The Man Who Loved Jane Austen
by Ray Smith
The Porcupine's Quill, 233 pg.
Ray Smith's characters in The Man Who Loved Jane Austen are the scraps of a once vibrant people, the forgotten refuse of the anglophone exodus, the miserable few who chose to stick it out here after Bill 101 and the sign laws. Or at least, this is a recurring feature in his view of the contemporary Montreal Anglo. His characters are a depressed and embittered lot - the very image of the Anglo manqué in the mind of the felquiste bureaucrat.
The novel concerns the trials of Frank Wilson, a widowed professor with two young boys. Our first glimpse of his life begins six months after his wife Emma has died in a car crash. Wilson mopes around Montreal, filled with longing for the old days, looking for the vestiges of his beloved city and seeing Emma in every old haunt.
Clichés of Anglo angst pervade the novel. People meet in taverns and chew over the latest speech from Bouchard or Landry, and exchange lame jokes about "tongue-troopers" and the language laws.
As the title spells out, Frank has a special love for Jane Austen, and looks at his unravelling life through the lens of a pre-Victorian melodrama. Though we're tipped off by Smith naming the dead wife Emma, the tone of his novel is closer to the shadowy menace in Austen's Persuasion or Sense and Sensibility.
Frank struggles to keep his life together: caring for his children, planning the semester's lessons, worrying over money. Emma's side of the family are the evil force which threaten Frank, especially his mother- and father-in-law, the Hatchers: stiff, bigoted Westmounters who connive to take custody of Frank's kids.
These last characters are Smith's most problematic - their antics degenerate to hysterical, soap opera excess as they plot to ruin Frank's career, finances, and reputation:
"Frank chuckled. 'It's ironic really. Dealing with the Hatchers is like dealing with Quebec nationalists... or the Inquisition. Their world view is entirely closed, virtue and truth are clearly defined, there are good guys and bad guys, you're either fer us or agin us, you're either inside the fort shooting out or outside the fort shooting in, praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.'"
The dialogue throughout is forced and unbelievable. Whether in the casual exchanges or the impassioned declarations of the characters, a studied, over-worked feeling emerges: there's no life to these people, and nothing to bring them off the page. Figures appear with little to distinguish them one from the other (apart from the Hatchers, whose settings are switched to Pure Evil; all that is required of them is to spit venom and scheme).
But more than this, the book is a very odd read: as we progress, a weird feeling begins to creep up on the reader: a sense of increasing un-suspension of one's disbelief. The Montreal we see though Frank's eyes is ugly and vulgar, an unrelenting view of decay and despair; it's a Montreal without resonance to the reader, and it describes a city nearly unrecognizable to we who live here.
One longs to feel sympathy for someone, anyone; a thread one could grasp to make the journey bearable. There is no such person. Frank endures a near endless string of rebukes and setbacks, but bears it with meekness, commenting only in his many internal monologues as he muses over his life.
At the end, we're left with little: even the immaculate spirit of Emma is sullied with the revelation she was a cheating and scheming wife - and in letters uncovered by Frank that reveal her duplicity and cruelty - seemingly the very image of her parents.
Though brief in length, the novel drags on, and we wish Smith had heeded Austen's own words from Northanger Abbey:
"After long thought and much perplexity, to be very brief was all that she could determine on with any confidence of safety."