A Spirited Debacle

The title of Michael Eddy’s smart, sprawling, and very funny first novel refers to a jewel. Plucked from a ten-year-old maharaja during the British annexation of Punjab, couriered to England by Lord Dalhousie — whose father founded the Nova Scotia university — the Koh‑i‑Noor eventually worms its way inside the cross pattée of various crowns made for British royalty, “a talisman of success in a prehistory of brutality.” It’s also the name of a new telecommunications system and line of self-charging phones from Hulitron, a fictional electronics company.

The phones enjoy little airtime in Koh‑i‑Noor, but as symbols larded with history, these solar-powered gadgets, each a “palm-sized crystal prism,” with their promises of sustainability and regenerative power, speak volumes. Political agency mobilizes through usage — or, to call on a less corporate word, community. A Hulitron spokesperson declares that they “will be dictating the terms of global energy!” These devices highlight the persistent anti-colonial and anti-capitalist themes at work in Eddy’s writing — and, significantly, the way in which these themes can be co-opted and fetishized — while hinting at the book’s prismatic, interconnected structure.

Set in the late 2010s, the story zigzags across countries and continents, its passport impastoed with stamps: Canada, the United States, China, Cuba. We visit the Monastery of Mount Carmel in Niagara Falls, Ontario, step aboard a sleeper car destined for Shijiazhuang, and even spend some time scanning high school yearbooks at the Lethbridge Public Library in Alberta.

The bulk of the action centres on the entrepreneurial travails of one family. Ken and Karen Lohan are Colorado Buddhists who have resettled in Halifax. They operate a natural cosmetics company, Maitreya, a name that refers to “the prophetic future Buddha.” Their children, Sean and Jeanette, pursue abstruse spiritual quests of their own. Sean, a recent Dalhousie grad with a head full of theory, decamps to China, where he establishes a “social enterprise” called Village Direct, which is “a partnership between practitioners of traditional farming and consumers, without profit-seeking go‑betweens.” Jeanette changes her name to Cassandra and starts to work for GeekUnit, “a subsidiary of the consumer electronics giant BestTech,” while spending “a prolific amount of time” contributing online fan fiction to The Universe.

This framing works well. Eddy writes with sincerity, even about Ken and Karen’s absurd marketing schemes: “Advocates of natural products still have to distinguish themselves against the powerful ideology of efficiency.” When one of Sean’s teachers dismisses hippie art as politically insubstantial, he earnestly struggles to reconcile his familial loyalties within an unwieldy academic paradigm: “His parents’ practices weren’t bad, Sean rationalized, but they didn’t help the cause of anti-capitalism — or did they?”

Beyond the immediate Lohan clan is Sean’s childhood friend Jerry, a Baptist coder with a heart of gold, who does contract scraping for Gazillion, another tech company with designs to “democratize information, to map and scan all spaces, and to digitize all books.” Samantha, a sociology student, is Sean’s girlfriend. While working for an NGO in Cuba, she meets a representative from Hulitron who informs her that the company has been using forced and child labour. She returns to the groves of Canadian academe with a warning: “It is slavery and it is in all of their pockets.”

The third-person narration shifts its focus among these characters, each with their own lexical idiosyncrasies. When Ken and Karen decide to move, their daughter must change high schools, “which she wasn’t too thrilled about, for real.” That wonderfully gratuitous phrase “for real” is Jeanette/Cassandra exactly. Eddy is an accomplished stylist, whose buoyant prose recalls the jazzy excesses of the great American novelist Stanley Elkin:

Notice how Eddy’s verbal precision turns an innocuous description into a heady reading experience. On the banks of the Maumee River, just outside of Toledo, Ohio, an incoming storm announces itself with “a deviant circus drumroll of hail and drizzle.”

Eddy is refreshingly unafraid of digression. When Jerry arrives at Gazillion’s headquarters in San Francisco, he receives an expletive-filled rant from an executive named Ron, which appears in full. Later, Sean reads a PDF of The Bourne Directive, a zany, post-apocalyptic novel written by his sister. His four-page synopsis and reaction are included: “Sean felt caged by the story, the language used from some obscure micro-generation, the why of it glossed copiously in reference or allegory or something.”

The prose here is self-conscious and playful, from the overwrought adverbs —“trilaterally upbeat,” “winching groaningly”— to the time-stamped parentheticals of cultural detritus: “Many viewers are surely familiar with The DaVinci Code (2003).” On occasion, characters seem to speak through these details, commenting on the very text we’ve been reading. “Is alliteration sexy?” one user asks on The Universe. “No, the chat bubble finally concluded. Alliteration brings attention to your writing. The writer looms behind a (masculine) keyboard.”

This self-consciousness reaches its apogee when a voice intrudes on the action. “The scattered pathways of the characters in the book all circle a vacuous fear holding the middle,” it says. “The fear of having no value.” The new narrator proceeds to assess Eddy’s style and ethical architecture: “It is not bad writing (some of it is kind of hilarious — except the copious alliteration, which draws attention to the author), but the extent to which it reflects ‘new pathways of allyship,’ as the publisher claims, is, to my mind, questionable.”

Novels that flaunt their fictitiousness risk cheapening their moral aims, and it’s a measure of Eddy’s skill, both as a satirist and as a realist, that Koh-i-Noor rises above its own writerly play. The metafictional interruptions, however rambunctious, are of a piece with the text’s world and not extraneous to it. In the final pages, word of Hulitron’s slave labour practices is unleashed: “Okay, so the book is published. Outrage spreads. It’s too much for people to face!” Koh-i-Noor phones smoulder in the street. Global boycotts are general. Workers and students strike. “Bank accounts are hacked and the money is redirected to autonomous citizen funds.” Does this reality exist inside the book or outside of it? The swift paragraphing and online lingo —“Police begin walking off the job in disgust. lol”— suggest that we are once again deep inside the mind of Cassandra, tooling away at her The Universe fanfic. And what of it? We retain the power, the collective privilege, to disengage, to resist, to opt out. Sure, a real revolution will always seem “sketchy and romantic,” but, as Cassandra says, it’s “a place to start.”