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Kaspoit! (Anvil Press $20)
Kaspoit!-that's the noise made by opening a beer can, a crisp flatulence so familiar it ought to be incorporated into O Canada, a sound that's usually evocative of barbecues, beach parties or the end of a hard day.
But after imbibing Dennis Bolen's Kaspoit! you'll never pop another Canadian or Blue without cringing. In his latest and darkest tale set among Vancouver's criminal underclass, Bolen, who has five previous books of gritty fiction under his belt, uses the sound to punctuate some of the most squalid dialogue ever put on paper, rendered all the more horrific by its very banality.
In the novel, a Fraser Valley pig farm owned by a not-too-bright character named Friendly serves as a private social club for assorted Lower Mainland gangsters, who stand around bonfires popping beers and talking business while waiting for Friendly to return with a carload of compliant or desperate women scooped from the sidewalks of the Downtown Eastside.
As a result of these debauches, women sometimes succumb to excesses of alcohol and drugs or to the bizarre sexual proclivities of some of the members. As host and hog-butcher to the underworld, Friendly's job is to clean up the mess.
Of course this plot will ring alarm bells with anyone who has followed the case of William Pickton, now our nation's most notorious serial killer.
The women are not the main focus of the plot; they are not even characters as such-an aspect of the novel that has already caused some critics to be concerned with making sure their politically correct jock-straps are in place. But they're missing the point.
After William Pickton was arrested, media and activist groups had a field day speculating about why women were going missing from the Downtown Eastside for years before the Vancouver Police or RCMP appeared to notice. That's the question Bolen tries to answer in Kaspoit!
It's a novel about perception and agendas, about how what we see, and what we think we know, are determined by what we're looking for.
In the novel, local RCMP are well aware of the pig farm's role as an ad hoc social club for the scum of Vancouver, who refer to the cops contemptuously as "Ruckmumps"; from the acronym of their insignia. In practice, police forces routinely permit certain bars or improvised social clubs where known criminals gather to continue to operate because, in the face of undermanned detachments and tight budgets, it's a cost-effective way of keeping track of the bad guys.
Bolen, a career veteran of the Canadian justice system after more than twenty years as a federal parole officer, knows how the system operates, what its priorities are, and how blurred the line between tolerance and collusion can become. The novel implies that even if Pickton's pig farm had been under 24/7 surveillance, it would ultimately have made no difference because the cops would have been clocking the comings and goings of gangsters, not doing a head-count of women who incidentally came and went-or didn't.
In three earlier novels featuring his parole-officer alter ego, Barry Delta-Stupid Crimes (Anvil Press), Krekshuns (Random House Canada) and Toy Gun (Anvil Press)-Bolen developed a signature style, a mix of Raymond Chandler wit and Trailer Park Boys goofiness you can't quite call gallows-humour (since Canada repealed capital punishment), but a sort of squalid slapstick that makes the antics of his criminal characters as pathetically funny as they are scary.
Literary and dramatic arts traditionally create a critical distance between the audience and horrific events that makes it possible for us to face our worst fears and experience a cathartic emotional resolution. Humour is one way of making the unbearable bearable; we laugh at the moronic screw-ups of Trailer Park Boys because we grew up knowing guys like Julian, Ricky and Bubbles and secretly remember that the messes they generated were anything but funny at the time.
As Raymond Chandler once said of the life on the mean streets he chronicled, "It reads better than it lives.";
In Kaspoit! the criminals are no brighter than the low-lifes who populate Bolen's Barry Delta novels, but the humour is of the Hell's Dark Roast variety as the various characters-including a couple of visiting hit-men from the Montreal mob, a senior RCMP officer and an ambitious Eurasian cocktail waitress-attempt to exploit a power vacuum created by a police sting back east (Google Project Colisee) that temporarily upsets the apple-cart of organized crime.
Abandoning the breezy cynical narrative commentary of the Barry Delta novels, here Bolen restricts himself to the more challenging toolkit of the dramatist and scriptwriter: descriptive action and dialogue carry the plot alone, with none of the gratuitous cheats of the "psychological novel"; or the interminable self-indulgent narrative commentary that is such a soporific feature of so many Canadian novels produced by holders of MFAs in creative writing.
Bolen's stripped-to-the-frame, dialogue-driven story will be as shocking to CanLit-conditioned sensibilities as a slap in the face with a bag of cold nails, but it is a brilliant exercise in minimalism that shows how much can be evoked with just a few lines of authentic dialogue and 'narrative' that amounts to little more than stage direction.
A novel written almost entirely in dialogue plays on the irresistible human temptation to eavesdrop and to continue to listen, with guilty shadenfreude, even when what we hear appalls us.
In his quirky film, My Dinner with Andre, director Louis Malle demonstrated the seductiveness of dialogue in a two-hour film consisting of two old friends talking over dinner. Philip Roth achieved a similar effect in a dull, somewhat plotless novel that consisted of nothing but the dialogue between a man and his mistress in bed.
In Kaspoit!, Dennis Bolen has created a terrifying and suspenseful thriller out of the kind of table talk you could overhear in certain clubs and bars no more than a twenty minute drive from your house. 9781897535059
Review by John Moore, in Squamish, who remains one of British Columbia's most original and un-self-censored book reviewers and fiction writers.
[BCBW 2010]
But after imbibing Dennis Bolen's Kaspoit! you'll never pop another Canadian or Blue without cringing. In his latest and darkest tale set among Vancouver's criminal underclass, Bolen, who has five previous books of gritty fiction under his belt, uses the sound to punctuate some of the most squalid dialogue ever put on paper, rendered all the more horrific by its very banality.
In the novel, a Fraser Valley pig farm owned by a not-too-bright character named Friendly serves as a private social club for assorted Lower Mainland gangsters, who stand around bonfires popping beers and talking business while waiting for Friendly to return with a carload of compliant or desperate women scooped from the sidewalks of the Downtown Eastside.
As a result of these debauches, women sometimes succumb to excesses of alcohol and drugs or to the bizarre sexual proclivities of some of the members. As host and hog-butcher to the underworld, Friendly's job is to clean up the mess.
Of course this plot will ring alarm bells with anyone who has followed the case of William Pickton, now our nation's most notorious serial killer.
The women are not the main focus of the plot; they are not even characters as such-an aspect of the novel that has already caused some critics to be concerned with making sure their politically correct jock-straps are in place. But they're missing the point.
After William Pickton was arrested, media and activist groups had a field day speculating about why women were going missing from the Downtown Eastside for years before the Vancouver Police or RCMP appeared to notice. That's the question Bolen tries to answer in Kaspoit!
It's a novel about perception and agendas, about how what we see, and what we think we know, are determined by what we're looking for.
In the novel, local RCMP are well aware of the pig farm's role as an ad hoc social club for the scum of Vancouver, who refer to the cops contemptuously as "Ruckmumps"; from the acronym of their insignia. In practice, police forces routinely permit certain bars or improvised social clubs where known criminals gather to continue to operate because, in the face of undermanned detachments and tight budgets, it's a cost-effective way of keeping track of the bad guys.
Bolen, a career veteran of the Canadian justice system after more than twenty years as a federal parole officer, knows how the system operates, what its priorities are, and how blurred the line between tolerance and collusion can become. The novel implies that even if Pickton's pig farm had been under 24/7 surveillance, it would ultimately have made no difference because the cops would have been clocking the comings and goings of gangsters, not doing a head-count of women who incidentally came and went-or didn't.
In three earlier novels featuring his parole-officer alter ego, Barry Delta-Stupid Crimes (Anvil Press), Krekshuns (Random House Canada) and Toy Gun (Anvil Press)-Bolen developed a signature style, a mix of Raymond Chandler wit and Trailer Park Boys goofiness you can't quite call gallows-humour (since Canada repealed capital punishment), but a sort of squalid slapstick that makes the antics of his criminal characters as pathetically funny as they are scary.
Literary and dramatic arts traditionally create a critical distance between the audience and horrific events that makes it possible for us to face our worst fears and experience a cathartic emotional resolution. Humour is one way of making the unbearable bearable; we laugh at the moronic screw-ups of Trailer Park Boys because we grew up knowing guys like Julian, Ricky and Bubbles and secretly remember that the messes they generated were anything but funny at the time.
As Raymond Chandler once said of the life on the mean streets he chronicled, "It reads better than it lives.";
In Kaspoit! the criminals are no brighter than the low-lifes who populate Bolen's Barry Delta novels, but the humour is of the Hell's Dark Roast variety as the various characters-including a couple of visiting hit-men from the Montreal mob, a senior RCMP officer and an ambitious Eurasian cocktail waitress-attempt to exploit a power vacuum created by a police sting back east (Google Project Colisee) that temporarily upsets the apple-cart of organized crime.
Abandoning the breezy cynical narrative commentary of the Barry Delta novels, here Bolen restricts himself to the more challenging toolkit of the dramatist and scriptwriter: descriptive action and dialogue carry the plot alone, with none of the gratuitous cheats of the "psychological novel"; or the interminable self-indulgent narrative commentary that is such a soporific feature of so many Canadian novels produced by holders of MFAs in creative writing.
Bolen's stripped-to-the-frame, dialogue-driven story will be as shocking to CanLit-conditioned sensibilities as a slap in the face with a bag of cold nails, but it is a brilliant exercise in minimalism that shows how much can be evoked with just a few lines of authentic dialogue and 'narrative' that amounts to little more than stage direction.
A novel written almost entirely in dialogue plays on the irresistible human temptation to eavesdrop and to continue to listen, with guilty shadenfreude, even when what we hear appalls us.
In his quirky film, My Dinner with Andre, director Louis Malle demonstrated the seductiveness of dialogue in a two-hour film consisting of two old friends talking over dinner. Philip Roth achieved a similar effect in a dull, somewhat plotless novel that consisted of nothing but the dialogue between a man and his mistress in bed.
In Kaspoit!, Dennis Bolen has created a terrifying and suspenseful thriller out of the kind of table talk you could overhear in certain clubs and bars no more than a twenty minute drive from your house. 9781897535059
Review by John Moore, in Squamish, who remains one of British Columbia's most original and un-self-censored book reviewers and fiction writers.
[BCBW 2010]
Submitted on March 2, 2010 in By David.
