Volcano Days

Eugenia Sojka is a sessional instructor of English at the Memorial
University of Newfoundland.

This novel is another example of Brian Johnson’s artistic virtuosity.
Johnson has published poetry and numerous book and movie reviews for
Maclean’s and many other national magazines. A novelistic discourse
seems to be a natural choice for someone who revels in the multiplicity
of forms and can switch easily from one discourse to another.
Johnson’s interest in the novel goes beyond the boundaries of the
traditional genre, however. He explores the subversive and the
carnivalesque, both at the level of story and language.

The narrative’s basis is the diary of a drugged paranoid narrator, an
English-Canadian reporter enamored of Quebec, revolution, Marxism,
“psychedelic drugs, surrealism, sexual innovation, augury and the
Rolling Stones.” His imagination, liberated by drugs, swings from
paranoia to ecstasy. He cherishes his surrealistic dreams, his delirious
thinking, and his conceptualization of the world in terms of colors,
sounds, and scents. Johnson examines here the question of identity, the
dissolution of the boundary between the subjective and the objective.
The volcano is a metaphor for someone with a passion for “internal
combustion,” the eruption of madness as a desirable artistic state.

Johnson’s use of language is extremely powerful. He explores a
variety of discourses: poetic, dramatic, fictional, journalistic,
mythical, and surrealistic. Frequently his erotic writing is
synaesthetic, an investigation into color, smell, and word. Plot is
minimalized in favor of an expanded sensory involvement. His text is
also a treasury of intertextual motifs from Alice in Wonderland,
Breton’s Surrealist Manifestos, Joyce’s Ulysses, Greek mythology,
cinema (Bergman, Rosselini), and the work of Malcolm Lowry and Federigo
Garcнa Lorca. He focuses, however, on the carnivalistic parody of the
journey motif, the journey into madness and out of madness.

Volcano Days is an excellent first novel that appeals to all senses,
stirring our literary memory and imagination. Johnson skilfully
manifests that “[i]n art ... all movements are permitted” and “the
most selfish deliriums are legal.”