The Grammar Architect

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

Wikipedia’s take on the term “cover version” is “any remake of a
song.” New Brunswick author and musician Chris Eaton has transferred
the concept to literature, taking Thomas Hardy’s 1873 work, A Pair of
Blue Eyes, as the basis for his second novel. In Eaton’s creative
hands, not much remains of Hardy’s tale of a doomed provincial love
affair. The original premise is expanded, transformed, distorted; if
there is anything remaining of Hardy, it is (slight pun) hardly
recognizable. Four men of post-university age commingle with an
assortment of somewhat damaged women, one of whom, the red-haired
Dallas, has developed, with a Scandinavian physicist, Framtiden (Swedish
wordplay), a time machine. “At last,” the physicist thinks, “a way
to witness the formation of the planets, the expansion of the universe
in reverse, even to be there for the first hundredth of a second!”

Neil, one of the four men, is a writer, “which meant he wrote more
than just emails or office memos, ad copy or term papers … or even
just scrawling things on the wall of the bathroom, although he was also
known to participate in that.” He has a job describing a church tower
being rebuilt, rendering it in language, word by word: “He decided one
should never describe a tower unless one could make it the only one of
its kind in the world, which he would do through exhaustive enumeration
… a tower like a phone book, or a stock inventory at a lumberyard, or
an alphabet.” Marsh is a painter, Burke, a poet, and there is Dooling,
whose vocation involves somehow the loss of one of his legs. And there
are the women who seem to flit like perverse muses across the creative
landscape: Judith (whose father is the personification of the Greek
Tragedy), and Anne-Sophie, the chanteuse whose G-spot is in her throat.

Eaton, whose first novel, The Inactivist, appeared in 2003, records CDs
under the name Rock Plaza Central. The Grammar Architect is sometimes
difficult to follow, but always thought-provoking and deftly written.