Party Favours

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

Christopher O’Reilly is a talented but somewhat naive young reporter
who has just landed a prestigious job as the Parliament Hill
correspondent for a major Canadian news service. He arrives in Ottawa
with a reputation as an aggressive investigative reporter. O’Reilly
soon discovers that these very skills are highly suspect in the cozy
club atmosphere of the Parliamentary Press Gallery. Most of his fellow
journalists regard him as an upstart and a loose cannon. Politicians
alternately woo or dodge him. When O’Reilly follows up on a few leads
that connect a dead Montreal lawyer, a powerful lobby group, and a
high-ranking cabinet minister, he suddenly finds his job—and even his
physical well-being—threatened.

There are no fewer than four blurbs hyping the book’s author, who is
declared to be a political insider writing under the pseudonym of Jean
Doe. Political credentials aside, Doe’s writing style leaves much to
be desired. The prose limps from cover to cover, crippled with metaphors
like “a handshake that was limper than a noodle, and eyeglasses
thicker than the bottom of a coke bottle.”

According to the blurb on the jacket cover, this novel is “remarkable
for its blend of political savvy, scandalous revelations and delicious
satire.”

The “delicious satire” is really a collection of poorly drawn prose
cartoons of well-known Canadian politicians. The character Bobby
Laurier, for example, is a chronically underestimated Liberal
French-Canadian prime minister “who talk like dis all da time.” Most
of Doe’s humor revolves around sophomoric jokes about the length of
another character’s penis. The bad guy is identified in the first 10
pages; watching O’Reilly take him down is like being forced to witness
a Revenue Canada tax audit.