DEBUT DRAWS ON HUMOUR
Shilo Jones is a serious writer who likes to fold comedy into the mix
So is Shilo Jones delivering a poison pen letter to Vancouver with his debut novel?
The question leads to a moment of silence from the 40-year-old author of On the Up, a wild ride of a book that lifts the lid off the more nefarious underlife of the West Coast city.
“I would say first of all that it would be hard to be engaged to a place without caring about it deeply,” Jones says carefully. After all, he remains at heart a Lower Mainland boy, despite the fact he and his family now live in the more tranquil environs of Kelowna.
There’s another pause. And then: “Poison pen? Sure. But Vancouver can present more than one narrative of itself.”
One distinctly unflattering narrative emerges through the bloodshot prism of Mark Ward, an Afghan War veteran under siege from PTSD and the machinations of a criminal brother to whom he owes a debt. Mark surveys the city he loves and judges it too young to have the kind of “richly sedimented history ” that creates something vital.
Instead, Vancouver “went straight from sucking her thumb to being embalmed.”
But Mark doesn’t stop there. “And as the corpse moulders the devout rise ever more vehement in her defence, their lives invested and committed, fawning over her, shrieking over her, shrieking look how pretty she is! How gorgeous! While her limbs rot off and her belly splits open ... . ”
But, Mark says, Vancouver can still look “real nice if you cover your nose.”
Jones’s publisher, McClelland & Stewart, calls On the Up “a wickedly funny debut” and “a biting satire” — both of which it is. There are some ruthlessly funny eviscerations of Vancouver’s overheated housing market. The novel also takes the mickey out of provincial politics, dares to lampoon environmentalists and modern technology, and needles the city’s low-lifers with the enthusiasm of an Elmore Leonard or Quentin Tarantino.
At first, it seems difficult to associate all this with the soft-spoken, somewhat professorial individual sitting across from me in a Toronto interview room.
“My first story was about gnomes when I was six or seven,” Jones says mildly. “But I always wanted to write.”
While securing degrees from both Simon Fraser University and University of British Columbia, Jones was also learning about a wider world. When this new novel talks about concrete saws, Jones knows of what he writes. In one of his other lives he worked as a stonemason.
The world of the novel is presented through the shifting perspectives of three main characters. There’s Mark, the perpetually beleaguered war veteran. There’s the financially vulnerable Jasmine Bansal, a fledgling journalist who’s also on a mission of revenge that engulfs her in the world of real estate. And there’s Carl (Blitzo) Reed, a zonked-out ecologist whose grasp of reality is so nebulous that he thinks his pot-bellied pig talks to him.
The lives of these three collide in connection with a questionable condo development in North Vancouver. And there’s a sobering undercurrent to their story, because these three seem trapped in their personal environments and vulnerable to broader social convulsions threatening Vancouver.
“What I really likes about writing this book is that these characters allowed me to parse through various connections,” Jones says. “So we have Vancouver real estate tied up with dirty money, which is then tied to all sorts of other industries.”
The novel can be biting in its social comment. There’s an unsettling chapter in which Jasmine, still a novice in the world of real estate, presides over an open house where an offshore buyer is clearly offended not to be dealing with a realtor of proper Asian-Canadian background.
Jones found a scene like this one particularly difficult to write.
“The book was originally my graduate thesis at UBC. I was nervous about it because I wasn’t sure how those scenes were going to be taken. There’s a fine line between holding a mirror up to the culture to be critical of it and allowing it to be taken as an endorsement. But the response was overwhelmingly positive.”
Elsewhere, he happily set loose his love for comic mischief with those pages that see Jasmine visiting a strip club called Cherry’s, or with the chapter in which he places a whacked-out Carl behind the wheel of a Tesla self-drive car.
“The Tesla chapter is all imagination,” he says. “I own a Subaru.”
Jones is fascinated by how society functions — or rather how it malfunctions. And he hopes he has created a balance between comedy and seriousness.
“There’s an undercurrent of real emotional hardship here,” he says. “Carl and Mark are two men who are both suffering in certain ways and confronted with their own inadequacies. Carl is living a life that is in some sense an echo of an idea that was powerful 40 years ago. Mark is obviously dealing with the effects of war.”
As for Jasmine, she is still suffering after the death of a loved one and is “hell-bent on retribution.”
Jones makes a strong case for folding humour into the mix.
“I believe serious writing can be fun to do and to read,” he says, adding lately he has been reading such classic satirists as Evelyn Waugh and Sinclair Lewis. “We have a tendency to ignore just how powerful humour can be. It can be redemptive. It can connect us. It can define our own falsehoods and give us a sense that maybe we can move beyond that.”
As for Vancouver itself, he still likes it, warts and all.
“The Lower B.C. Mainland culture is fascinating to write about. These are three characters in three different lives and social milieu who are each struggling in their own way. In that sense Vancouver is fascinating — an amazing beautiful city that has so much else going on beneath the surface.”
We have Vancouver real estate tied up with dirty money, which is then tied to all sorts of other industries.