Pontypool Changes Everything
by Tony Burgess
ECW
Press, 1998.
Reviewed by Michael Bryson
Oh, me. Oh, my. What a book we have here. A book about a zombie
infestation
in southern Ontario circa now, which empties out cities and makes citizens
fearful of the language they speak. Pontypool Changes Everything
provides yet more evidence that the newest generation of Canadian writers
have moved away from the sickly National Project encouraged by arts funding
council bureaucrats and post-Expo '67 flagwavers to a rainbow of experimentation
of the most rewarding kind.
Burgess displays nary a trace of Northop Frye's
"garrison mentality" in his loopy cannibalistic tale, the sequel to his
earlier success, The Hellmouths of Bewdley, and second in a trilogy
recently completed with the release of Caesarea. The only garrison
in this novel is the one Burgess' characters build (physically or mentally)
to ward off the flesh eaters and their language-based disease.
If you're
wondering what it all means, you're probably asking the wrong question.
The best fiction is more than meaningful, it's interesting. Provocative.
Quizzical. Threatening to those who refuse to question the assumptions
that underlie the quotidian. That is, the everyday.
Pontypool Changes
Everything gets beneath those assumptions. It provides a startling
new vision of the world that stares out at us from daily newspaper headlines
and the bland repertoire of television programming. It is the best kind
of novel and a tasty book to read.
Michael Bryson is the editor of
The Danforth Review.
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