Reviewed by Lisa Pasold
In a parallel universe, CBC’s interminable Vinyl Café broadcasts have been replaced with updates from the life of Nina, The Bandit Queen. Instead of hapless Dave’s gentle faux pas, listeners are treated to demonic ice cream trucks, stolen cars, and impractical torture techniques. And while this may be a parallel universe, it is all darkly familiar, especially to anyone who lives in Toronto. Or Winnipeg. Or Vancouver. Or any urban landscape—because the blighted land of SuEz is everywhere.
These twisting anecdotes spiral out not from a charming record shop, but rather from a dilapidated, abandoned-yet-inhabited house tucked in the buzzing shadow of looming apartment projects. The porch doesn’t have any railings, the door is missing its doorknob, and the place stinks. Literally:
…it was the smell of mildew and mold and spilled food that had never been wiped up and feet that had never been washed and dirty diapers left in the bathtub forever that nobody cared about because nobody had any reason to care, so why bother? It was the smell inside every house in SuEz.
Welcome to the series of events that turn Nina Carson Dolgoy, low-key welfare queen and SuEz resident, into Nina, The Bandit Queen. With her four daughters Guinevere, Merlina, Lady and Fabreece in tow, Nina takes on escalating battles until she finds herself up against the city’s entire police force and the mayor. All because she’d like her eldest daughter to take swimming lessons. Though friends doubt that swimming will distract Gwinny from sex, Nina can’t think of a better plan. The only problem is that the swimming pool has been closed since forever—even the water has been stolen. It isn’t that Nina intends to launch herself into a life of crime, but she can’t think of any other route for acquiring the funds needed to reopen the pool. Really, what else is a concerned mother to do?
The plot is mostly an excuse for Slinger to sketch a delectable assortment of memorable secondary characters—including a slick-voiced ice cream vending truck. The story begins simply enough: an evil ice cream truck appears in the neighbourhood, making personalized loudspeaker announcements along the lines of “Katie, we have the Silver Shiver you’ve been wishing for….” This truck plagues neighbourhood parents with guilt—because no one in SuEz can afford ridiculous ice cream treats. Most days, they’re lucky if they come up with potato chips as the kids’ main course. Nina decides to confront the truck. After that, all bets are off.
I was hooked once Nina begins her war against the ice cream truck. With gleeful disregard for political correctness, Joey Slinger skewers urban identities. Straight, gay, educated or not, local or not, any skin colour at all—look out. I appreciate Slinger’s basic point: everybody, whatever our background, whatever our personal taste—and whether we’re from SuEz or not—absolutely everybody is always trying to find a creative solution to life’s little problems. Nina’s neighbour, Ed, summarizes it thus: “It was a nice little business that catered to people with real needs.” Ed’s job is straightforward—he steals cars on request, so owners can collect on the insurance money. Real needs, indeed.
Another neighbour, Jarmeel Tolbert, suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder but the army refuses to give him a disability pension. To survive, he starts a space-based religion for people who believe they’ve survived alien abductions. He discovers that starting a religion isn’t for sissies: “Something Jarmeel would really have liked to know was whether their followers scared the shit out of the founders of other religions.”
Despite his legitimate concerns, Jarmeel gives his first collection plate money to Nina for her swimming pool fund. Her daughters also do their part: Merlina and Lady attempt to sell their baby sister Fabreece to a strange man in a car, in return for a lamentable amount of cash, which they immediately contribute to the swimming pool fund. And Nina’s brother Frank becomes involved in a bank heist—which starts Nina thinking about larger money-making schemes.
All too soon, her brother’s bank robbery attracts the attention of a police sergeant. “It came down to basic economics. Unless he made something on the side, there was no way he could afford his stereotypically gay lifestyle. Robbie Toole was essentially an honest man—certainly honest enough to admit that he was well past middle age, and for that reason alone it was impossible to do it on the cheap and have the kind of friends and home décor he wanted.” So he tracks down Nina, the bank robber’s next-of-kin.
As the plot spirals further out of control, Nina meets the seventy-six-year-old identical twin brothers L.Roy and L.Ray Elwell, whose automobile company is run from the front seats of ruined cars. Due to constraints of space and sanity, I won’t detail why two Nigerian Finance Ministry representatives stumble into Nina’s basement, or why the hapless torturers Victor and Raoul become involved. But trust me—it makes sense in context.
The novel feels loose and disorganized in the way a good jazz improvisation swings out and then back into its groove on a lazy summer festival night. The book builds to a clever recreation of the O.J. slow-mo live-coverage freeway chase. Hand-made signs line the highways with encouraging lines like “Long Live Bandit Queen Nina!”, but Nina is too busy dealing with everyday chaos to worry about her debut as a celebrity.
As Nina realizes: “To go from being locked in a showdown with an ice cream truck to deciding to rob a bank wasn’t a straight line from A to B.” Which as every good storyteller knows, is precisely the joy of the thing. The addled-junebug perambulations of this story would give stress migraines to the current powers at CBC (funnily enough, Slinger isn’t a producer there anymore.) But this comic novel is just the right antidote to our all-too-Canadian complacency about how very nice we all are. Just in time for summer reading, though maybe a little early for a Canada Day gift, our national identity could use a dose of these dark little comedic broadcasts from the mind of Joey Slinger.
Dundurn | 272 pages | $21.99 | paper | ISBN #978-1459701380
‘Nina, the Bandit Queen’ by Joey Slinger
Book Reviews
In a parallel universe, CBC’s interminable Vinyl Café broadcasts have been replaced with updates from the life of Nina, The Bandit Queen. Instead of hapless Dave’s gentle faux pas, listeners are treated to demonic ice cream trucks, stolen cars, and impractical torture techniques. And while this may be a parallel universe, it is all darkly familiar, especially to anyone who lives in Toronto. Or Winnipeg. Or Vancouver. Or any urban landscape—because the blighted land of SuEz is everywhere.
These twisting anecdotes spiral out not from a charming record shop, but rather from a dilapidated, abandoned-yet-inhabited house tucked in the buzzing shadow of looming apartment projects. The porch doesn’t have any railings, the door is missing its doorknob, and the place stinks. Literally:
…it was the smell of mildew and mold and spilled food that had never been wiped up and feet that had never been washed and dirty diapers left in the bathtub forever that nobody cared about because nobody had any reason to care, so why bother? It was the smell inside every house in SuEz.
Welcome to the series of events that turn Nina Carson Dolgoy, low-key welfare queen and SuEz resident, into Nina, The Bandit Queen. With her four daughters Guinevere, Merlina, Lady and Fabreece in tow, Nina takes on escalating battles until she finds herself up against the city’s entire police force and the mayor. All because she’d like her eldest daughter to take swimming lessons. Though friends doubt that swimming will distract Gwinny from sex, Nina can’t think of a better plan. The only problem is that the swimming pool has been closed since forever—even the water has been stolen. It isn’t that Nina intends to launch herself into a life of crime, but she can’t think of any other route for acquiring the funds needed to reopen the pool. Really, what else is a concerned mother to do?
The plot is mostly an excuse for Slinger to sketch a delectable assortment of memorable secondary characters—including a slick-voiced ice cream vending truck. The story begins simply enough: an evil ice cream truck appears in the neighbourhood, making personalized loudspeaker announcements along the lines of “Katie, we have the Silver Shiver you’ve been wishing for….” This truck plagues neighbourhood parents with guilt—because no one in SuEz can afford ridiculous ice cream treats. Most days, they’re lucky if they come up with potato chips as the kids’ main course. Nina decides to confront the truck. After that, all bets are off.
I was hooked once Nina begins her war against the ice cream truck. With gleeful disregard for political correctness, Joey Slinger skewers urban identities. Straight, gay, educated or not, local or not, any skin colour at all—look out. I appreciate Slinger’s basic point: everybody, whatever our background, whatever our personal taste—and whether we’re from SuEz or not—absolutely everybody is always trying to find a creative solution to life’s little problems. Nina’s neighbour, Ed, summarizes it thus: “It was a nice little business that catered to people with real needs.” Ed’s job is straightforward—he steals cars on request, so owners can collect on the insurance money. Real needs, indeed.
Another neighbour, Jarmeel Tolbert, suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder but the army refuses to give him a disability pension. To survive, he starts a space-based religion for people who believe they’ve survived alien abductions. He discovers that starting a religion isn’t for sissies: “Something Jarmeel would really have liked to know was whether their followers scared the shit out of the founders of other religions.”
Despite his legitimate concerns, Jarmeel gives his first collection plate money to Nina for her swimming pool fund. Her daughters also do their part: Merlina and Lady attempt to sell their baby sister Fabreece to a strange man in a car, in return for a lamentable amount of cash, which they immediately contribute to the swimming pool fund. And Nina’s brother Frank becomes involved in a bank heist—which starts Nina thinking about larger money-making schemes.
All too soon, her brother’s bank robbery attracts the attention of a police sergeant. “It came down to basic economics. Unless he made something on the side, there was no way he could afford his stereotypically gay lifestyle. Robbie Toole was essentially an honest man—certainly honest enough to admit that he was well past middle age, and for that reason alone it was impossible to do it on the cheap and have the kind of friends and home décor he wanted.” So he tracks down Nina, the bank robber’s next-of-kin.
As the plot spirals further out of control, Nina meets the seventy-six-year-old identical twin brothers L.Roy and L.Ray Elwell, whose automobile company is run from the front seats of ruined cars. Due to constraints of space and sanity, I won’t detail why two Nigerian Finance Ministry representatives stumble into Nina’s basement, or why the hapless torturers Victor and Raoul become involved. But trust me—it makes sense in context.
The novel feels loose and disorganized in the way a good jazz improvisation swings out and then back into its groove on a lazy summer festival night. The book builds to a clever recreation of the O.J. slow-mo live-coverage freeway chase. Hand-made signs line the highways with encouraging lines like “Long Live Bandit Queen Nina!”, but Nina is too busy dealing with everyday chaos to worry about her debut as a celebrity.
As Nina realizes: “To go from being locked in a showdown with an ice cream truck to deciding to rob a bank wasn’t a straight line from A to B.” Which as every good storyteller knows, is precisely the joy of the thing. The addled-junebug perambulations of this story would give stress migraines to the current powers at CBC (funnily enough, Slinger isn’t a producer there anymore.) But this comic novel is just the right antidote to our all-too-Canadian complacency about how very nice we all are. Just in time for summer reading, though maybe a little early for a Canada Day gift, our national identity could use a dose of these dark little comedic broadcasts from the mind of Joey Slinger.
Dundurn | 272 pages | $21.99 | paper | ISBN #978-1459701380