www.philipquinn.ca
"Writer "
Danforth
Review
The Double
by Philip Quinn
Gutter Press, 2003
Reviewed by Matthew Firth
To label Philip Quinn’s fiction as enigmatic makes me immediately
guilty of two things: simplifying and leaping to the obvious. But
damn it the dude’s work is just so downright weird at times. Plus
I think it’s necessary to address this head-on before going any
further.
Quinn’s new novel, The Double, is a wonderful book but it does not
lend itself to review very easily. And it’s not just my current
caffeine-deprived headache; it’s the weirdness of the whole thing.
The question is, then, is Quinn’s weirdness the genuine product of a
fruitful imagination run wild or is it contrived posturing of some
sort? An attempt at a plot summary answers that question in favour
of the former.
The Double is a character-driven novel, centring on the interplay
between Augustus Pollard and Emily Carr Black. Pollard is an orphan
who was raised by monks and nuns with a thing for wearing woman’s
undies. He’s also an ex-psychiatric patient. And believes he’s the
son of James Earl Ray, Martin Luther King’s assassin. Ray fled
Memphis for Toronto and was later arrested in London, England. In
the novel, Ray may have fathered a son while in
Emily Carr Black is a Toronto writer who is also a bit loopy.
She’s
got a thing for seeing double, especially when it comes to people.
Each person has a double, according to Black. Pollard also thinks
she might just be his mother. Pollard’s on a quest to sort out his
identity. Quinn plays Pollard’s madness off the Black character
quite well. In the second half of the novel, the insanity is upped
with some missing children thrown into the fray amidst a dash of
Halloween shenanigans. It all becomes rather dense the deeper you
get into the book. And this is before mentioning the food counter at
Woolworth’s, the Muslim homosexual, Elvis, the scarecrow from the
Wizard of Oz, prostitutes, the polluted waters of the Don River in
Toronto, and other stuff that Quinn somehow weaves into the
narrative. His weirdness and convolution are genuine; of this I have
little doubt.
In one sense, what Quinn has done here with The Double is import
William S. Burroughs’ Interzone to Toronto, transforming Canada’s
largest city into a hallucinatory subterranean landscape, complete
with brown-skinned, hash-smoking queers, hangings, assassins, and a
healthy dose of paranoia. For example, check out these passages:
Illegal immigrants live in Toronto sewers. They come up at night
for the restaurant waste. Rahman told me this. We’ll be walking
downtown, and Rahman takes a sniff and knows it’s a member of the
underground tribe though I can’t see anybody. He insists it’s one
of them, he says. One of the sewer people.
I visit the Eaton Centre shopping mall, shaped like an Indian long
house, the shoppers hunting and gathering, loaded down with their
bags of kill.
Fake decorative Thanksgiving corn hangs from the knickknack shops.
Shellacked grains. The blé, the blessé, the blessings. Assassins
of the maize moving on, the soil exhausted.
These have the scent of Burroughs all over them. And like him, Quinn
is satirizing. In Quinn’s case, though, it’s Toronto that falls prey
to the poison pen. Quinn paints Toronto as not the good, hell no
rather a city teeming with depravity, deprivation, obsession and the
delusional meanderings of dislocated characters. This is Quinn’s
trump card his characters. Despite the convoluted,
nearly-impossible-to-summarize plotlines, the characters are what
rule the roost in The Double. Pollard and Black, in particular, are
vivid, palpable characters, despite what goes on in their muddled
heads. Quinn makes the reader embrace his characters’ insanity and
become comfortable with it. The Double can be maddening. But it can
also be very provocative and gratifying.
This all makes Quinn a rare breed in these parts: an imaginative,
challenging Canadian fiction writer producing surreal and macabre
works. I can only come up with Tony Burgess and perhaps Derek
McCormack, to a certain extent, as company for him. So many other
fiction writers especially those who base their tales in
maunder in comfy, middle class quasi-problems. Quinn, though, is a
horse of a different colour. He bites at the ugliness of Toronto. He
embraces the perversity of
the contemporary. He perspicaciously shows that madness is
everywhere, at least everywhere we chose to look. And thankfully
Quinn does not turn his gaze away, does not restrict his vision to
boring characterizations of the privileged classes who are so
tediously ubiquitous in so many other books set in
Quinn’s The Double is weird, sure, but it’s also a determined and
deadly serious piece of work.
Matthew Firth is the author of two short story collections Fresh
Meat and Can You Take Me There, Now?. He is also editor/publisher of
Black Bile Press chapbooks and Front&Centre. Originally from
Hamilton, he now lives in Ottawa.
