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Satire

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“I refresh, I refresh, I refresh.”

The new English translation of Jean-Philippe Baril Guérard’s Sports and Pastimes (translated by Newfoundland’s Aimee Wall) contemplates boredom and excess as the preeminent disposition of the 21st Century’s first adult generation. On the path dissecting contemporary Quebecois ennui, Guérard’s second novel takes shots at the highest envelope of middle-class excess using elite Canadian show business as his proxy: not lavish enough for vast coteries and personal photographers, but enough to blow $6,000 on a couch before checking to see if it fits up the stairs of your trendy apartment. Shame but never remorse. Grief but never loss. With commendable skill, Guérard executes such literary feats as determining the deafening inanity of cokeheads and making orgies seem boring.

Aimee Wall’s superb translation is a deceptively free moving rendering of the intimate slang, slurs and insults that characterize the narrator’s often frenetic inner monologue. With prose as lean and compact as the 22-year-old, unnamed, fitness-obsessed narrator, Sports and Pastimes demands the kind of literary alertness more often reserved for very sparse verse.

The novel, which follows three former child star friends through a week in their early 20s, is bookended by two dead deer. First, acting out the insensible 20th-century Canadian ritual of retreating to the weekend hinterland cottage, the friends almost immediately panic and return to the city once they’ve run out of cocaine. They run over a deer on the drive back leaving Felix-Antoine, the immaculate “Nadia Comaneci of drunks,” to sever the deer’s spinal cord in an act of mercy.

In the frightening aftermath of the accident, David, the sensitive but ultimately mediocre filmmaker, experiences the novel’s nearest moment of self awareness worrying that they’ve all lapsed into a state of shock: “maybe we think we’re okay, but we’re not.” This futile grasp toward self awareness hangs distantly behind the novel’s chilling final image when the narrator, Felix-Antoine, and David gleefully count likes on an Instagram selfie of the trio mugging over a deer they’ve just killed on an impromptu hunting trip: they think they’re okay, but they’re not.

Readers might be tempted to include this novel among a genre of disaffected techno-youth novels, but Sports and Pastimes is already bored with the cult of youth and even more uninterested in the endless hand wringing critiques that dominated the turn of the century. The novel deals with the shallowness of digital existence and fame, but does so in a crisp voice comfortably acclimated to a culture where people live disparately on their phones and in the ghastly world of bodies.

The narrator herself offers the most concise review of the novel. Sitting in a waiting room–the perfect environment for this novel’s unaware moment of clarity–where the book she is reading fails to hold her attention, she complains that it is “a self-conscious novel…about trashy youth living a life of ennui, young people who have everything too easily, who don’t know what to do with all their free time, and who thus set about destroying everything around them out of cynicism. It passes the time all the same; I don’t have anything better to read.”

Sports and Pastimes
Jean-Philippe Baril Guérard, translated by Aimee Wall
Book Thug

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The first comedy or satire I wrote was for The Muse, the student newspaper of Memorial University of Newfoundland. In the fall of 1980 The Muse was part of a largely unorganized student crusade to do something about The Parkway, a four-lane highway that, owing to a kind of haphazard urban planning endemic to St. John’s, bisected the campus. Crossing the road was perilous and the student body wanted a remedy.

The Muse didn’t want to let the issue die so running a story about it as often as possible was a priority. But there was only so much one could say; the road was in the wrong place and presented a real danger to students; a safe crossing needed to be provided and soon. That was it.

I took the baton for the week of the October 17th edition, reporting on an imagined “Parkway Safari” motorsport event wherein drivers tore around campus trying to strike and kill students with their cars, scoring points as they did so. I enlisted a couple of pals to pose as victims for grisly photos of the contest. The piece did what I still suppose good satire does, issue a warning about where a stupid behaviour will land us if we don’t smarten up.

The paper was distributed throughout the campus in the morning. That afternoon a Memorial University student, a young woman full of promise, Judy Lynn Ford, was struck and killed by a car on The Parkway. I thought that horror rather proved the point of my piece. Not so most people on campus who read it after the tragedy. Many were unaware that it was written and printed before the accident and judged it, I can’t say unfairly if they believed it was in response, in horrendously bad taste.

Bad taste sometimes lends satire vitality. As it can be a knife or skewer satire can also be a blunt instrument. It can be a cudgel, a hammer. We say in Newfoundland “Foolish as a bag of hammers” to mean something or someone ridiculous. In other places there is “ugly as a bag of hammers” to mean that which is lumpen, misshapen, unwieldy. All that can be said of comic and satiric prose.

The outrage over the Parkway piece didn’t much bother me; my heart was colder then.

Energies soon found focus in a spontaneous act of civil disobedience, students marching across a crosswalk on The Parkway in an uninterrupted, endlessly looping line so as to permanently arrest the flow of traffic. The cops arrived and handled things poorly, the protest escalated to the point where the police considered it best to beat a retreat. Barricades were erected and the students occupied the highway for a glorious weekend, until commitments were given to build an elevated pedway over the road.

In the years since, I’ve written four novels and a couple of feature-film screenplays, notably the adaptation of my comic novel Rare Birds. I wrote a bunch of episodes of the television industry satire Made In Canada. I’ve kept up writing for print media and have written for the stage. I spent the most creatively rewarding five years of my life writing for the CBC Radio show The Great Eastern, a program I have no hesitation declaring among the very best examples of scripted radio in the history of that medium. (Why the show isn’t podcast by the CBC is an unfathomable mystery.) The Great Eastern was a more sophisticated comedy than the CBC brass was comfortable with in a show coming out of Newfoundland. A CBC Vice President cautioned us, “No more jokes about French philosophers.” We paid him no heed and CBC canned us one season before the project was completed.

Photos by Joel Upshall courtesy of The Overcast

How have things changed since I started out almost forty years ago? In four decades what is funny and how comedy works hasn’t changed much. The audience has; it’s grown timid. The pieties of Political Correctness have scared people off that which is transgressional. People are afraid to laugh lest it be heard as laughter “at” something.

So it was that two people, on separate occasions, told me they put down my novel Today I Learned It Was You because they were “afraid of where it was going.” At the centre of that novel is a report that a one-time thespian sleeping rough in a public park in St. John’s is “transitioning” from man to deer. Spoiler alert: he isn’t doing any such thing. The ridiculous proposition that he is, a bit of dark mischief by another character in the novel, is embraced by a gullible public to such a degree that confessing the deed becomes unthinkable. Those readers “afraid of where it was going” never read far enough to grasp that the central joke was their very fear. That’s where we are.

Satire is a distant early-warning system. Without it the most unlikely and absurd consequences befall those who haven’t imagined the world at its most preposterous.

The speech police, these days as likely to come from the smouldering ruins of the political left or the Academy as from the Church or the Mosque or the Presidential Palace, are making it more difficult and more dangerous to sound the alarm. If there was ever a time to reach into the bag for a hammer it’s now.

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Newfoundland and Labrador has its own political realm and doesn’t necessarily adhere or attach itself to Canada’s rules or logic. These are lands and waters of their own and columnist Ray Guy devoted his writing career to the province, its humour, hard knocks, political spheres and relentless weather.

Edited by Brian Jones with a foreword by Michael Harris, Ray Guy The Final Columns 2003-2013 spans the rise and fall of former premiere Joey Smallwood, Brian Tobin’s ignorance, weather woes and small town politics, and gets away with calling St. John’s “Sin City Upon Cesspool.”

Born in Come By Chance, Guy’s mix of satire and humour depicts the very crux of Newfoundland and Labrador and the realities of its outport-versus-urban politics, Anglican-versus-Catholic judgments and townie-versus-baymen divides. While writing for newspapers, magazines, radio, television, theatre and even the silver screen, Guy studied journalism at the Ryerson Polytechnic Institute and for many years wrote for the St. John’s Evening Telegram, Atlantic Insight and the Newfoundland Quarterly.

He became a household name taking stabs at Joey Smallwood in a weekday column with The Telegram. Some of these columns became That Far Greater Bay and were awarded the Stephen Leacock Award, an annual literary prize for the best book of humour published in Canada. Guy was awarded an honorary doctorate by Memorial University in 2001. He died of cancer at the age of 71 in Spring 2013.

Guy’s legacy lives on through a lifetime of prose, decades of published and collected satirical columns. By far my favourite of Guy’s work, “Life Lessons from Bell Island,” from December 2006, contextualizes the spirit of a place very near. He writes, “my first impression there on this huge table high above the water was that the rest of the world ceased to exist. The place was self-contained. Bell Islanders were self-contained–surely, if there was any better place to be, they’d never heard of it.”

Wafts of nostalgia washed over me as I read of his annual visits to Bell Island and how the place disorients and re-orients. “Pink will always be the colour of Bell Island to me,” he writes, noting the grey-red mud surrounding the mines. Guy writes of the mass exodus of Bell Islanders to Cambridge, Ontario, which struck a chord, as my grandmother was from the little bell-shaped island and she moved up with her sisters. Half a dozen of them piled into a seatbelt-less car from Wabana and made their way to the Mainland. Apparently, my grandmother screamed at the top of her lungs merely being a passenger down the twelve-lane 401. Once they arrived, her sisters decided they were homesick and drove back home to Bell Island the next day. But my grandmother, self-contained as she was, stayed.

The thing about revisiting Guy’s columns: his work embodies what it means to be a Newfoundlander, the various angles. His humour, quick wit, nostalgic rhetoric and personalized insight into the island in the sky remain relevant.

Guy even makes the weather something worth reading about. His meditations on Canada’s switch to metric and musings on winter seem apt as I write this review with a sunburn from Toronto and the Avalon Peninsula gets slammed with another snowstorm on the first week of April. Currently, St. John’s harbour is covered in massive ice floes.

“Thanking God we’re surrounded by water does us no good at all once April comes. That same water slows down the brisk jump into spring they get on the Mainland,” Guy writes. “They’re slapping on the sunblock in Toronto and we’re still slipping and sliding down Signal Hill … it’s crucifixion by contrast.”

Guy’s humour shines in every column and his wisdom is both grandfatherly and brattish. He wrote about Newfoundland as an islander, a heartfelt insiders take, and yet with a critical seabird’s view. Intimate and observational, Guy understood the complexities of a province that enchants and traumatizes, exploring the dark underbelly, false truths and inflated political perceptions. Yet it remains a place worthy of devoting a lifetime of writing and to.

Ray Guy: The Final Columns
Ray Guy, edited by Brian Jones
Creative Book Publishing

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Today I Learned It Was YouA retired actor-cum-security-guard is living in a park, and rumour has it he now identifies as a deer. A rookie St. John’s city councillor puts up with her idiot colleagues while feeling nostalgic for her native Venice and despairing over her husband’s dementia. Meanwhile, the mayor considers a run for federal office — if he doesn’t wind up torpedoing his own chances first.

In this keenly satirical and funny novel, Ed Riche spares nobody, from the good ol’ boy councillor whose accent gets stronger during televised meetings to the vegan activist who won’t perform a particular sex act “because of the animal protein.”

Riche piles up characters and situations — I lost track of the number of plots — building towards the circumstances that will inevitably cause everyone’s dreams and plans to collapse. There’s a bit of deus ex machina involved, but mostly events are driven by the characters’ own failures, lapses in judgment and just plain stupidity.

It’s a bit like following the Newfoundland energy boom that was in full swing when the book was written. You know it’s not going to turn out well. And, given the current state of venality and incompetence in Newfoundland politics, now is a fine time to read this book.

Today I Learned It Was You
By Ed Riche
$19.95, paperback, 224 pp.
House of Anansi Press, April 2016