George Elliott Clarke has a formidable resume: renowned poet and playwright, University of Toronto literature professor, current Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate, and an Officer of the Order of Canada. Like much of Clarke’s work, The Motorcyclist strives to give voice to the experience of East Coast Black Canadians, but don’t let Clarke’s credentials and lofty literary goals convince you that his second novel is a stuffy affair – The Motorcyclist is a vital, zippy read, at its core mostly a breezy sex romp.
Set in late 1950s Halifax, the book is loosely based on the diary of Clarke’s father, written in the spring and summer of his 25th year. As Clarke writes in the book’s introduction, the diary “relates my father’s endeavours to secure Love and a satisfying wage.” Potential reader of The Motorcyclist, I hope you enjoy emphasizing words by capitalizing and italicizing them, because Clarke certainly does. A sampling of examples from the book’s first six-page section: “Race, Romance, Chance, Prejudice, Possibility, Glamour, Perdition, Salvation.” This short list contains what is essentially a complete explication of the book’s themes and preoccupations.
The first third of the story jumps back and forth between the book’s present and protagonist Carl’s formative experiences in the past, many grappling with the realization of his place as a black man in post-WWII Canadian society. After a first childhood brush with racism, Carl’s mother sits him down and puts two China sugar bowls before him, telling him simply, “you are brown like the brown sugar, those boys who were yelling that ugly word are white like the white sugar. Some white sugar people do not like brown sugar people.”
As he enters puberty, Carl quickly realizes that his otherness also has a sexual component. An encounter on a bus with a drunken woman who simultaneously grabs at his crotch with “groping octopus hands” while admonishing him to not touch her is “bizarre and destabilizing” but also “undeniably stimulating.” Though Carl quickly becomes fully cognizant that this attraction is rooted in the diminution of his humanity – a hyper-sexualized version of the noble savage – this complex mix of sexual attraction and taboo-trampling also provides him a certain thrilling power.
The book meanders, mostly pleasantly, through stories from Carl’s past, settling into a series of scenes detailing Carl’s encounters with the many young ladies of Halifax, both black and white. The book is unabashedly explicit, as focused on sex as a peacocking 25-year-old. But The Motorcyclist is more than just sex; Clarke’s evocation of late ’50s Halifax is fully realized – socially, geographically, psychically.
Clarke is an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink prose stylist – The Motorcyclist is stuffed with rhyme, puns, and alliteration. Occasionally Clarke teeters on the edge of beatnik caricature, but in a way, that’s part of the joy of the thing. Clarke consistently prioritizes lexical acrobatics over flow, which does lead to the occasional clunky turn. Example: I defy anyone to make it unrehearsed through the phrase “as if a machine gun had blizzarded it with bullets” without tripping over their tongue. But really – who cares? It’s a wonderful image, and, like all of Clarke’s prose in The Motorcyclist, once you give yourself over to it, its manifold pleasures reveal their splendid abundance: “Halifax is a naval base, bristling white power and bristling black servitude”; a man is described as being “stout, portly, and the colour of port or stout.” One can essentially choose a page at random and be rewarded by Clarke’s witty, endlessly inventive prose.
Contrary to my expectations, The Motorcyclist is not a road novel. Beyond a section describing a trip to New York City, Carl doesn’t ever really go anywhere. Though the travelogue’s On The Road epigraph reveals its obvious forebear, the section contains little of its inspiration’s live-wire vitality – possibly the only time the novel is hampered by faithfulness to its source text – and is easily the book’s weakest part.
However, this formal gambit follows the novel’s function. In 1950s North America, a young, black male like Carl is forced to navigate a tricky path through racism and potential violence. Unlike Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, Carl can’t just pick any destination and head for it. What Carl can control, however, is how he travels. Carl’s motorcycle isn’t meant to get its rider to a destination so much as it’s supposed to get its rider there in style, or Style, if you prefer. Style is power, is freedom, is self-determination. In much the same way, the book zips from scene to scene ferried by prose that, like Carl’s BMW, is both showy and muscular. Like Carl, The Motorcyclist’s true concern is Style, and in this manner, Clarke pays a most sincere tribute to his novel’s titular inspiration.
‘The Motorcyclist’ by George Elliott Clarke
Book Reviews
George Elliott Clarke has a formidable resume: renowned poet and playwright, University of Toronto literature professor, current Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate, and an Officer of the Order of Canada. Like much of Clarke’s work, The Motorcyclist strives to give voice to the experience of East Coast Black Canadians, but don’t let Clarke’s credentials and lofty literary goals convince you that his second novel is a stuffy affair – The Motorcyclist is a vital, zippy read, at its core mostly a breezy sex romp.
Set in late 1950s Halifax, the book is loosely based on the diary of Clarke’s father, written in the spring and summer of his 25th year. As Clarke writes in the book’s introduction, the diary “relates my father’s endeavours to secure Love and a satisfying wage.” Potential reader of The Motorcyclist, I hope you enjoy emphasizing words by capitalizing and italicizing them, because Clarke certainly does. A sampling of examples from the book’s first six-page section: “Race, Romance, Chance, Prejudice, Possibility, Glamour, Perdition, Salvation.” This short list contains what is essentially a complete explication of the book’s themes and preoccupations.
The first third of the story jumps back and forth between the book’s present and protagonist Carl’s formative experiences in the past, many grappling with the realization of his place as a black man in post-WWII Canadian society. After a first childhood brush with racism, Carl’s mother sits him down and puts two China sugar bowls before him, telling him simply, “you are brown like the brown sugar, those boys who were yelling that ugly word are white like the white sugar. Some white sugar people do not like brown sugar people.”
As he enters puberty, Carl quickly realizes that his otherness also has a sexual component. An encounter on a bus with a drunken woman who simultaneously grabs at his crotch with “groping octopus hands” while admonishing him to not touch her is “bizarre and destabilizing” but also “undeniably stimulating.” Though Carl quickly becomes fully cognizant that this attraction is rooted in the diminution of his humanity – a hyper-sexualized version of the noble savage – this complex mix of sexual attraction and taboo-trampling also provides him a certain thrilling power.
The book meanders, mostly pleasantly, through stories from Carl’s past, settling into a series of scenes detailing Carl’s encounters with the many young ladies of Halifax, both black and white. The book is unabashedly explicit, as focused on sex as a peacocking 25-year-old. But The Motorcyclist is more than just sex; Clarke’s evocation of late ’50s Halifax is fully realized – socially, geographically, psychically.
Clarke is an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink prose stylist – The Motorcyclist is stuffed with rhyme, puns, and alliteration. Occasionally Clarke teeters on the edge of beatnik caricature, but in a way, that’s part of the joy of the thing. Clarke consistently prioritizes lexical acrobatics over flow, which does lead to the occasional clunky turn. Example: I defy anyone to make it unrehearsed through the phrase “as if a machine gun had blizzarded it with bullets” without tripping over their tongue. But really – who cares? It’s a wonderful image, and, like all of Clarke’s prose in The Motorcyclist, once you give yourself over to it, its manifold pleasures reveal their splendid abundance: “Halifax is a naval base, bristling white power and bristling black servitude”; a man is described as being “stout, portly, and the colour of port or stout.” One can essentially choose a page at random and be rewarded by Clarke’s witty, endlessly inventive prose.
Contrary to my expectations, The Motorcyclist is not a road novel. Beyond a section describing a trip to New York City, Carl doesn’t ever really go anywhere. Though the travelogue’s On The Road epigraph reveals its obvious forebear, the section contains little of its inspiration’s live-wire vitality – possibly the only time the novel is hampered by faithfulness to its source text – and is easily the book’s weakest part.
However, this formal gambit follows the novel’s function. In 1950s North America, a young, black male like Carl is forced to navigate a tricky path through racism and potential violence. Unlike Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, Carl can’t just pick any destination and head for it. What Carl can control, however, is how he travels. Carl’s motorcycle isn’t meant to get its rider to a destination so much as it’s supposed to get its rider there in style, or Style, if you prefer. Style is power, is freedom, is self-determination. In much the same way, the book zips from scene to scene ferried by prose that, like Carl’s BMW, is both showy and muscular. Like Carl, The Motorcyclist’s true concern is Style, and in this manner, Clarke pays a most sincere tribute to his novel’s titular inspiration.
HarperCollins | 288 pages | $29.69 | cloth | ISBN 978-1443445139