The Statement

Alison Acker was a member of the English Department at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute, Toronto.

Revolutions have no right to be dull, nor have novels about revolution. Jan Drabek, author of The Statement and himself a refugee from Czechoslovakia, might very well have written more credibly about Eastern Europe, but here he has three strikes against him — his setting, his characters, and his dialogue.

Setting his revolution in a miniature version of New Zealand strains the reader’s credibility to begin with, even though anything is possible in Cold War times like the present. But in the cosy surroundings of “New Salisbury,” even the hardships of guerrilla camps in the hills sound like Boy Scout camp. When the fighting reaches the city, Drabek insists that suburbanites “become mammals again, hairy mammals, part of the primeval order of things on this earth, staking out their territory, wordlessly, savagely and effectively eliminating all that stood in their way,” but we never really see them bare their fangs.

The characters do not help. Most of them are such bores — academics in tweeds, eccentric female journalists who descend via parachute, colonels, and tea-swilling liberals. Even the leader of this revolution, one George Titus, never appears capable of pushing a resolution through the membership committee of a golf-club. And do they ever talk the revolution to death! Most of them use a quaint language that conjures up the gentleman’s club pre-World War II and the Boys’ Own Annual. They love clichés — “War is the great simplifier,” etc. The narrator, once “Head Boy at Herriott School,” chats about young ladies and “soft-stepping butlers” and “curtsying maids” and “cavorting about town.”

For all the book jacket picture of some sporting type, snarling and waving an archaic sword, Drabek’s revolution never takes off. Rather, the novel’s theme, about revolution and moral contradictions, never gets a chance and the “statement” never gets heard. But then, it is hard to be a Canadian Conrad.