Muriella
Pent
by Russel Smith
Doubleday Canada, 2004
You may know Russel Smith through his reports in the Globe column on current fads and
fashion e. g. where he discusses 'the
history
of the button down shirt collar'. I have found his previous
novels How Insensitive and Noise entertaining. These early
novels are
descriptions of the daily life of grad student bohemians of Toronto
circa
1990.
Smith has recently turned forty and his most recent novel, Muriella Pent, is his attempt to
deal with
older characters.
Muriella Pent opens with a
scene of impromptu intimacy, that results
in spilled brandy and a broken vase. We then spend the majority of the
novel finding out how this out of the blue event occurred. The title
character is a widowed Forest Hill matron. She spends
her time working
on a City of Toronto arts committee. At the beginning of the novel
Muriella believes
that ART should open ones eyes to the suffering of others. The other
members of the committee are an assortment of politically correct
bohemians. This set up was partially inspired by the
actual interactions between June Callwood and
the well intentioned politically correct board members of Jessie's
Hostel. (In what might be described as a tragicomic episode, the
board at Jessie's deemed Callwood, the hostel's founder, a 'racist'.)
In the novel, the Art Committee decides to (well actually get the
taxpayers to) fund a third
world author. They choose Marcus Royston, who is a 'hero' of the
independence movement in a small Caribbean island, St. Andrews. There
is a rather interesting interplay between the totally unrelated
political needs of the
bureaucrats in the Canadian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the
politicians of St.
Andrews. The end result is that Marcus is
"chosen", but not for the politically correct reasons of the Art
Committee.
Marcus Royston will not allow himself to be
portrayed as a symbol of third world oppression, much to the
disappointment of the Toronto bohemians, who find this difficult to
accept!
As an example of how these misunderstanding manifest themselves, there
is a rather delightful encounter with the Toronto Library. The Library
gets
Royston to speak at the announcement of a new "Community Centred"
policy.
This is apparently a more or less direct retelling of an actual event
with Jane Jacobs, were Jacobs did not live up to the expectations of
the
cultural bureaucrats.
The cleverness of the novel is to ridicule the self absorbed trendoids
AND the pettiness of those that live beyond the Pail (i.e.
outside the
GTA).
An artist is independent. There is an ambiguity. The artist is
both a hero and an
anti hero at the same time. It is my view that the novel successful
attempts to
illustrate how the conception of the artist as received by society is
different from how an artist actually is. It is a good protrayal of the
political shenagans of the
self important. There is also an insight into what is real art which
must be based on integraty and false art which is the artifice
developped from community standards.The novel shows that this
confusion between 'the myth' and 'the man' can make for some absurd
situations and an enjoyable read.