Ian McEwan’s Solar is a climate change novel in the same way that his 2005 effort Saturday is an Iraq war novel — which is to say, it both is and it isn’t. At their core, these books are concerned less with their apparent subjects than with capturing a particular sort of post-millennial malaise — the experience of living a privileged life within a gilded age that seems fated for extinction. The seeming apocalypses beyond the horizon are more than mere vehicles for this exploration, but not much more.
Solar’s protagonist, John Beard, a Nobel laureate in physics, functions as a dark reflection of Saturday’s neurosurgeon Henry Perowne. Both are men of science who voice skepticism toward literature, and both are consumed with thoughts of global events from which they can’t escape.
But whereas Perowne is happily married (too happily for some critics’ tastes), Beard is a serial philanderer: four times divorced, and well at work on number five. While Perowne is an admirable humanist who altruistically employs his scientific knowledge, Beard is decades removed from the work that earned him renown, and he enjoys his lingering fame in a grotesquely indulgent manner that rivals Martin Amis’s John Self. Though dogmatic hawks and doves often missed the point, McEwan intended his readers to sympathize with, or at the very least understand, Perowne’s mixed feelings toward the impending Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. Beard’s internal reactions to external events are hardly so generously rendered.
As the novel opens in 2000, Beard grows weary of the constant television chatter over the protracted American presidential election: “It could make no significant difference to the world at large… if Bush rather than Gore, Tweedledum rather than Tweedledee, was president for the first four or eight years of the twenty-first century.” This prediction is on its face ridiculous, and it’s particularly absurd that a former oilman and once-and-future environmentalist vying to become the most powerful person in the world should seem irrelevant to a scientist who, over the course of the novel, is charged with ensuring the survival of humanity in the face of climatological catastrophe. Of course, at the time Beard would hardly have been alone in harbouring these sentiments. Hindsight is what ripens this folly into farce, and what wonderful farce Solar has to offer.
Beard is himself a fitting metaphor for the planet he selfishly endeavours to save, and an aptly depressing synecdoche for the species that’s condemned it to its sorry state. At once bloated and sickly, short-sighted and obtuse, he’s an expertly cast comic caricature, yet he lacks the depth of McEwan’s most convincing creations. Still, when placed in circumstances like an Arctic expedition for artists and scientists (based on the experience that inspired McEwan to write the novel), Beard offers a hilarious window into the pettiness of human nature even when faced with events of world-historical significance. Such satirical set-pieces, though largely rendered in McEwan’s typically measured elegance, are where the parallels to Saturday break down; the earlier novel is far more directly earnest. Solar’s tone is more reminiscent of McEwan’s Booker Prize-winning novella Amsterdam, which pits two former lovers of a deceased woman in a life-and-death struggle. Conspicuous in their absence, perhaps, are comparisons to his greatest novel, Atonement. But only a rarefied class of contemporary fiction earns such accolades, and to complain that Solar is eclipsed by McEwan’s earlier genius would be akin to Beard lamenting that he’s no Einstein. In the absence of perfection, a small measure of greatness works just fine.
Few writers can lay claim to the triple crown — the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize — of CanLit award nominations. M.G. Vassanji pulled it off two years ago with The Assassin’s Song, and Rawi Hage followed suit with last year’s Cockroach. This year, Vancouver writer Annabel Lyon joined their illustrious ranks with The Golden Mean, her first novel for adults. Depicting Aristotle’s tutelage of a young Alexander the Great, The Golden Mean is a gripping, thoughtful dramatization of one of the most intriguing relationships in ancient history. Tonight, Lyon joins the other four writers shortlisted for the Giller in Toronto for the award ceremony. I spoke with her over champagne during the International Festival of Authors.
Before we talk about The Golden Mean, can you tell me about the experience of being nominated for all these awards?
I feel like I’ve been hit by something large. It’s overwhelming, and the days have become very long. It’s a lot of media and it’s a lot of readings. I’m used to being at home in my room and my book being this little personal thing, and all of the sudden it’s just out there. Of course, I’m not complaining at all. It’s wonderful, but it is very overwhelming, and I’m a pretty shy person.
How did the experience of writing a novel compare to writing the shorter fiction you’ve published?
It was really hard. I feel like I’m a short story writer. I always compare it to running: it all depends on what you’ve got the body for, and what you’re wired for. You might be a short-distance runner, or you might be a long-distance runner. I think I’m a short-distance writer. I feel confident when I do that, in control. The novel was a long, hard slog, and it didn’t come naturally at all. There were many points where I thought, “Can I just make this back into a short story?” I wanted to give up. But the story was just too big; it needed the scope of a novel.
Do you plan to write more novels in the future?
I have an idea for a sequel to this one. It was always a two-book project in my mind. I would love to write more short stories and I plan to, but it’s not like I have all these great novel ideas racked up and waiting to go in a production line. It would have to be something pretty compelling to get me to dive back into that again. Did I mention it was hard?
Why write a novel about Aristotle today?
I was a philosophy major as an undergrad. I liked ancient philosophy and ethics, and he’s the towering figure when you put those two together. I always loved to read his work, which I realize is incredibly geeky, which I am. In times of stress I would read Nicomachean Ethics, because it calmed me down. It’s someone trying to think things through in a very steady, calm, orderly way. To give you a trivial example: I would come home from going on a date which was kind of miserable, and I’d feel gross and wasn’t ready for bed right away, and I would start reading Aristotle. No wonder I didn’t get more dates. The period after September 11, not quite so trivially, was a stressful time. I started thinking, as did many people in the arts, “What’s the relevance of what I’m doing? Who needs fiction right now? What am I doing after all?” I started reading Aristotle again, and I was struck by how relevant and how contemporary he is. He’s asking questions like, “What is it to live a good life? What is it to be a good citizen? How do you avoid extremism?” All of which is hugely relevant. I remember reading that tiny little bio that was in the front of [his books] and thinking how I would make that into a novel. I’m a fiction writer, and eventually the fiction brain comes back. It took a long time before I realized I was actually going to write the novel, because I was just doing it as an exercise to see how I would write the novel if I was going to do it. [Finally] I accepted that I was really working on it.
Are there particular lessons you think Aristotle has for us today?
That idea of the golden mean, the avoidance of extremes and trying to find a middle ground. I think that is relevant, for obvious reasons in the world today, and something that will remain relevant, at the personal level and the political level, as long as there are human beings. My bigger project was that I really wanted people to know who Aristotle was and remember what he gave to the culture, because he’s at the foundation of so many things. He was one of the first empirical scientists. He went out and got his hands dirty, where the Greek philosophers before him just sat in chairs and thought things through. He was the father of logic, which led all the way to computer science and gave us the world we have today. He was one of the first people to do dissection on animals, which gave us modern medicine. Then there’s his ethics. And not just western culture, he was a huge influence over medieval Islamic scholars, as well. He’s like a Leonardo DaVinci or a Shakespeare — one of those once-in-a-thousand-years brains. I have little kids and I realized they can go through twelve years of school, they can go to university, they can get PhDs, and never have to learn anything about Aristotle. That felt wrong to me. I just want people to realize that deep down under everything the world is today, he’s there. It’s all built on top of what he did.
How close is your portrayal of Aristotle to what we know about the actual person?
There are works of historical fiction that play a lot more with characters and invent scenes that never really happened. That can be wonderful and really fun to read, but since my goal was to kind of give Aristotle back, I didn’t want to give him back in a warped or twisted way. I wanted to keep it pretty straightforward. Obviously, there’s not a lot that’s known because he lived 2,300 years ago, so I had to extrapolate a lot from his writings. For instance, it’s known that his father was a physician, so I assumed that he would have learned some of his father’s trade. I don’t know that for sure, but it’s a pretty safe assumption.
Can you talk a bit about your decision to portray him as essentially bipolar?
Again, that’s extrapolation from his work. He wrote in a book called Problems about the link between what he called melancholy — but we would call depression — and the creative temperament. It sounds like something he knew intimately and wrote about from experience. Then you look at the sheer amount of work that he produced. It’s a manic mind that could never switch off. He was just insanely curious about everything. Metaphysics, law, politics, theatre, marine biology, astronomy, astrology, the Olympics — you name it and he wrote a book about it. So at the other end there was this kind of frenetic mind that just never seemed to stop. You take those two things and then look in the Ethics where he writes about the golden mean being his ideal. I thought, that doesn’t sound like somebody who’s arrived at that, it sounds like someone who desperately wants that.
What is it about this particular period in Aristotle’s life — when he began tutoring Alexander the Great — that attracted you to write about it?
Those seven years were the most tumultuous of his life. He spent the first twenty years of his adult life in Plato’s Academy as basically a student and then as a teacher. And then he had this period of travels where, after Plato died, he went to Asia Minor, he went to Turkey, and then he lived on the island of Lesbos before being summoned back to his birthplace, Macedonia. He spent seven years there, and during that period Macedonia conquered the rest of the southern city-states. He was away from Athens, which is the center of the world for an intellect like him. Then he tutored the young Alexander, who must have been a force to be reckoned with. After Philip, the king of Macedonia, died, Alexander took the throne and went off on his big campaigns. Aristotle went back to Athens and stayed there for pretty much the rest of his life. Once again he was in a university writing books. Externally and internally, I thought that seven-year period really had the most going on, and it’s also a nice, discreet period for a novelist. It has a beginning, and a middle, and an end. For me, coming to it from short stories, I needed that framework to hang it on.
What was the research process like?
I wrote a very embryonic, complete first draft of about forty pages before I did much research at all, and then went out and did a lot of reading. I came back and realized I’d gotten all this stuff wrong, so I went back and fixed it. It got longer: it was eighty pages, then a hundred pages. I went out and did more research, and then I came back to writing again. The neat thing about something set in ancient times is that there’s a limit to how many primary sources you can read. You can get to the end of it, whereas if you’re writing about Shakespeare you can go on researching forever. So in a way, [The Golden Mean] being set so long ago made the research a little easier. But I didn’t go to Greece. I was having babies at the time that I was writing this and I couldn’t get away from them. More to the point, you can’t go to ancient Greece. Things that I would have wanted to see just weren’t there anymore.
Did working on the novel so long change your relationship to Aristotle’s work?
The more I worked on him, the more he became a frail figure in my mind. He starts out seeming like this monolithic, huge brain. Such a reputation, such influence down the ages; you think he must have been this solid, confident figure. Yet the more I read his work and the more I thought about the character, the less true that seemed. He increasingly became someone who I felt worried for.
Throughout the novel, characters use contemporary vernacular, including profanity. What went into your decision to take that route?
When I started working on it, I found that I was using a very British diction, which was really annoying, because that’s not my diction. My dad’s English, so I sort of have that voice in my head. A lot of historical fiction, especially about the ancient world, is written by Brits. It’s become a convention to have characters speak British diction. I started questioning why I was doing this, and why I couldn’t just use a North American diction. I ended up having the Athenians speak like Brits, because the Athenians are from of an older, more refined culture; they certainly looked down on the Macedonians for being a very young, very wealthy, barbarous society that had to import all its culture. I gave the Macedonians my vernacular, the North American ways of speech. I’ve had reviewers trip on that sometimes and say, “Well, why do they speak this, it sounds anachronistic, it sounds too contemporary, would they really swear like that?” Well, why would they say “bloody hell” like a British person? That doesn’t make any more sense. [Using contemporary vernacular] also seemed a way of saying this isn’t British history that I’m writing, this is Canadian history. We’re a democracy, and where does that come from? We watch Hollywood movies that are in three acts, and who wrote about that first? This is Canadian history, it’s North American history, it’s world history — so why can’t I use my own voice?
Since this is your first novel for adults, I wonder what differences you noticed between writing for adults and children, both in the composition and the reception.
I’ve found children’s writing easier. It’s a more joyous thing to do. I look forward to sitting down at the desk, and it comes very easily. Obviously there are certain things you wouldn’t write about in a children’s book, and the level of language has to be different. I had to learn to do that, and I had a great editor who helped me through it. The Golden Mean was definitely harder, darker. As far as reception goes, I think the real contrast is with publishing short fiction. People often think The Golden Mean is my first book, when I’ve written prior collections. Short fiction really doesn’t count. I’ve spoken to poets about this, and they’re also often asked, “Are you just a poet?” In the same way: “Are you just a short story writer?” It still amazes me that people are buying this book. As a short story writer, I’m used to selling my 400 copies. You sit at the tables waiting to sign, and you watch everybody line up for the novelists. Now people are lining up for me, and I still have that kind of feeling: “Really, you bought that? You bought my book?” I have no experience with this. This is crazy.
(Photo by Phillip Chin)
With such successes as The World According to Garp, A Prayer For Owen Meany, and The Cider House Rules to his name, John Irving is one of the most beloved novelists of our time. Last week he appeared at IFOA XXX to promote his twelfth novel, Last Night in Twisted River. (You can listen to the early part of the event via The Globe and Mail’s podcast.)
At first, Irving spoke about his writing process, which always begins with him figuring out the final sentence of his intended novel. Only then, he explained, can he know where to start. For two decades, Irving struggled to find the closing words of Twisted River. When he had them at last, he was able to craft the book with unprecedented speed. Irving started writing in 2005, and delivered the manuscript to his publisher just over a year ago — a furious pace by his standards.
Irving read the novel’s opening passages, then sat down with CTV host Seamus O’Regan for a fascinating discussion. O’Regan quoted a passage from Twisted River wherein the protagonist, a renowned writer named Daniel Baciagalupo, laments the propensity of readers to search his novels for evidence of autobiography. O’Regan likewise lamented that this put him in the awkward position of recognizing autobiographical elements in Twisted River, but feeling reluctant to explore them. Irving jokingly threw his interviewer a lifeline when he admitted that Kurt Vonnegut, in scenes from the book, repeats the same advice to Danny at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop that he once gave Irving, in reality, at the same institution.
During the audience Q&A session that followed, a high school English teacher asked Irving how he feels about his work being taught in schools. The author confessed to mixed feelings. Many of his favourite books are those that he first read in school, he said, and so he likes that students will be exposed to his work. But there were other books (e.g. Faulkner canon), he continued, that he was made to read when he wasn’t ready for them, and so he hates the idea of students being forced to slog through his novels if they don’t enjoy them. “Teach the books,” Irving instructed his questioner, “but make sure your students know I’m not the one forcing them to read them.”
Later, Irving related an amusing anecdote about Charlton Heston’s arrival at a Planned Parenthood benefit screening of The Cider House Rules, the 1999 film based on his abortion-themed novel. No one would sit with Heston, fearing he was a right-wing zealot, but the writer knew better. “The Planned Parenthood people assumed that because he was a big gun-rights guy, he must be pro-life — when actually, and I’ll bet you didn’t know this, he was as staunchly pro-choice as he was pro-gun. His entire political philosophy was, ‘Don’t you tell me what to do!’”
All in all, a very enjoyable evening with one of America’s most celebrated storytellers.
Over the past few decades, Paul Quarrington has forged an unparalleled career as a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, filmmaker, and musician. Earlier this year, he was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. Saturday afternoon a sell-out crowd came to the Brigantine Room at Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre — with some, including yours truly, relegated to the adjacent tent — in order to celebrate the life and work of this remarkable artist.
Dave Bidini hosted the event, which saw an assortment of Quarrington’s friends and colleagues take to the stage in order to celebrate his work. Up first was Irish writer Roddy Doyle, who explained that he’d met Quarrington and grown to like him before ever reading his work. “Which is just as well — it’s shite!” From then on, despite Bidini’s claim to the contrary, the event took on the occasional air of a roast. Margaret Atwood related an anecdote about performing country western songs with Quarrington and Timothy Findley at a PEN benefit in the early ’90s. David Bezmozgis talked about attending a Quarrington reading years ago: “It was the first time I saw in the flesh a writer whose books I’d actually read. I’d like to thank Paul for dispelling my romantic image of writers.” Later, Nino Ricci described his regular poker games with Quarrington. Particularly noteworthy was Bidini’s reunion with his Rheostatics band mates, who performed a short and very sweet set midway through the event.
During the intermission, video greetings from those who couldn’t attend played on screen. Among these speakers were Jim Cuddy, Michael Ondaatje, and Ron Mann. Afterward, The Quarrington Brothers, a band comprised of Paul’s musician brothers Joel and Tony, performed. Next, his sister Christine spoke, followed by Paul joining his brothers to perform as The Quarrington Trio. Other speakers included Alistair MacLeod, who delivered a poem he’d written about Quarrington, and Patsy Aldana, who presented Quarrington with the Writers’ Trust of Canada’s Matt Cohen Award.
Finally, Quarrington himself took to the mike. In talking about his diagnosis and upcoming chemotherapy, he became the first speaker to directly address his illness. He spoke movingly about his belief that he’d been given a second chance in life, and that the illness struck him as a message from his creator that, “If you don’t like it here, you don’t have to stick around.” After leading the crowd in an apposite reenactment of Lou Gehrig’s famous words at Yankee Stadium, he closed the proceedings with a performance by his band, Porkbelly Futures. All in all, a quite fitting tribute — celebratory, not funereal — to a writer we all hope will be delighting us with his work for many years to come.
By any measure, Turkey’s Orhan Pamuk is one of the most celebrated and respected writers alive. The author of six novels, a memoir, and a recent essay collection, Pamuk was the recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature. Three years earlier he won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award — the world’s most lucrative prize for an individual work of fiction — for his novel My Name Is Red. On the second night of IFOA XXX, Pamuk took to Toronto’s Fleck Dance Theatre to read from his new novel, The Museum of Innocence. Set in 1970s Istanbul, the novel (an excerpt from which recently appeared in The New Yorker) is the story of Kemal, a wealthy man who becomes enthralled with a young shopgirl and spends nearly a decade trying to woo her.
Pamuk delivered a few well-received passages before sitting down for a wide-ranging talk with CBC Radio host Carol Off. For the first part of the interview, they discussed the novel’s thematic concerns. Like most of Pamuk’s work, The Museum of Innocence focuses on the fault lines in a society dealing with the competing strains and allures of tradition and progress, of Islam and the West. An obviously cosmopolitan man, Pamuk expressed his sympathies for the progressive side, though he criticized those who congratulate themselves on their outward modernism (which, he said, largely amounts to the frivolity of European shopping sprees) while harbouring deep conservatism within. At that, the conversation turned to political matters.
It’s a long-standing PEN Canada tradition to place an empty chair on stage at its events to symbolize the many writers around the world who cannot freely participate in such proceedings. For the past fifteen years, IFOA has observed this tradition in the name of a specific author. This year’s selection is of intimate relevance to Pamuk. In January 2007, Turkish-Armenian magazine editor Hrant Dink was shot to death outside his office in Istanbul. Prior to the assassination, Dink had become one of the few people convicted under Article 301 of the Turkish penal code for “insulting Turkishness” in his writings on the Armenian genocide. Pamuk was charged under the same article for his own comments on the topic in 2005.
When Off broached the subject of his relationship with Dink, Pamuk demurred, explaining that he has strong private feelings, but does not share them in interviews. He seemed somewhat reticent to discuss politics at all, preferring to speak about his literary work. This sparked an interesting exchange about interviewers’ tendency to question writers about politics, as well as a minor audience revolt.
After the interview, Pamuk took questions from the crowd. Of particular interest was his response to a question about the experience of having his novels translated into English. He explained that English is the only non-native language he’s comfortable with, and that he collaborates with his translator to ensure that the reworked text maintains the subtle artistry of his Turkish original. Regardless of the translation’s quality, he went on, the first reading always leaves him depressed, as it’s difficult to see his Turkish voice replaced with an English one. In part, he settles on an acceptable translation by simply growing used to it.
Those who’ve never read any of Pamuk’s work would do well to peruse his extraordinary Nobel lecture; anyone who regrets missing last night’s event may want to give his 2008 appearance at the University of California a look. Both serve as fitting, yet succinct introductions to one of the world’s most important writers.
Welcome to Walrusmagazine.com’s coverage of the thirtieth annual International Festival of Authors.
IFOA XXX began last night with a PEN Canada fundraiser that featured a rare public appearance by Alice Munro, who shared the stage with fellow author Diana Athill. Over the next ten days, Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre (along with several venues outside the city) will host a wide range of literary luminaries, including internationally renowned writers like John Irving, Orhan Pamuk, Margaret Atwood, and Colm Tóibín, and Walrus contributors including Lisa Moore, Mark Kingwell, and Hal Niedzviecki. The current crop of CanLit awards finalists is well represented: the festival includes readings by short-listed authors for the Governor General’s Literary Award, Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and Scotiabank Giller Prize.
There are multiple Walrus-related events throughout the festival. For those who prefer politics to the NFL, The Walrus editor John Macfarlane interviews Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff this Sunday at 2pm. A week from tonight, October 29, is Walrus Night at IFOA, with multiple editors hosting events. On the final Saturday of the festival, October 31, The Walrus comics blogger Sean Rogers will be interviewing R.O. Blechman and Seth, the latter of whom Rogers recently profiled for the magazine. Later that day, managing editor Jared Bland will host “On Influencing and Being Influenced,” a panel discussion with Debra Adelaide, William Deverell, Robert Girardi, and Nikos Papandreou.
Watch this space throughout IFOA XXX for reports on particular events, author interviews, and the latest news. And follow The Walrus on Twitter for breaking updates and chances to win event tickets.
It is the lot of public intellectuals to be simultaneously admired and loathed, and few evoke either feeling as intensely as British biologist Richard Dawkins. The pugnacious professor established his reputation in 1976 with the release of his first book, The Selfish Gene, a modern classic that, like all the best popular science writing, relates complex ideas in nuanced terms comprehensible to any educated layperson. Dawkins has written nine other books since then, including 2006’s best-selling atheist polemic The God Delusion. His latest effort, The Greatest Show on Earth, is his first substantial attempt to catalogue the evidence for Darwinian evolution. It expertly combines his talent for scientific explication with his disdain for religious fundamentalism. I spoke with Dawkins last week as he began a North American tour to promote the book, which is a riveting, humbling, and stunningly informative read.
Who is the audience for this book?
I don’t think it’s going to change the minds of dedicated creationists, but there are lots and lots of people who have never been exposed to the evidence of evolution before. They may be sufficiently gripped by the book. I’m hoping to not exactly change people’s minds, but to draw people off the fence — people who haven’t really thought about it much before.
What is the greatest misconception about evolution not among creationists, but among people who believe in Darwinism?
That Darwinian evolution is a theory of chance. That’s probably the largest one of all. There are many people who say, “I simply refuse to believe that anything as complicated as the human body — or any living body, for that matter — could be a result of chance.” Well, of course it’s not the result of chance. That’s the whole point.
Your book debunks many creationist myths, from the suggestion that natural selection is only a theory, to the crocoduck canard about missing links in the fossil record. What are creationists’ most pernicious mistakes about evolution, and why do they persist?
For creationists as well, the most pernicious mistake is the one about it being a theory of chance. Darwin’s Theory of Evolution doesn’t mean Darwin’s Tentative Hypothesis Concerning Evolution; it means theory in the scientific sense, which is a body of knowledge gathered together and widely accepted. The crocoduck one is a bit of a joke. There are people who misunderstand evolution so much that they think it means there should be intermediates between not just ancestors and descendants, which would be reasonable, but intermediates between any animal and any other animal, like a crocodile and a duck. Or a fronkey! “Where are your fronkeys between frogs and monkeys?” And that, of course, is a truly grotesque misunderstanding.
That’s a mistake many people make about missing links. Any species that is the halfway point between two other species is still going to be classified as one of those two species, or as a third species. Nothing is classified as mid-species.
That’s right. We’re lucky that we have fossils at all. It’s an extremely fortunate circumstance that corpses do fossilize. Even if they didn’t — if we had not a single fossil — we would still know that evolution had happened from other evidence. What’s really telling is that there’s not a single fossil in the wrong place. If there were mammal fossils from before fish evolved, for example, that would totally and utterly disprove evolution. But not a single fossil of that kind has ever been discovered in the wrong place.
The book details how easy it would be to falsify the theory of evolution. In your dealings with creationists, how do they account for the lack of such falsifying evidence?
They don’t discuss it, or they try instead to make a big deal out of gaps in the fossil record, which is only negative evidence. You expect to find gaps. What you don’t expect to find is evidence of something in the wrong place. Creationists basically ignore the fact that that hasn’t happened. Or they make [things] up. There are some fake fossils. There are allegations of human skulls in rock measured from the Carboniferous Era. There are allegations of human footprints interspersed with dinosaur footprints. I’m happy to say that most creationists have now explicitly disavowed that particular one. The leading creationists have said, “No, we can’t use that anymore, it’s too obviously wrong.”
You label creationists “history deniers,” intentionally likening them to Holocaust deniers. There’s considerable rhetorical power in this. Do you worry, however, that it might alienate some readers?
It hadn’t occurred to me that it would be alienating or seen as a strong pronouncement. Maybe it’s because I’m a scientist and I don’t latch onto the political implications of it. To me, it’s a perfectly good parallel. The historical evidence in favour of the Holocaust having happened is overwhelmingly strong, obviously, and the historical evidence in favour of evolution being a fact is also overwhelmingly strong. There are deniers of both. Why not link them as a good analogy?
The Greatest Show on Earth was only just released in Canada, but it’s been out a little longer in Britain. What sort of reaction have you gotten from creationists?
The book went straight to number one on the British, Australian, and Irish bestseller lists, and I have great hopes for the Canadian bestseller list. But I haven’t specifically heard any reaction from creationists. The kind of creationists you may be talking about are the young earth creationists, those who think the world is only 6,000 years old. I don’t think they really read books anyway, do they?
There’s at least one book that they read.
Yes, one book. And not much of it, by the way. If they read all of the Bible, they would get a nasty shock.
What is the most compelling piece of evidence for the theory of evolution?
That’s a difficult one to answer because there’s so much evidence that’s very, very compelling. The single most compelling piece probably comes from molecular genetics compared across all living creatures: all living creatures have the same genetic code. That means you can quantitatively compare the genes of any creature with any other creature… Whether you take similar animals — rats and mice, or humans and chimpanzees, or moles and hedgehogs — or you take more different animals, you find a beautiful, hierarchical pattern: a tree. The tree is, of course, a tree of life. It’s a family tree. It’s a pedigree. These animals are all cousins of one another. Every single molecule you look at produces the same tree.
Is the sense of wonder with which you write and speak about evolution a conscious strategy, or simply unavoidable when describing this material?
The material is awe inspiring. It dwarfs Genesis or any other creation myth. It is an astonishing story that on this planet — and maybe on other planets, but we don’t know about other planets — the ordinary laws of physics and chemistry could do this extraordinary thing from the arising, at some point more than three billion years ago, of a self-replicating molecule. From this everything followed. We now have the most staggering elegance, beauty, and illusion of design that, as Hume said, ravishes into admiration all men who have ever contemplated it.
(Photo by Josh Timonen)
Over the past two decades, Toronto-born actor Enrico Colantoni has made a name for himself with a variety of roles in Canada and the United States, both on television and in film. These days he plays Sergeant Greg Parker on the police drama Flashpoint, the first Canadian series to be broadcast on an American network since Due South a decade ago. In The Walrus’s September issue, Jason Anderson profiled Flashpoint, which has become something of an unlikely hit for its American network CBS. Last month I went to visit Colantoni on the set of Flashpoint, where we discussed the series, the difference between American and Canadian culture, and a criminally underappreciated show about a teenaged detective.
Our blogger updates on his progress with David Foster Wallace’s behemoth novel of ideas
“A few members of the online discussion kept referring to it, like it was the Bible or something. A definition of the zeitgeist, one person had written … So he was reading it to catch up. He was reading it to be educated, which was, along with self-reliance, his current great aim. To be able to comment knowledgeably on one of the voices of his time … If only it weren’t quite so long, he thought … Maybe he could read just half of it? Would that be enough?” – The Emperor’s Children, Claire Messud
“God some people are such pussies. ‘Oh it’s so long…’ ‘Oh the words are too big…’ Just read the damn book. Read it. (Read the goddamn book.)” – CraftyJack, Onion AV Club Commenter
The Infinite Summer bookmark calendar I printed off a couple of months ago tells me that I should be well past page 600. I’m nowhere close. In my first post about Infinite Summer, I described the seventy-five pages per week schedule as “entirely feasible.” I still believe this is the case, though it’s certainly more difficult than I’d imagined. Part of the reason I’ve fallen so far behind is a wide array of distractions, but the larger reason is that I’d figured I could read the requisite weekly pages in a couple of brief sittings. I’ve always been a slow reader, but Infinite Jest has decelerated my already leaden pace. Because of the labyrinthine sentences, because of all the words I need to look up, and because I’m convinced enough of Wallace’s genius to pore over the novel with nearly monastic zeal, I read, almost without fail, ten pages every hour. This means that by the time I finish (and unlike all but one person I know who’s attempted to read it, I will finish) I’ll have spent more than one hundred hours with IJ. That’s more time than most Christians I know have spent reading the New Testament.
In recent years, the bloody spectacle of mixed-martial-arts has rapidly grown in popularity. Tomorrow night, the largest MMA promotion, the Ultimate Fighting Championship, stages a landmark event, UFC 100. Though MMA understandably doesn’t appeal to all tastes, tomorrow’s event is of added importance because it offers the opportunity to witness one of Canada’s most accomplished athletes at the top of his game: Montreal’s Georges St-Pierre, the current UFC welterweight champion.
Responding to MMA’s popularity are the competing choruses of devoted fans who obsess over it with a zeal geekier types (say, those of us at The Walrus) reserve for interests like Lost, and those disgusted by the sport’s alleged barbarism. Of course, there’s an expanse of grey between these, and it’s here that my own impressions reside. (more…)
The first late night monologues written since Michael Jackson’s death will be broadcast later today. The tone will almost certainly be different from the usual mentions Jackson receives. Along with Bill Clinton’s promiscuity and George W. Bush’s ignorance, Jackson’s strangeness is a recurring trope in paint-by-numbers American comedy. And not without reason. Even Jackson’s most ardent admirers must concede that he was a disturbed figure. Still, at times I’d find myself troubled by the constant barrage of abuse directed at him.
I don’t blame the comedians, really. I laughed at my fair share of the jokes. Still, as Craig Ferguson explained in his first show after Britney Spears’s self-inflicted balding, comedians should focus their abuse on the powerful. Clinton and Bush can handle it. Maybe it’s also fair to have expected Jackson to handle it. Such a monumentally successful musician may not have seemed like a particularly vulnerable target, but remember the abuse Jackson suffered at the hands of his father, and consider that his oft-mocked Peter Pan syndrome was the result of desperately grasping for the healthy childhood he never experienced.
Like most self-proclaimed serious readers, I maintain loosely-codified mental lists of books I feel I should read and those I actually want to. Then there are those volumes that bridge both categories, but that I’ve avoided because of their intimidating page counts. I feel certain that I’ll eventually get around to reading Middlemarch and Underworld (I’m less sure about In Search of Lost Time), but as of this week I’m joining an array of readers across the Internet who are braving David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.
The plan calls for reading an entirely feasible seventy-five pages per week, meaning an approximate end date of September 22. The Infinite Summer website offers several tips which range from the absolutely necessary to the seemingly dubious, as well as testimonials from participants like the blogger Jason Kottke and The Decemberists’ frontman Colin Meloy. I’ve never been one for book clubs, but the site’s discussion forum may well prove to be interesting. (more…)
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