Bloody Jack: A Book

Bill Brydon was a librarian/journalist in Toronto.

This is a “free-verse novel,” 235 pages of poetry about a bankrobber named John Krafchenko, who terrorizes Western Canada. There is the usual disclaimer for fiction (“any resemblance to any character...”), so I presume it’s fiction. It’s hard to tell. It’s difficult to find place names, impossible to find dates (even fiction needs dates), and almost impossible to extract a story. In short, it’s hard to get through it.

I admire any attempt to use poetry to tell a story, especially an action story, but the poet really has to know what he’s doing. This story is told largely in stream-of-consciousness free verse, with liberal use of the sort of experimental technique (all over the page) that is no longer experimental. The narrative is severely disjointed and the energy required to create atmosphere is dissipated.

There is a fair amount of good writing. The book should be edited down by half, and devices should be employed to create atmosphere. As Cooley is aware, a project like this one has a mysterious sense of “primary source.” I would like to see photos, maps, and personal letters describing action sequences (these last would be particularly important). Then he could slot in the poems, but only the really good ones. Cooley does give us newspaper clippings, monologues, and a couple of short letters, but these do not do enough to establish a narrative framework.

Browning’s dramatic monologues end just when the action begins. There’s a good reason for this. It’s very hard to combine action and poetry (although I suppose Shakespeare did). Cooley tries hard to create action using scattershot words and fragments of thought. The result is not hard to understand, but it is hard to grasp. It’s asking the reader to do the writer’s job.