Leon Rooke and his narrative hijinks
Philip Marchand says it’s great fun but warns some readers to beware all that manic energy
wo or three centuries ago,
the novel was maturing into its classic form as a realistic study of fully individualized characters. Novelists no longer gave their characters such names as Mr. Thwackum and Mrs. Grizzle. Instead they began giving characters such names as Emma Woodhouse and Edgar Linton — normal, everyday names. By the same token, we know the postmodern novel has abandoned realism and fully individualized characters when characters’ names are ViVa Straight and Perchance Quickly. Those are two main characters, if that’s the word, in Leon Rooke’s The Beautiful Wife. Rooke has never been a writer in the realist mode — his bestknown novel, Shakespeare’s Dog, was narrated by an Elizabethan canine. ( In The Beautiful Wife, we also hear the voice of a very strange cat.) In the new novel, Rooke seems to have outdone himself in wild, complex anti-realism. The narrative is steeped in parody, caricature, verbal riffs uttered by characters with minimal motivation, surrealism ( there are numerous ghosts plus a hotel elevator that does not rise vertically, but shoots off at an angle) and general comic bumptiousness. To summarize plot and character is utterly contrary to the novel’s spirit and technique, but since Rooke himself, at one point, provides a ( sorely needed) 12-point summary of the book’s events, we can give it a try. The novel begins with a young woman, ViVa Straight, and her mother, Vira Straight, flying to the Dominican Republic for a vacation. ViVa has been
Tsuspended from her job with the immigration board of Canada for championing the cause of a woman named Marchusa, a refugee from the Philippines of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos. The plane is mysteriously diverted to a Philippines resort, but ViVa and Vira happily adjust — in fact, ViVa has a rapturous night of love with a handsome gentleman named Monsieur Epee, despite the latter’s marriage to a “ beautiful wife” with five children. Meanwhile, ViVa’s brother Finn, a slumlord in Winnipeg, is estranged from his wife, Betty, and emotionally involved with the tenant in his basement apartment, who is none other than Marchusa. Their relationship is somewhat limited by the fact that Marchusa is dead and exists only in ghostly form.
Another major presence is the “ author,” who also seems to be a character in the story named James Taterfield. The author/ Taterfield is certainly no omniscient third- person narrator — he hires a “ research bureau” to help him with his story and characters, and part of the novel is taken up with a quarrel between the two. The researcher will do things like point out certain actions of a character and then admonish the author, “ You have been extremely lax in failing to portray this.” Deadpan footnotes, written, one assumes, by the “ author” ( although don’t bet the farm on this) can also be argumentative. “ Such language you put in ViVa’s mouth,” an outraged character is quoted in a footnote, after ViVa uses the F word in the main narrative. The characters, never clearly delineated to begin with, become ever more fluid and shape- shifting. Monsieur Epee’s spouse is always “the beautiful wife,” but that same title is applied to ever-greater numbers of married women, including ViVa Straight.
“ It’s all very complicated,” Vira Straight remarks. She’s not kidding. Rooke’s narrative reminds me of one of those kids’ flip books where you can change a figure’s torso, legs and head. A character named Bob Hatchet, for example, is variously transformed into a CSIS investigator, an ex- cop who owns a string of pizza parlours, a shirt presser in a dry cleaner’s and a phoney Catholic priest, depending on whatever momentary arrangement of his parts is visible. One theme is the search for love, an elusive quality. Romantic love is highlighted in the narrative, but often in a comically exaggerated form. “ Her face was flushed,” the author writes of the besotted ViVa. “ She could hear her heart pounding. Her tongue could not produce the simplest syllables. He was too handsome to be looked at; she could only survive the odd glance.” More grotesque is the “ whirlwind courtship” between Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, in which the latter deliriously proclaims, “ The stars of the heavens and the music of the spheres will be ours.” Yet a more credible form of love between men and women seems hard to come by, in a world in which the sexes are at war.
“ Nearly all Canadian cities aspire towards womanhood,” one character remarks. “ These cities long for the creation of an environment where they can display themselves in their best colours. A landscape where romance can feel at home . . . The men who run cities want something else.”
Political power? Metaphysical certitude? There are recurring references to Roman Catholicism, a force that seems, in Rooke’s mind, opposed to the creation of landscapes where romance can feel at home — a force emphasizing “ the reward of heaven” instead of “ the glory of life on earth.” Part of the parody element in the novel is a Da Vinci Code- like search for the “ Vatican Pumps,” a pair of shoes containing fabulous jewels, plus a piece of “ canvas torn from a Raphael painting long sealed in Vatican vaults.” This is the international thriller aspect of the novel, in which characters “ are but pawns being sacrificed to a grander scheme.”
This aspect fits the self- referential nature of Rooke’s narrative. An author is a sort of tyrant, like Ferdinand Marcos, exercising absolute power over his characters; or a CSIS investigator, making innumerable “ connections” between characters and events. Rooke simply takes an additional step and informs the reader, in the words of one of his characters, “ We are all fictional one way or another.” If the characters in his novel suffer from confused identities, if they find themselves helpless pawns in a grand, incomprehensible scheme of things, does that make them any different from us?
Success or failure in a novel of this kind depends almost entirely on the force of language, and the presence or absence of a comic edge to that language. It is precisely Rooke’s forte. Almost every sentence in this novel has a comic energy that keeps all the involutions of character and action afloat. It’s great fun. Only one complaint: The novel is too long. Brevity is essential in this kind of narrative. It’s no accident, for example, that Shakespeare’s Dog
is little more than two-thirds the length of The Beautiful Wife. That shorter length reaches the limit of most readers’ tolerance for faux Elizabethan speech. The Beautiful Wife touches the limit of most readers’ tolerance for narrative hijinks, and goes just a tad beyond it. Star literary critic Philip Marchand appears weekly. His new book is Ghost Empire: How the French Almost Conquered North America (McClelland & Stewart).