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MisfitsBarry Campbell Finds a Lot to Like
I've said it before, but Dennis E. Bolen is an important writer and deserves to be more popular than he is. Menacing yet elegant, Bolen's style - his lurid, harsh prose strokes written with vigour and bite - preserves the surreal just-the-facts-please formality of vintage crime fiction. If you pick up one of Bolen's books you will read it because he has an uncanny talent for solidly putting himself into the position of the person whose experience he is describing - no matter how naive or insane.
And Krekshuns is his most distinctive novel yet. In it Bolen resurrects Barry Delta, the metaphysically challenged Vancouver parole officer from his first novel, Stupid Crimes. That first Delta book was about the wisecracking, smartass parole officer trying to come to terms with his personal responsibility for nine dead parolees, nine yellowed obituaries arranged in a row beneath his desk blotter. "Exactly one for every year he's been in the business." Krekshuns opens two years later, and the road to the hell of culpability is still being paved with Delta's good intentions, as five more people die. Barry Delta is such an intriguing character because he so efficiently intuits psychotic behavior in near strangers and yet seems unable to notice the same dark symptoms in himself. He helpfully tries to make other people less unfeeling and destructive by giving them some real insight into the wretched world they have created for themselves - while remaining seemingly oblivious to his own lonely miserable existence. Basically Delta is having a nervous breakdown throughout Krekshuns, but he barely acknowledges it. He is too preoccupied with exploring the ugly urban spaces of our runaway civilization and questioning, with imagination and violence, the values on which it has been erected. Delta is not only alienated from both sides of the law and order fence, he's self-alienated - the perfect série noire hero. In Stupid Crimes, Barry Delta's purpose in life was to become something like a moral fun-house mirror shoved into the faces of unrepentant parolees. To quote one of the ex-cons on his case-load, Delta "was good at not letting you go without giving something, waking you up for maybe just a second, even if you didn't want to and were determined no to." But since arranging a jail-house contract killing at the end of the last book, his ambition in life seems to have turned into nothing less than becoming the fulcrum for the scales of true cosmic justice. It was arranging that jail-house murder in Stupid Crimes that now provides the momentum for Barry's life in Krekshuns. Normally only judges and killers enjoy such absolute power - deciding who is fit enough to continue the small journey of their lives and who is not. But now Delta has sipped from that cup, and it seems as if he likes sitting in judgment and has acquired an addiction. Delta sums up his newly grandiose attitudes best when he tells one of his parolees, "If I'm to keep you out, you've got to keep me in your head, if you know what I mean." The poor ex-con he says this to prefers to commit suicide rather than accept the bleakness of a life with Delta as his murmuring conscience. In Stupid Crimes Bolen subtly showed us some of the real-life futility of the Canadian punishment bureaucracy. The Victorian theory of imprisonment that our nation's correctional system is founded upon believed that solitary confinement combined with individual reflection was the road to salvation. But Bolen shows us that prison does not teach self-discipline. Instead it makes prisoners passive and lazy. They forget how to shop, cook, look for work - and without any real opportunities for growth and change, prisoners and ex-convicts remain in a peculiar sort of suspended animation. Is it any wonder that so many ex-cons reoffend soon after they are released from prison? In Krekshuns, Bolen covers that same sad, fascinating territory - but he also cleverly inverts the criminology microscope and shows us the even more twisted attitudes of law-and-order workers. "Nevermind the crooks. They're relatively okay," Delta explains to Jane, a prostitute that he platonically loves, "I mean my colleagues. The people I'm supposed to be allied with. They're ugly misfits." With his new novel, Bolen gives us a rare literary glimpse into the "us and them" dichotomy that poisons many Canadian crime and punishment workers. When Delta reports finding the maggoty corpse of one of his parolees, a police detective quips:
"That's for mortals only," Delta replies. And he means it. Sometimes he really does seem to think he is God. Deep down Delta understands that the general evilness of the Canadian correctional system is unintentional - that his professional peers are really only doing their jobs, pushed along by an overpowering institutional momentum, and motivated by little more than good salaries and pensions. And Delta is smart enough to know that incompetence is the only possible captain of a crew like that. But now that he's tasted the forbidden fruit of sitting in absolute judgment he want to become "More than just a parole officer!" He tries to become an avenging angel fighting crimes almost before they are committed on the sleek greasy streets of Vancouver. Delta's tragedy is that although he is unwilling to join the "good guys," neither is he able to embrace the "bad boys." He can empathize with the cruel prison experiences that mold some of his monsters on his caseload, but he has too much weary experience to not know that their emotional damage is probably permanent. Unable to choose between playing with the good or the bad boys, Delta wisecracks from atop the playground fence and mutters tough guy things like, "When I go I want it to be over something nifty, like kicking the administrator in the balls or something like that." But really Delta's bad attitude is just him whistling past the graveyard of his existence, perhaps wanting to believe that there is something more substantial at the bottom of his obsessive fascination with psychotics than mere perverse voyeurism. And Delta's incessant voyeurism is a little disconcerting because of the natural impulse of all us readers to wonder how much of this book is based on actual events. After all, Bolen really is a parole officer. It is the reason why his dialogue sounds so solid and authentic - he really has spent a lot of time talking to criminals and psychotics. An reading the conversations of this novel one begins to wonder just how much of the "fictional" Barry Delta is made up of "real" Dennis E. Bolen. That jarring thought cuts across the seamless narrative of Krekshuns. I mean, what if Bolen really does wish he had the "brass guts and iron balls" to arrange jail house murders like his alter-ego does? I sincerely hope Bolen writes another Barry Delta novel. It would make a very interesting trilogy if Delta really does kick his evil boss in the balls - and then goes to prison for it, thus turning this important Canadian crime fiction story inside out. And it could be the perfect série noire ending for Barry Delta. ©Vancouver Review |
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