Dazzled

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

Gray’s Billy Bishop Goes to War is one of the success stories of Canadian theatre. A new play, Better Watch Out, is the Christmas offering at the Vancouver Playhouse. The 38-year-old playwright has spent some sixteen of those years in Vancouver and has experienced first-hand some of the distractions of his characters. Gray’s first foray into fiction contains within its interstices enough of the social foibles of the ‘60s to merit consideration as social commentary. Dazzled isa flippant, witty, and insightful novel about the struggle to pull out from under the illusory life of television, fashion fads, and our friends, the Americans.

Gray’s persona shares with this reviewer the distinctive post-hippie milieu of the Kitsilano District (shares, in fact, nearly an identical address on West 6th Avenue in what was, during the early ‘70s, Haight-Ashbury North). Communal living, turning-on and tuning-out, the blathering narcotic of network television, image consciousness — these are the stuff that dreams were made on. From the purgatory of shifting fashions and unstable images Gray’s first person hero emerges atop a rainswept mountain to blow up a tv transmitter and settles, finally, into the ownership of the Luxe Junk Company, where he can “take stock by taking stock” and from this vantage point see what was wrong and what was right with his life.

Gray is at his best when he is shafting cultural faddism. His hero, Willard, experiences the mixed blessings of life as a graduate student (Gray, himself, majored in theatre at UBC) and as a clothing salesman (at which Gray spent seven months of “Sartrean boredom”). His wife leaves him; he retreats to a communal house where he takes up with a character called the Scrapper, who is engaged in writing a 1500-page “work” about Nothingness — fitting to symbolic perfection Willard’s own life. Human lives are being reduced to illusions, to shadows. The situation calls for drastic action; the Scrapper hatches a plan involving the destruction of the means of disseminating these shadows — television — and engages Willard’s reluctant assistance.

The novel plunges on to a slapstick denouement in the best theatrical tradition, ripe with fortuitous coincidence and contrapuntal dialogue. Any English major can tell you that dramatic plot requires at least three characters playing off one another to create movement. This might be Gray’s most telling success in Dazzled: his use of comedic theatrical devices to prod his fiction into life.

The movement in Dazzled is frenetic and scattered; yet Gray steers and controls it skillfully. Whatever shortcomings the novel has are in the area of character differentiation. Willard and the Scrapper are often nearly interchangeable in their dialogue. Other, minor characters (Trashman, Ethereal, Jake Slider) too often speak with a sameness of voice. It will be interesting to see whether Gray, in his next novel, will succeed in using more distinct brush strokes in drawing his figures.