Doug Johnstone’s ‘The Ossians’ reviewed by Evan Dempsey

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Sep 082011

It is hard to read Doug Johnstone’s The Ossians without suspecting that he has put a lot of his own life into it. Johnstone’s second novel is a rock biography of Connor, lead singer in the eponymous Edinburgh band. It is also a road novel that follows the band as they tour Scotland counter-clockwise in search of fans, artistic authenticity and a record contract.

It is often said that a story needs a beginning, a middle, and an end. The Ossians has a slow beginning, a meandering middle, and an excellent ending. At the start, the author devotes far too much space to inert narrative in which not much is at stake. The initial chapters primarily serve the needs of characterization and allow him to work in some lengthy musings on Scottish identity.

Things pick up towards the middle. As the band goes from town to town, the novel settles into a more steady rhythm. Amid the tedium of gigs, drug taking, lovers’ arguments and car journeys, enough interesting things happen to keep the story afloat. Connor gets himself into a series of increasingly idiotic situations, but always manages to extricate himself, or at least survive. Relationships deepen. Back stories are filled in. It’s not masterful, but it works.

The end of the novel is quite accomplished. It gallops along, gaining momentum as sub plots rally to their conclusions. With a hundred pages left, Johnstone has enough balls in the air that you wonder how he’s going to avoid dropping any. He juggles them well, however, and concocts a denouement that resolves the main conflicts while avoiding an excessive feeling of finality, hinting at the characters’ future directions.

In term of style, the novel is by turns pleasingly lyrical and unnecessarily crude. The fucks and shits are applied liberally. Don’t think I have a problem with that. I most certainly don’t, but the sheer density of swear words surpasses the requirements of characterization and setting. The same goes for musician jargon. In some passages, Johnstone’s desire to establish authenticity leads him to lay it on thick with descriptions of amps, guitars, drum kits and PA systems. These bits read like something out of Guitar Techniques. I am inclined to think that swearing and jargon should be dispensed with the same stinginess as dialect; a little goes a long way.

If the book loses any marks in this department, however, it makes them up by affording us the opportunity to actually hear the fictional band whose career it charts. Johnstone and his own band have composed and recorded some of their songs, and uploaded them to a Myspace page. And the songs are pretty good. Slow, chilled out indie with a distorted edge. I played the songs on repeat while I was finishing off this review.

For all the good things about the novel, I couldn’t help feeling disappointed by it. Doug Johnstone’s talent is conspicuous and I suspect that he is capable of producing something much tighter. Maybe he has done that with Smokeheads, his latest novel. Nevertheless, The Ossians is a fun book with a few faults and a great many nice touches. You should read it.

Posted by Len Wanner at 6:04 pm Tagged with: , ,

Benjamin Whitmer’s ‘Pike’ reviewed by Evan Dempsey

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Aug 142011

Set in the grime of the Reagan era, Pike, Benjamin Whitmer’s debut novel, is the story of a small-time low-life that most, including himself, consider irredeemable. Pike has more than a few skeletons in his closet; he’s got a whole cemetery. When the novel begins, he is wasting away what remains of his life in Nanticonte, a hick town outside Cincinnati. Here he has peace, of a sort. Stability, at least. But that peace is ruptured by the arrival of his granddaughter from Cincinnati, whose mother, Pike’s daughter, is a recently deceased crack whore whose rotting corpse has been used as a sperm receptacle by the neighbourhood drug addicts.

Meanwhile, a dirty cop called Derrick, who runs whores and crack in the crime-ridden Over-the-Rhine area of the city, kicks off a race riot by gunning down a teenage boy. Pike suspects that Derrick had something to do with his daughter’s death, so he and his friend Rory, an amateur boxer dreaming of the big time, set out to discover the truth and, if needs be, exact revenge.

So begins a picaresque journey through the different levels of Cincinnati society, as Pike and Rory invade crack houses, shanty towns, rehab centres and middle-class living rooms in pursuit of Derrick. The plot lurches from confrontation to confrontation, and every one is expertly rendered. The most effective are those that pit our heroes against ordinary decent people. I found myself thrown outside the ethical world of the plot, thinking what it would be like to be confronted with a pair of hulking brutes like Pike and his sidekick. It was disconcerting to find myself coming down on the side of these bloodthirsty bottom-feeders and their maniacal mission. Like them, I was infected with contempt for the soft-fleshed wrapped-in-cotton-wool white-collar world.

Whitmer’s style is classic noir. He is an adept of the fizzling simile, the influence of Chandler hanging conspicuously from his sleeve. At one point, “the stars above flicker like knife holes of light punched through a black curtain.” The narrative is shot through with uncompromising imagery of the hardboiled variety. Emotionally, too, Whitmer takes no prisoners. Sentimental he is not. His characters are capable of affection, even nobility, but there is never a hint that their gentler qualities will win out. Indeed, Pike’s love for his granddaughter is the “gun” – to use one of Chuck Palahniuk’s terms – that spurs him on to commit ever greater atrocities.

I must make one criticism of the edition. As I read Pike, I had a growing feeling that the editing process was not as rigourous as it might have been. There are lots of typos. In one passage, Whitmer describes the picture on the cover of a book that lies “open on the coffee table.” Surely if the book was lying open the picture on the cover would be obscured, but that’s no matter. These are minor slips, and ones for which the reader makes silent correction.

These small deficiencies do not detract in any way from the experience of the novel, however. It remains an impressive achievement, a tightly plotted, fast paced nightmare. I emerged from it like a fish out of water, startled, gasping to get back in.

Posted by Len Wanner at 7:35 am Tagged with: , ,
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