Edward & Patricia

Bill Brydon was a librarian/journalist in Toronto.

The cover of this book is so tacky that you could lose it in Woolworth’s gift department, but never in a university book room. It shows a pair of china dogs photographed in black and white, superimposed on an orange background. The blurb on the back describes the book as “hilarious” and “rollicking”; I find it to be neither, but I like it, and I like the fact that they didn’t know how to package it.

The little dogs belong to Patricia, who is the child-like and emotionally wayward wife of Edward, who is more repressed but scarcely more self-assured. The book chronicles their marriage, from courtship to dissolution. It’s about two people who, early on, decide that they’re in love, because they’re not in anything else, and who go on pretending that their boredom and frustration are only boredom and frustration, until suddenly one day, the bond has snapped, the story is over, and the reader is left to guess about the sadness that remains. At least, this is what seems to happen, for very little is told directly. The author allows his people to wall themselves in with illusion, and if they can’t see that they’re getting into trouble, how can we? The narration shows self-discipline: there’s lots of dialogue, and no authorial comment. The result is tragedy dressed up as comedy, energetic (if not “rollicking”) and not “hilarious” because you can always tell that something is a little off.

Edward and Patricia are basically held together by sex, and their story is told in a series of free-verse poems about their sex-life. Don’t expect to see the movie version in Ontario. As encounter follows encounter, it emerges that whenever these two are anywhere, they talk about sex, but when they’re at home in bed, they get distracted by other things, among which are private, unfulfilled sexual fantasies. It’s all pretty convincing.

From a technical standpoint, the poems are not so much poems as clipped prose with rhythmic exchanges of dialogue. The story could have been presented as a series of Brautigan-like chapterlets. It’s really a piece of off-beat fiction that hangs between several genres.