuck in the past. Too many immigrants. Too few … Too much hockey violence. Too little. Too hot. Too cold.”

The book concludes on a bittersweet note, with the impending eviction of the residents of Regent Park and its forthcoming demolition. Samuel’s father makes what might be a final disappearance. And when Samuel remembers his town of Mayaro in Trinidad, he now sees it in his mind becoming overlaid with tall glass buildings and red-leafed trees and something like Union Station right in the middle of the town.

For Samuel the past has receded too far to be reclaimed. What remains to be seen is whether he will also leave his comic book alternate universe and find a real Canada. As for the amazing absorbing boy of the title, he is the one extravagantly named character who is not from a comic book but is a real boy. I leave it to the reader to discover his identity, and his significance.