bout de papier, Vol. 5, No. 2 (1987) — Summer 1987 // Été 1987, pp. 51–52
Bedfellows by C.J. Masson, Balmuir, 220 pp., $12.95.
Bedfellows, by C.J. Masson, is, on the surface, a poorly-written melange of dangling participles, jargon, and pseudonymic pinpricks unworthy of the Canada Council assistance it received.
The disclaimer on the back of the title page reads, “BEDFELLOWS is a work of fiction and any similarity to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.” Hogwash! Guess who this Canadian might be, “purely coincidentally” of course:
“Let them discover what it is to have a First Lady totally dedicated to her man’s chosen path. How she wished to be alone with him at the moment of triumph so that she could rub herself against him like a pussy-cat.”
Certainly not Maureen McTeer. Or, who could this fellow traveller be?
“The Prime Minister’s Challenger landed first followed by the security plane; then his empty back-up aircraft and finally the buzz-saw of Bliss’ Dash-8 with her and their two daughters aboard.”
Aha! Eureka! Certainly not Pierre Elliott Trudeau. No, these celebrities are Bliss “chirp and twitter” Dolittle and her husband Prime Minister William “repetitive speeches in the honied monotone” Waverly Dolittle.
It gets worse as “Bliss dropped her Reader’s Digest and sat bolt upright, her perky nipples straining at the Dacron of her nightie.” Waverly is so narcissistic he wants a baby on Christmas Day to keep up with a famous precedent. He discusses strategic family planning with his wife before “his oleaginous snores began to fill the chamber.” Yuk! No one would steal this book from the luggage rack of a Via railcar so far.
If you can stand the Harlequin romance illiteracy posing as satire (“Shit! he yelled, as Mrs. Stenhouse cameled her way toward the oasis beyond the door.”), or the crypto-libellous venom of an obviously disgruntled civil servant writing under pseudonym (“C.J. Masson” = “J..Maison” = Jamieson) there are merits to this book.
Sex and the United States have always confused Canadians. Both are elements that have to be lived with up close (like them or not), and both involve extensive human and commercial intercourse leading to dependence and the gradual lessening of personal or national sovereignty. Bedfellows alludes to the 19th Century sexual metaphor of Canadian submissiveness to American pressures on matters of sovereignty. Prime
Minister Waverly Dolittle is gradually assuming a Presidential Republican system with the help of his henchman, Arnold Mann, and the irrepressible forces of American hegemony.
The book and its writing improve as it progresses, and the author becomes more fluid in her plot. There are surrealistic absurdities that work such as the destruction of the Deputy Minister of Fisheries and his bicycle by a camouflaged truck driven by “Minister-of-almost-everything” Arnold Mann. Deputy after Deputy is trucked down by the crazy Mann who is never caught. There are no witnesses to this effective downsizing of the senior level of the public service.
Another clever aspect is the settlement by vigilant Canadians of northern “Gulags” as part of bureaucratic decentralization and the assertion of Canadian Arctic sovereignty.
The final act of Manifest Destiny is to blow up Dolittle’s plane, put the simpering Bliss in charge of Canada, and “sign the Order-in- Council declaring anything north of the 60th parallel extraterritorial to be used by the U.S. as they see fit.”
C.J. Masson seems to be legitimately angry at what she sees as having happened to Canada and the Canadian public service in the last decade or so. Her satire does not put the blame fully at the feet of politicians though these are portrayed as self-serving, brainless egotists. She implies criticism also of the cloning system of senior managers in the public service brainwashed in pseudo-training schools like Touraine, a monastic retreat on a hill near Ottawa staffed by would-be professors of management. The only benefit of such training is the networking aspect where manager meets manager. The drawback is that the blue sky theories are seldom realized in the real world of public service. Her character Arnold Mann is the much power is placed by political masters. Mann is a calculator with plans for the world that have little to do with the way things actually work. He reminds us of the terminally superannuated Senator Michael Pitfield whose solipsistic ideas are in large part responsible for the dire straits in which a disillusioned and demoralized Canadian public service finds itself. C.J. Masson has warned us of the dangers of egghead strategic management that simply apes American mistakes. After all, Robert MacNamara of Harvard believed that the attrition of the Vietnam death machine would bring victory for the United States. What it brought instead, as predicted by better American minds, was the realization that the real enemy was not a cruel communist regime but an inner devil trying to impose inhuman systems on men and women. In fairness, MacNamara has worn his sackcloth and ashes since Vietnam in his espousal of ethical approaches to the world monetary system and the prevention of war. Yet another Saul must fall off his horse in front of the light. Pitfield has simply “gone bush”.. The lesson is that the dangers of lost vigilance abound. C.J. Masson has, somewhat clumsily, sent a cry across the valleys of lost ethics and numbskull management theories in Ottawa, and has implicitly called for reform in “the blissful days of Waverly Dolittle.”
Tighter editing and more surrealistic satire would have helped this book. Given the critical situation of the political realm and the public service in Canada at present we would have enjoyed more poignancy and better humour. It is true that the real-life “herds of sycophants, pocket-liners, nepotists, bunglers, dipsomaniacs, and power-trippers who run a suffering nation” are well represented in Bedfellows. But where Stephen Leacock, Jonathan Swift and Mark Twain succeeded was in their artistic ability to hit a target square on the nose without too much axe-grinding. The characters in Bedfellows are just too close to home for comfort making the book less a satire and more a diatribe.
C.J. Masson writes well when she fantasizes about “Government Departments relocated to Arctic Gulags.” For that she receives a resounding B plus. But the reader does have to wade through D-grades of sophomoric writing, sludge, and cant, before the merits of the book are visible. O Canada, we really do still stand on guard for thee…..
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 5, No. 2 (1987) — Summer 1987 // Été 1987, pp. 51–52. Read the rest of this issue →
