Reviewed by Hubert O’Hearn
Have you ever noticed that the two one-word variations on a common phrase have completely opposite meanings? I’m not quite sure which is said more often – the road to heaven is paid with good intentions or the road to hell is paved with good intentions – but any time I hear either one, I play back the memory tape to make sure it wasn’t the other. Are we damning or praising here?The same sort of confusion is at the heart of the issue I have with Terry Fallis’s new novel Poles Apart. Fallis, in case you didn’t know, became famous for his first novel, the political satire The Best Laid Plans (2008). That won him the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour and also was named by CBC’s Canada Reads in 2011 “the essential Canadian novel of the decade.” So here we have a writer who is doing well, is certifiably funny, and now wants to cash in on that capital by writing a novel about a truly important topic. Perhaps not the equivalent of Chaucer’s deathbed conversion or Alfred Nobel channelling the profits of dynamite into a Peace Prize, nonetheless Terry Fallis is all about an honourable purpose in writing Poles Apart. He wishes to advance the cause of women’s rights and to do so in an entertainingly popular fashion.
Anyone who doubts that women still occupy a second-class position in society is either a man or is a woman who has been as completely indoctrinated into a false sense of reality as any of those rigidly seated observers of the shadow puppets in Plato’s Cave. Of course the usual litany of exceptions is read out in an attempt to prove that there is no glass ceiling – a Hillary Clinton here or an Oprah Winfrey there, and look! women host SportsCentre! – but really those are the equivalent of Potemkin Villages shown off to hide the reality. As Fallis points out in a helpful list at the back of Poles Apart, at the time of publication women had been heads of state only 7.4 per cent of the time over the previous fifty years. Women also work two-thirds of the world’s working hours yet receive just 10 per cent of the world’s income. I could go on, but really either you get it or you don’t. If you don’t get it, ask your Mom.
Now it is also not only possible but even desirable to write about the cause of human rights as it concerns women in a humorous way. There is a cliche that goes something like “If you want people to take you seriously, make them laugh first.” I’d trot out Jon Stewart as an exhibit, but much better for our purposes here is Caitlin Moran. The Times columnist in her collections How to Be a Woman and Moranthology is at her wickedly funniest when discussing the difficulties faced by women. It doesn’t matter if the specific issue is body image, domestic work sharing or the discomfort of wearing “fashionable” clothes, Moran makes her points and you read them through eyes washed clean by tears of laughter.
The problem with Terry Fallis’s book (I may as well just plunge the knife in) is that it just isn’t very funny. Now I grant you I’m a lousy audience for comedy, but over the course of 400 pages I didn’t laugh out loud once. Instead I read the whole novel with a sort of benign smile on my face, like a dinner guest forced to watch the host’s child tap dance her way through “Good Ship Lollipop,” badly, while seconds pass with the pace of continental drift.
The problem isn’t with Poles Apart’s plot per se. Everett Kane is a freelance writer in his late 30s. Now I always worry when a central male character in a novel is a writer, for as sure as beer adds to bellies, it is inevitable that the author’s surrogate is going to end up in relationships with the sort of dazzling hot women who would never dream of giving them a second glance in real life. It’s just a little counter-productive to Fallis’s desire to elaborate on women’s rights that a good portion of Poles Apart takes place in a Florida strip bar, which in turn allows for the description of:
…a polished chrome pole anchored at one end to the floor and at the other to the ceiling, around which gyrated not one, but two of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen. They both had long blond hair and were dressed in nothing but come-hither smiles, dangly earrings, and glowing perspiration.
I’ll let the use of that hoary cliché “come-hither smiles” pass without further mention. We’ll just pretend it isn’t there. At least Fallis avoids the phallus as we are spared hot rumpy-pumpy action even though Everett does become (of course mutually!) attracted to a first-year lawyer who has to be a dozen years younger.
Everett, who is in Orlando to assist his father’s recuperation from a stroke, decides to start an anonymously-written blog called Eve of Equality about women’s rights. The blog becomes an overnight monster success and Everett has the moral dilemma as to whether or not to admit that a man is writing these pro-feminist essays.
Wait. Why is that a moral dilemma? Everett does the same version of an explanation twice in the book, once to an elderly and once-famous feminist (think Gloria Steinem) recuperating in the same rehab hospital as his Dad, and a second time to a fictionalized CEO of the National Organization for Women (NOW). He says that it would be wrong for a man to be seen as in the vanguard of the women’s movement and both times I waited in vain for either or both of the women to reply with a pat on the head, “There, there, darling, no worries for you won’t be seen that way at all.” I do get that Fallis needed a plot device in order for Everett’s desire for anonymity to make sense, but is monstrous vanity really a good choice? A vast, multinational movement involving billions of women is never, ever going to have one figurehead, as anyone writing about it would probably know. I’m quite sure that when Jimmy Carter announced he had a brain tumour but would spend his last lucid days working for women’s rights, he didn’t worry about the negative optics of being a man.
At the nut of it, though, Poles Apart lacks the two core principles that comedic satire must have. Handily both start with T: tension and target. Comedy, and in particular laughter, involves a release of tension. I have a long-standing uncollected bet on offer that no one can name a joke that does not involve pain. Even a pun involves mental confusion and thus a sort of pain. Everett’s moral dilemma is so trumped-up that we readers never really worry about it. Nor is there ever any real threat made to him. Oh yes, the strip club owner is very, very annoyed when he is pointed out as a villain in Everett’s blog, but our hero doesn’t even go through a decent beating, instead having the kindly, smiling kneebreaker paint bruises on Everett’s torso with makeup. There is no tension, and we need no release.
Similarly, there is no target. Satire has to leave some wounds or its arrows just fire and plop onto the grass of a soft field. There is nowhere a sense of what or whom the women’s rights movement is fighting against. Fallis had some opportunities here. When he looks at the comments on his blog, he just deletes the misogynistic ones instead of giving shape and shade to their authors. Worse yet, they aren’t quoted. Readers need a monster in order to see a hero. I also kept expecting to see an example of Everett’s massively influential and admired blog posts. There is not a one and that is a choice by Fallis that I simply can’t understand. Why do we never get to read, and ourselves be influenced by, the arguments made in Eve of Equality?
I haven’t enjoyed writing this review, not one bit. Having written plays and essays, speeches and reviews on human rights and in particular women’s rights, I absolutely love that a very popular novelist has joined the battle. I just wish he hadn’t arrived and left his sword sheathed.
McClelland & Stewart | 432 pages | $22.95 | paper | ISBN# 978-0771036194
‘Poles Apart’ by Terry Fallis
Book Reviews
Have you ever noticed that the two one-word variations on a common phrase have completely opposite meanings? I’m not quite sure which is said more often – the road to heaven is paid with good intentions or the road to hell is paved with good intentions – but any time I hear either one, I play back the memory tape to make sure it wasn’t the other. Are we damning or praising here?The same sort of confusion is at the heart of the issue I have with Terry Fallis’s new novel Poles Apart. Fallis, in case you didn’t know, became famous for his first novel, the political satire The Best Laid Plans (2008). That won him the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour and also was named by CBC’s Canada Reads in 2011 “the essential Canadian novel of the decade.” So here we have a writer who is doing well, is certifiably funny, and now wants to cash in on that capital by writing a novel about a truly important topic. Perhaps not the equivalent of Chaucer’s deathbed conversion or Alfred Nobel channelling the profits of dynamite into a Peace Prize, nonetheless Terry Fallis is all about an honourable purpose in writing Poles Apart. He wishes to advance the cause of women’s rights and to do so in an entertainingly popular fashion.
Anyone who doubts that women still occupy a second-class position in society is either a man or is a woman who has been as completely indoctrinated into a false sense of reality as any of those rigidly seated observers of the shadow puppets in Plato’s Cave. Of course the usual litany of exceptions is read out in an attempt to prove that there is no glass ceiling – a Hillary Clinton here or an Oprah Winfrey there, and look! women host SportsCentre! – but really those are the equivalent of Potemkin Villages shown off to hide the reality. As Fallis points out in a helpful list at the back of Poles Apart, at the time of publication women had been heads of state only 7.4 per cent of the time over the previous fifty years. Women also work two-thirds of the world’s working hours yet receive just 10 per cent of the world’s income. I could go on, but really either you get it or you don’t. If you don’t get it, ask your Mom.
Now it is also not only possible but even desirable to write about the cause of human rights as it concerns women in a humorous way. There is a cliche that goes something like “If you want people to take you seriously, make them laugh first.” I’d trot out Jon Stewart as an exhibit, but much better for our purposes here is Caitlin Moran. The Times columnist in her collections How to Be a Woman and Moranthology is at her wickedly funniest when discussing the difficulties faced by women. It doesn’t matter if the specific issue is body image, domestic work sharing or the discomfort of wearing “fashionable” clothes, Moran makes her points and you read them through eyes washed clean by tears of laughter.
The problem with Terry Fallis’s book (I may as well just plunge the knife in) is that it just isn’t very funny. Now I grant you I’m a lousy audience for comedy, but over the course of 400 pages I didn’t laugh out loud once. Instead I read the whole novel with a sort of benign smile on my face, like a dinner guest forced to watch the host’s child tap dance her way through “Good Ship Lollipop,” badly, while seconds pass with the pace of continental drift.
The problem isn’t with Poles Apart’s plot per se. Everett Kane is a freelance writer in his late 30s. Now I always worry when a central male character in a novel is a writer, for as sure as beer adds to bellies, it is inevitable that the author’s surrogate is going to end up in relationships with the sort of dazzling hot women who would never dream of giving them a second glance in real life. It’s just a little counter-productive to Fallis’s desire to elaborate on women’s rights that a good portion of Poles Apart takes place in a Florida strip bar, which in turn allows for the description of:
…a polished chrome pole anchored at one end to the floor and at the other to the ceiling, around which gyrated not one, but two of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen. They both had long blond hair and were dressed in nothing but come-hither smiles, dangly earrings, and glowing perspiration.
I’ll let the use of that hoary cliché “come-hither smiles” pass without further mention. We’ll just pretend it isn’t there. At least Fallis avoids the phallus as we are spared hot rumpy-pumpy action even though Everett does become (of course mutually!) attracted to a first-year lawyer who has to be a dozen years younger.
Everett, who is in Orlando to assist his father’s recuperation from a stroke, decides to start an anonymously-written blog called Eve of Equality about women’s rights. The blog becomes an overnight monster success and Everett has the moral dilemma as to whether or not to admit that a man is writing these pro-feminist essays.
Wait. Why is that a moral dilemma? Everett does the same version of an explanation twice in the book, once to an elderly and once-famous feminist (think Gloria Steinem) recuperating in the same rehab hospital as his Dad, and a second time to a fictionalized CEO of the National Organization for Women (NOW). He says that it would be wrong for a man to be seen as in the vanguard of the women’s movement and both times I waited in vain for either or both of the women to reply with a pat on the head, “There, there, darling, no worries for you won’t be seen that way at all.” I do get that Fallis needed a plot device in order for Everett’s desire for anonymity to make sense, but is monstrous vanity really a good choice? A vast, multinational movement involving billions of women is never, ever going to have one figurehead, as anyone writing about it would probably know. I’m quite sure that when Jimmy Carter announced he had a brain tumour but would spend his last lucid days working for women’s rights, he didn’t worry about the negative optics of being a man.
At the nut of it, though, Poles Apart lacks the two core principles that comedic satire must have. Handily both start with T: tension and target. Comedy, and in particular laughter, involves a release of tension. I have a long-standing uncollected bet on offer that no one can name a joke that does not involve pain. Even a pun involves mental confusion and thus a sort of pain. Everett’s moral dilemma is so trumped-up that we readers never really worry about it. Nor is there ever any real threat made to him. Oh yes, the strip club owner is very, very annoyed when he is pointed out as a villain in Everett’s blog, but our hero doesn’t even go through a decent beating, instead having the kindly, smiling kneebreaker paint bruises on Everett’s torso with makeup. There is no tension, and we need no release.
Similarly, there is no target. Satire has to leave some wounds or its arrows just fire and plop onto the grass of a soft field. There is nowhere a sense of what or whom the women’s rights movement is fighting against. Fallis had some opportunities here. When he looks at the comments on his blog, he just deletes the misogynistic ones instead of giving shape and shade to their authors. Worse yet, they aren’t quoted. Readers need a monster in order to see a hero. I also kept expecting to see an example of Everett’s massively influential and admired blog posts. There is not a one and that is a choice by Fallis that I simply can’t understand. Why do we never get to read, and ourselves be influenced by, the arguments made in Eve of Equality?
I haven’t enjoyed writing this review, not one bit. Having written plays and essays, speeches and reviews on human rights and in particular women’s rights, I absolutely love that a very popular novelist has joined the battle. I just wish he hadn’t arrived and left his sword sheathed.
McClelland & Stewart | 432 pages | $22.95 | paper | ISBN# 978-0771036194