An illiterate, laughable attempt at prose
Serial rapist, torturer and killer Paul Bernardo — one of the most hated humans Canada has ever had the misfortune to contain — has selfpublished an ebook. For that you may thank Amazon.ca, which sells the thing on its website, though I and others begged the company this morning to stop doing so.
The Kindle version costs $7.77 — I just downloaded the Kindle app and as a new (and never again, thanks to this) Kindler, seem to have read most of the thing for free which is a load off the conscience of both myself and the Star.
Bernardo, 51, has been imprisoned for 20 years. He has 23 hours a day to himself in tiny quarters, I understand, and is said to be at Millhaven Penitentiary in eastern Ontario. In other words, he has had what so many aspirational novelists dream of — time to write.
And what use he has made of his time. The book is called A MAD World Order. It had to be called something, and why not that.
I hoped to find evidence of regret or even awareness, but was hardly expecting to declare Bernardo the Alice Munro of the Ontario prison system, a mine of subtlety and vision. My expectations were low, if not subterranean.
Good thing too. Have you ever cleaned out your dryer vent? After careful stroking with a hand rake, one claws out a huge thicket of dry matted strands, a sort of felted matter. This is Bernardo’s brain, handy for oil spills or lining a bird’s nest but nothing more.
Bernardo, a graduate of University of Toronto’s Scarborough campus, which can’t be happy today, cannot produce a sentence that isn’t laughably bad. He can’t spell — immortal is “innortal,” Sig Sauer guns are “Sig Savers,” “Sub Tzu” (who he?) wrote
The Art of War — but worse, he can’t even spell his characters’ names. Mason Steel or Steale is a Silicon Valley billionaire who created the app Social Mall, or Mass, or Media
or Mal, because Bernardo got flustered, I guess.
A MAD World Order covers Al Qaeda, the Freemasons, Illuminati, Russian military, Chinese drug smugglers, Russian Mafia, nuclear attack, Skull and Bones, Knights Templar, hackers, U.S. Special Forces — could he not have picked just one? — with two main characters, Mason and his friend, Kyle, who are all kinds of busy in ways I frankly could not follow.
There’s a spelling mistake in the first sentence and most sentences after that. Bernardo can’t grasp punctuation like hyphens, and apostrophes, which become commas if you slide them down a little.
He describes people the way a towel would, if towels could talk: “The five foot ten inch Abdel looked over at his one month older, but two inches shorter best friend Jared. Abdel said, ‘We are two poor, uneducated Yemenites, yet we have a boatload of cargo destined to change the course of world history.’ The dialogue really sings.
“In his basement man cave Mason Steale looked through his blue eyes at the time on his computer screen, and saw it was 8:00 p.m.” I looked through my brown eyes, and saw that the time was irrelevant so why mention it?
Why does he describe a “curved upward slopping driveway”? Upwards or downwards, it’s going to “slopp,” or possibly slope, who cares? Someone speaks “without hesitation or mental reservation.” Which is it, buddy?
I am told Bernardo has no Internet access so where he stole his descriptions of places and geopolitics is a mystery. Perhaps his daft damaged fiancée copied them from Wikipedia.
Bernardo’s prose is like Morse code, dots and dashes from an illiterate and literal mind. The man is thick, stupid, a clot. He has a brake pad for a brain.
The agony of the families of Bernardo’s raped and murdered women will never end. Does it help to know that young women were savaged by a dunce? It may make it worse. The book is said to be legal because it doesn’t describe his crimes. I disagree. The Kindle download didn’t include all 631pages and I don’t have a full list but there is plenty for the police to study.
I ask them to investigate crimes in the book that mirror Bernardo’s: corpses thrown into water, “blood droplets, hair and chunks of grey matter oozing down the sheet,” Kyle begging for his life.
He’s making money off his knowledge of what he did to those beautiful, loving, hopeful young girls. They cry out from their graves for justice. Above ground, so do we.