The Nowhere Idea

William Blackburn is a professor of English at the University of
Calgary.

I am a sporting man — but, if I had to name one thing the world does not genuinely require at this moment, it would be a serious academic spoof. And yet, in The Nowhere Idea, Pablo Urbanyi has produced a work that shakes even my certitude.

The Nowhere Idea tells the story of two academics who rip tufts out of each other’s beards in a dispute over the possession of an undisclosed idea. The only judge willing to try their case lives in Erewhon, an unknown town in rural Ontario; in a treasury of mishaps, our principals probe the heart of Upper-Canada Rectitude, and live unhappily ever after.

Though thinly, and plausibly, described as an academic spoof, Urbanyi’s novel is in fact an attempt to make the myth of the Golden Age — and how we have given the Golden Age away — comprehensible to Canadian readers. Urbanyi has written a novel with real teeth — a novel well-served by Nigel Dennis’s translation — which even his pretension to write an academic spoof cannot obscure. Despite its ludicrous pretext, The Nowhere Idea attempts to grapple with the fact that the world is “nothing more than a tourist playground, a clumsy, ridiculous plastic imitation of a lost paradise.” He grapples with that fact with wit and sensitivity, daring and invention — and for that we owe him all thanks.