It's every eccentric dreamer & small-town store owner & jaded
RCMP officer you've ever met, all crushed into one zany story by an
ex-rocker who lives on Vancouver Island himself. He knows whereof he writes.
The first thing that hits you about this book is that it’s not a cozy. As if it could be with a title like this. But it goes in hard and fast and definitely off the twist. And that’s just the prologue.
Chapter 1 is just as weird in a different way, introducing our protagonist, our antihero, Tony Vicar who is at that very moment gyrating his way right out of a job as an Elvis-impersonating wedding DJ. Then we meet Tony‘s new boss, and have a really enjoyable few pages inside Tony‘s head while he mentally corrects all the malapropisms his new boss utters. But at the end of it, he has a new job in a back-bush hamlet on Vancouver Island.
Even if we still don’t find much sympathetic about Tony or any of the other characters, there is a hint that he cares not to make life worse for himself or anybody else, no matter how much he despises them. And he despises pretty much everybody. There is no softness, very little political correctness, just jaded dystopian review of his neighbours and society and the whole universe.
The only thing that makes Tony truly outraged is unwitting massacre of the English language; The only thing he loves is music, preferably from 40 years ago. But he has these Robin Hood moments where he just goes off to help out someone vulnerable.
I was definitely intrigued enough to keep turning the pages as Tony settles in to his new life, and the front seat of his new boss's massive, ancient muscle car.
I admit to being a bit generous with the stars on this one, in that I really enjoy the voice of Jacky O. That’s not her real name but she says herself that nobody can spell it and very few can extract what it's supposed to sound like from the Irish Gaelic spelling. And her descriptions of other characters tell as much about her as about them, for example, “This guy. Kind, generous, and surprisingly sensitive, but with the social graces of a bag of mud hitting the sidewalk from a great height.“
There are some funny minor truths here too.
“Those passengers were surveilling him, stalking him. Driving around his house to get a look-e-loo. He’d never heard of such a thing in this country, where most celebrities still mowed their own lawns.”
One annoying little tic is the author intrusions. We’re going along happily falling for all the rhetorical flourishes, seeing exactly what we're intended to see and thinking what we are supposed to think about all the characters, and then the author intrudes to underline it for us. Whether the author himself or an editor somewhere along the way decided that it had to be underlined for the slow readers, I don’t know. But it is obvious and off-putting when it happens.
Despite that last comment, I am definitely up for another dip into the world of this author, just as soon as I can get my hands on their next book.
#Dundurn #VancouverIsland #ComedyOfErrors #music #love #friendship #smalltownlife
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