Too much clutter saps narrative
Hot-button topics fail to meld in novel
Set in Hong Kong, Bangkok and, via FaceTime, Toronto, Planet Lolita, true to its title, aspires to be at once global in scope and tawdry in the milieux it intermittently probes. The story of a 15-year-old who becomes something of an Internet sensation after posting unintentionally lurid photos of an attractive and enigmatic young woman, the new novel by celebrated Toronto author Charles Foran weaves plenty of hot-button topics — human trafficking, sex tourism and pedophilia, digital-era privacy, the threat of sundry diseases blossoming into fatal epidemics — into what is in many regards a fairly prosaic coming-of-age tale.
Xixi, or Sarah, or See-see, or Seesaw (aliases abound in multicultural families and social media, both) is camping with her parents on “the most remote beach in Hong Kong” when the three wake one morning to discover a school of so-called mermaids, i.e., illegal immigrant women destined for brothels, washed up on the shore. Leah, Xixi’s mom, a somewhat chilly, nononsense lawyer, advises everyone to keep their distance. Jacob, Xixi’s dad, is more laid-back.
He shares his daughter’s curiosity and compassion for these trouble-bound strangers. Xixi feels instantly drawn to a young woman she dubs Mary. Before she and her parents hastily depart, Xixi snaps some photos of Mary, which will get posted online and appropriated by others with less than noble intentions.
Meanwhile, despite her caution, Leah lends her phone to the mermaids’ handler, thus proving valuable personal data to the mermaids’ triad proprietors — data that will come in handy once said triad gets wind of Xixi’s campaign to locate Mary and bring her to safety.
It’s difficult to gauge just how much of a threat the organized crime lords, who for the most part remain discreetly offstage, might consider our meddlesome teenage heroine to be. But lest we fret over any lack of stakes here, Xixi must also contend with a new outbreak of SARS, a disease that she and her dad refuse to take seriously enough to wear masks, even when it turns them into social pariahs.
There’s also the apparent disintegration of Leah and Jacob’s marriage, exacerbated by possible affairs. Xixi’s big sister Rachel is studying at the University of Toronto and exploring sex, tattoos and noise rock with a new boyfriend, so whatever consolation or guidance she can offer is limited to distracted videophone calls, leaving Xixi with only a pooch and her beloved Filipino nanny as dependable emotional resources. To boot, Xixi has been diagnosed with epilepsy, which leads to unexpected seizures and blackouts. And she’s just started to menstruate.
There’s something artificial about the relentless stacking of obstacles in Planet Lolita, an eagerness to cram in as much sheer issue-laden adversity as possible. A strong sense of voice might balance out such cumbersome schematics, but the novel’s web-savvy teen-speak often feels strained.
At one point Rachel, via FaceTime, demands, with some mighty pith, that her parents “check out our platforms … Learn how we move from place to place and space to space, silent and quick and beyond detection by your analogue radars. If you don’t know my Facebook, you don’t know me.”
Younger and less experienced, Xixi isn’t meant to be overly sophisticated: She’s more preoccupied with Hello Kitty, Sailor Moon and designating goofy head shapes (one of the novel’s more amusing refrains) than she is with, for example, adolescent sexual rites of passage. Still, she actually says “OMG!” out loud. She makes references to “the Net” and uses “cyber” as a prefix, as though it’s 1995. Maybe teenage girls in Hong Kong talk like it’s 1995. What do I know? Only that I’m not convinced.
Still, so long as Xixi remains Planet Lolita’s narrator, we’re predisposed to feel compassion for her, want the best for her, because she’s a good kid, and because her emotions, which she describes (all-too) articulately, and which are dissected in numerous scenes of interfamilial heart-to-hearts, are universal. But Foran makes a bold, dull choice when he hands off the narration of the novel’s final chapters to others.
The climax fare sworst, with more than 50 pages of story relayed entirely through online news stories, blog-posts and, ugh, Facebook chats and tweets written by salacious idiots with too much time on their hands and an unlikely level of sustained interest in Xixi and Jacob’s activities. This entire chapter, replete with URL sand other streamers of purely decorative data, works as a testament to the brain-draining effects of excess Internet usage.
The final chapter, which introduces yet another narrator, extends the denouement to profile a self-aggrandizing blow-hard and reformed douche bag-turned-safe-house proprietor. Why the third-act distancing from our heroine?
At least we cared about her.
Conventional wisdom has it that writers who work in multiple forms are granted the most liberty when composing fiction, yet it’s interesting to note that the prose in Foran’s definitive and awardladen 2010 Mordecai Richler biography, Mordecai: The Life & Times, for example, is so much more muscular, focused, provocative and, yes, creative than that of Planet Lolita. As he’s proven over the last two decades, Foran has chops aplenty, but this particular planet does not engage them to great effect.