Fusion fiction
A Life of Bliss Don Butler Ottawa Press and Publishing
Don Butler's engaging debut novel provides many pleasures. For one thing, it will find a ready audience in opera lovers who worship at the shrine of legendary Greek soprano Maria Callas. But that's not all it has to offer. It's an affectionate — but also clear-eyed — celebration of the culture and landscape of Greece.
There's also a tantalizing mystery that its hapless hero, an inept journalist named Bliss Browning, must solve. Was there a secret child in Callas's turbulent life?
When it comes to tone and style, Butler is navigating tricky narrative waters. There are moments of laugh-outloud comedy, highlighted by some mercilessly satirical jabs at life in an Ottawa newsroom. Yet there's tragedy as well, and one can only admire the assurance with which this novel manages a generally seamless fusion of potentially warring elements. As for the touches of magic realism — well, is it really that impossible for the ghost of Maria Callas to be communicating by internet from the afterlife?
The novel's credentials as a character-driven work certainly provide ballast. And when it comes to its endearing central figure, Bliss Browning, you find perhaps the most bumbling foreign correspondent to emerge in a work of fiction since renowned satirist Evelyn Waugh dispatched William Boot to East Africa in his 1939 classic, Scoop.
Bliss is the improbable travel editor of an Ottawa newspaper, a timid soul who is a nearly friendless quivering hypochondriac, one glumly resigned to his own inadequacies, particularly sexual. He's also terrified of travel (the poor sap doesn't even possess a passport), so when his editor is seized by the nitwit idea of sending him to Botswana to write something authentic, Bliss has a panic attack.
But he never makes it to Africa, because of these ghostly emails he's been getting from Maria Callas, a long-dead diva about whose life and art he has an encyclopedic knowledge. He instead ends up in Greece and embarks on a fumbling but determined quest for Maria's missing child.
Ultimately this novel by a veteran Canadian newspaperman is about rebirth and renewal.