Greatest Hits Medley

"I did, and he did."

In the summer of 1972, at a meeting with Jack McClelland (after the Royal Commission on Book Publishing was finished), I told him that I had a book I wanted to write on the Arctic. I gave him the basics. He said, "You write the book, and I'll publish it," I did, and he did. McClelland & Stewart published The Arctic Imperative in quality paperback in the spring of 1973.

— Richard Rohmer, Generally Speaking, p. 526 

Arctic Imperative is a chore. You start feeling like you'll know less at the end than you did at the beginning. The submarines and giant planes are the easy part. The eight identical chapters about who wants to lay pipe might as well be a baby slapping a keyboard with its hands.

— Chris Kelly, email to Stanley Whyte and Brian Busby, 6 June 2015

The Arctic Imperative is unlike any other book I’ve read. It repeats itself and it contradicts itself. It has no structure, yet moves forward with purpose. A failure, true, but it does intrigue. Just how did Rohmer do it?

Here’s my theory:

The Arctic Imperative is composed of information gleaned from press releases, newspaper clippings and the occasional note to self. This goes some way in explaining the curious formality. Richard Nixon is “Mr. Nixon”, Jean Chrétien is “Mr. Chretien [sic]” and the “Vancouver firm of F.F. Stanley and Co. Ltd.” work with “Tremblay, Heroux and Associates of Montreal, consulting engineers.”

See: The Globe and Mail Style Guide.

The reason that there’s no order is because clippings have no real order. Categorization is in the brain of the beholder and chronology becomes skewed because news isn’t always breaking. Consider how long “J.M. Douglas of Parry Sound, H.J. Kliener of Hamilton, and E.J. Smith of Burlington” worked on the X-Mac before it made the paper. Consider too the amusing Dennis the Menace strip that appeared in that same edition.

Dennis the Menace is set aside, but the clippings used as reference are given equal weight. Nothing is irrelevant and no detail is too small, which is how we learn of “a diplomatic note to the United States in 1971 on the instigation of David Anderson, member [sic] of Parliament for Esqumalt-Saanich. That note was delivered on August 18. 1971, and tabled in the House of Commons in April, 1972.”

How else do we explain The Arctic Imperative?

After his pitch, Rohmer had mere months to write the book.

It was imperative.

Three closing notes:

Where politicians are mentioned by name – “the Leader of the Opposition, Mr. Stanfield”, for example – Pierre Trudeau is referred to only as “the Prime Minister”. His name never appears. I suggest this is no accident.

Rohmer’s “Canadian beaver” and ever-present “American eagle” appear here as the “Canadian mouse” and the “American elephant”. Republicans take note.

I was astonished – no exaggeration – to discover that my copy is a second printing.

Speaking generally...

About Generally Speaking, I'd say Chris is right - overall, he has led an interesting life and comes across as pretty likeable.  But that said, his aversion to editors is (once again) his undoing.  There's a pretty good 300-page book in here about someone who lived through interesting times and had a hand in a lot of historically significant events.  The problem is, of course, that the book is 581 pages long (counting the appendices).

There are far too many chapters here about things that he was only marginally connected to, at the expense of his own story - the family anecdotes dwindle to almost nothing once he becomes a lawyer.   Chapter after chapter seems to exist because everything that crossed his sphere of influence deserved a part in the story.  Why?  Because he doesn't seem to want to let even the smallest story go by if it means he can mention the Reichmanns, Galen Weston, Conrad Black, etc, etc.  He's a tad star struck by these leading lights of Canadian business (wonder what he thinks of Conrad since his fall from grace?) - the fact they are rich means that any chance to mention them is taken.

A good example - there is the story of how he, Weston, Black and CUAW president Bob White ("as far to the left in things Canadian as Black and Weston, each a tycoon in his own right, are to the right") are all made Officers to the Order of Canada at the same time.  Seated alphabetically, Weston and White end up next to each other.  The result?  They chat amiably.

This is an anecdote?

The short shrift given to his family makes for some weird elliptical passages.  Out of the blue, we get this: "It was 1999.  Mary-O and I were visiting her mother figure, Elspeth Gormley, in England...".  Who?  We never heard of her before or after this cryptic reference.

I think what I found most disappointing was the small amount of space he devotes to his writing career.  There is next-to-nothing about the how and why of any of his novels - nothing much about why he bothers to write, what he gets out of it (except money), his reaction to critics, to readers, what inspires him, what other books he's read etc. etc.  All I got out of the chapter on his writing was the fact he fought to get Ultimatum published his way - without any of those interfering editors.  And if ever a book needed editing, it's Ultimatum...

I note that while he is proudly conservative, it isn't always with a capital C.  Mulroney is barely mentioned and he grudgingly admits to admiring Trudeau.  Sometimes he's off-putting (a throwaway reference to "so-called global warming"), but by and large it wasn't as painful as I'd feared.

 Advertisements for myself:  Not one, but two references to Ultimatum 2, the new novel he is working on.  Both references read like ad copy.

I've started Retaliation and am pleased to find many old favourites are back:

1. Chapter two begins with the US President (another President as main character!) and Jim Crane telling each other things they already know.

2. An ultimatum delivered to the Japanese Ambassador.

3. A main character who made his fortune in the oil business.

4. Thinly-veiled Trudeau bashing ("That socialist bastard up there in Ottawa")

5. A deal brewing to take over a major US company (wait a minute - didn't Pierre de Gaspe already do this? Maybe not - by page 40 I still don't know the target of the takeover bid - maybe it's NOT an energy/oil related takeover this time).

Why does Chapter 1 read like a pitch?

My new favourite Rohmer line, deliberately quoted here out of context for effect:  "It'll be a cosmetic carrot for the beaver before I hit it between the eyes with my sanctions!".

I've just realized that Periscope Red opens on 9 March, twenty-four hours (more or less) before the beginning of Triad.

Bloody hell.

Here's the thing about Rohmer, one of his greatest weaknesses stems from wanting to set things in the near future. Very near. He moves in as close as possible, yet still misses the mark. Where any other writer would continue – this is fiction after all – Rohmer feels he must realign with reality.

Balls!, published eight months before the 1980 Quebec Referendum, imagines a world in which federalist forces lose. Rohmer was wrong, of course, but I've read The Man in the High Castle and am interested in seeing where this could lead.

(Not to suggest that the péquistes are fascists, you understand. Rohmer's is the party of Lévesque, not Marois.)

So, the Canada of Balls! is disintegrating – in Periscope Red mention of its existence is limited to a stray sentence – yet Triad, written after referendum, has the Dominion as healthy as ever.

For an author so intent on pursuing American sales this miscalculation is but a trifle. Rohmer's big problem rests with Balls!, which had Hugh Barker, the 40th President of the United States dying in a snowdrift. The tragedy is so recent that it is referenced in Periscope Red, yet Triad has Ronald Reagan as the fortieth.

This brings me to Peter Lockhart, the bland, blue-eyed Albertan who was Prime Minister of Canada in Balls! How is it that in Triad, which begins just four weeks later, the office is held by Pierre Trudeau Louis Turcot?

Now, where was I...

Well, I am finally starting Triad this week and can now spend May catching up with everyone.  But I can't start without offering a few thoughts about Periscope Red:

1. What struck me at the end of the book if you've never read anything without a real protagonist before, you don't really know what "episodic"  means until you jump from Washington to the Mecca to Moscow to the Indian Ocean with NOTHING holding things together. 

2. Brian is right in calling this his most accomplished/controlled book - he refrains from digressions about technical issues, doesn't talk overly-much about energy, even with oil tankers sailing through every second page.  That said, it's also his dullest book.  Maybe it's fatigue, but when Said starts planting Limpet Mines what should have been tense was instead as tedious as anything from the previous 6 books.  I longed to get back to Moscow so real-life Andrei Gromyko could make another generically Russian proclamation.

3. So not only Gromyko but Yasser Arafat appears as a character.  I guess this is a running quirk we should be documenting - real people as characters adding, er, adding.. something or other.  I'm sure this meant to add gravitas to the story, but it seems sort of random - why not Jimmy Carter or Trudeau? 

4. Never have submarines been rendered so boring.  That is an accomplishment.

Looking ahead:

Now that I am about to start Triad, I can read thinking of this notion of robbing the climax by redoing the ending of the last book.  I'm betting this isn't a technique like The Alexandria Quartet, where the first 3 books tell the same story from different perspectives and with different sensibilities.  But it doesn't change the story. 

I'll see soon enough later this week.

I was thinking that Separation might be sort of interesting to Lexie Kelly, who almost took Canadian history last fall, and who likes that sort of thing.  (Her introduction was Brian Busby's Encyclopedia of Questions and Answers About Canada.)  But Rohmer keeps tripping over the difference between what would actually happen in our system and what he needs to have happen for his plot.  He can't have Parliament called back into session and still keep Pseudeau Trudeau as PM, so he figures out a way for that not to happen.  It feels like the same sort of thing is happening with the national government in Great Britain.  People from opposing parties agree to table all kinds of issues they'd never table, just to keep the story moving.

The same goes for (SPOILER ALERT, STAN) the Palestinian terrorist assassinating the Saudi who shut off England's oil for selling missiles to Israel.  She should be on his side.  You just have to accept that she thinks she's gotten a better offer.

This assassination subplot really does feel like it was from some other book, and by "some other book" I mean The Day of the Jackal, which came out five years before Separation.  I kept waiting for the Lady Hawk to kill everyone who helps her -- the plastic surgeon, the gun shop owner -- and I realize now it's not because I've got better armchair-quarterback ideas than Rohmer, it's because that's what happens in Jackal.  And every other thriller with an assassin playing tourist in France.  The chapter fades from the sexy assignation to morning, with the car driving away from the small hotel, and then the maid -- farmer, mailman, barge captain -- finding the body.

The best parts of Separation, a book I've read, are the ones that aren't about separation.  I liked the stuff with the beautiful Palestinian terrorist a lot.  (Decades before the White Widow, enemy of America, rapping jihadis and Kenyan malls.)  And how about Great Britain's first lady prime minister, Marion Thrasher, three years before M. Thatcher in horrible real life?  The Lady Hawk and the Hawk Lady -- not bad work in the ripped-from-tomorrow's-headlines department.

Although, as you've both pointed out, the fact that Rohmer's Iron Lady seems to represent the party that's for trade unions makes the whole thing sort of a muddle.  And where are my maps and charts?  This "707" you speak of, is that some kind of aircraft?  If only I had a drawing to help me imagine such a thing.

The stuff about Canadian politics was pretty deadly.  Like an endless car trip on the dullest parts of the 401, enlivened only by the driver occasionally drifting out of our lane into some really weird generalisations about French Canadians. (Who, when not acting in perfect lockstep like the Borg, won't stop accusing English-speaking Canadians of all being alike.)

And lines about pseudeau-Trudeau like:

"He was in power and through him the people of Quebec controlled Canada." 

But the stuff with the casino and the terrorists and the sexy ultraviolence and everything was actually like a real thriller.  What's next?

People Tell Things They Already Know

"French Canada, as you well know, is already in a minority position in Canada."

"You know you will be recognised instantly at any airport or by police any place you go, even here in Paris."

"I know you're tired, Prime Minister, and you may have forgotten exactly what it was you and Hobson agreed to.  Let me read to you to refresh your memory..."

"Just to refresh your memory, Prime Minister, oil imports in 1975 cost us about $7 billion."

"Since we're refreshing each other's memory, let me remind you of some financial facts..."

"There is no way to have an election in the next thirty days.  The electoral laws, as we all know, do not permit this to happen."

"As you all know, Michael Lewis and I met with Premier Belisle in Montreal this morning."

"As you well know, France, our true mother country, is not participating in NATO."

'Then we'll have our meeting in the Privy Council Chamber which, as you know, is just around the corner from his office."

"As you may know, he's a lawyer and became a member of the National Assembly during the last election."

"As you know, any answer I give you will have to be confirmed by the Cabinet and by the caucus and ultimately by Parliament itself."

"As you know, our wealthy Arabs love to gamble..."

"I also bring you greetings and congratulations from my dear nephew, Prince Faisal, who last evening was confirmed as the new King of Saudi Arabia, succeeding his late cousin who, as you are aware, died tragically last Friday."

"Congratulations on your victory and on becoming the first woman Prime Minister of Great Britain!"

Prime Minister Thrasher Becomes My Favourite Character in Richard Rohmer

"I know exactly what you mean by a National Government.  You don't have to explain it to me."

Even Though She Never Appears in the Novel, Things Secretary of State Jessica Swift is:
handsome
brilliant

The GOBSMACKING SHOCK CLIMAX came as no shock, but only because I've remembered it these past four decades. Wonder whether my eleven-year-old self was floored. I'm guessing not, though it probably woke me up some after the pages devoted to parliamentary procedure, Air Force One flight plans, and the technical details of underwater gas system tower types.

Anyway, you gotta wonder just how President Blank's October Surprise would work in his favour. Wouldn't it destabilize… well, everything? Throwing the world into political and economic crises hardly seems like a good re-election strategy.

I was more interested in Bob Porter. I'm pretty certain we're meant to think of him as a real leader, but I'd lost faith by page six – and that's before he starts in on how Canada hasn't treated the Americans all that well, and how they kinda own our natural resources 'cause they found them.

Who voted for this guy? His friends, I suppose. The Governor General, a party supporter, is his old boss; the terrorists are old friends, as is the editor of the Toronto Star. Staff Sergeant Ray of the North-West Territories? Porter knew him, too… and his family.

Funny to think that Trudeau, prime minister in 1973 (when Ultimatum was published), was the actual prime minister in October 1980 (when the novel takes place). Rohmer was right in predicting that there'd be a Democrat in the White House, but Jimmy Carter wasn't anything like President Blank.

The Mackenzie Valley Pipeline was never built.

Wonder how a fella from Georgia would've felt about that.