The Baie-Comeau Angel and Other Stories

Bruce Meyer teaches English at Trinity College, University of Toronto.

The cliché that people receive the government they deserve is evoked by
the title story of this collection of short stories. In “The Angel of
Baie Comeau,” a distraught John Turner is continually thwarted by a
misguided angel who replaces assassinated Brian Mulroneys with replicas
as disingenuous as the previous ones. At the heart of this political
diatribe-cum-fable is the question of whether it is acceptable to suffer
personal damnation for the sake of patriotism. As Watson suggests, Brian
Mulroney may have been the manifestation of a national failure of
spiritual resolve—a black hole at heart of Canada’s collective
psyche.

Watson continues his metafictional vein in “Mettre en conte le
dream,” a Cortazar-esque essay/story on the nature of Derridian dream
interpretation and the mischances of imaginative reconstruction. There
is an erudite sense of scholastic interruption that plays throughout
these stories, as Watson examines the occult, the supernatural, and the
paranormal through the miasma of critical theory and cultural discourse.
What is troubling, however, is that the intellectual matrix often gets
in the way of the fictional aspects of his stories, so that, as Watson
states in this story, “we never arrive at the dream we want to recall,
it is another dream we arrive at, and from that, another, until we have
to be satisfied with the insecure fiction of a series of fiction.”