Read and reviewed elsewhere back in 2018, Verbatim is Canadian Voyageur of exploratory fiction Jeff Bursey’s first published novel, one of a number of works since which demand a much wider readership for Mr. Bursey—hence my drawing your attention to it here with this reprint…The novel is perhaps not what the average reader of CanLit might expect—often deadpan in the deliberate flatness of parliamentary reportage (the novel is presented as ‘verbatim’ documentary evidence from the pages of Hansard, the publishers of debate in the Houses of Commons in Canada and the UK), it also careens into the carnvalesque unpredictability of certain exchanges of, e.g., parliamentary back-benchers, or harried Hansard staff. And so if the tone of this review is at times a tad…overmuch…it is because it breathes of that same heady Prince Edward Island air, so to speak, as its characters—ta!

Verbatim: A Novel makes for, among its other virtues, a thorough disemboweling of the parliamentary system—and thereby of this reader, who had had high hopes of, erm, “representing” Erehwon Centre for the Paleoliberal Pale People’s Party until encountering Mr. Bursey’s documentary, which acted upon yours truly the way that certain films and medications modified Alex’s (of A Clockwork Orange fame) dreams of an uninterrupted, unprecedentedly unrestrained spree of the ol’ ultraviolence.

Cos even a casual reading of V: AN (O my brothers) displays the wanton ultraviolence being perpetrated upon we, the subjects of the Crown, natives to these our great parliamentary democracies (and, by analogy [& more on analogies later], upon les citoyens of the free world’s imperiled republics) —the evil of banality of politics at its absolute (and perfectly normal) nadir; the incompetent philistinism of those whom we freely(?) elect; the grade-school-level bickerthon and mendacity-a-looza that passes for “debate”; the soul-destroying small-mindedness of both the torturous (I’m calling out you and your rules of Ordnung, Roger!) lobotomies and psychectomies that pass for “parliamentary procedures”… I could go on here, but it would be ice to the Inuit, coals to Newcastle, preaching to the choir (hey, ain’t I starting to sound…”parliamentarian” [i.e. cliché, at the very, very least] in my “rhetoric”?), wouldn’t it?

Oh, I have a hardback 1st ed. of this novel that is worth nearly $2,000, dontcha know, but did I even crack the spine to have a peek inside? No sir! Cos this baby has just been re-issued in a second edition (with an excellent [but “edited” rather than “verbatim”, hehe] transcript of a colloquium on the novel from a university in Munich serving as a foreward, and a well-written afterword as well), so I marked up my copy of this with a heavy pen, cos Bursey sure tested my patience by forcing me to wade through hours and hours of sometimes-stultifying inanity that passes for—heck, just see above. Then see this, below:

Should we describe it as Satire
(merely because it does not refine the truth)
or should we call it realism?

—Wyndham Lewis

That’s the novel’s epigraph, and therein lies the rub: whether to take arms against a sea of shit, or to hold the mirror up to nature (as’t were), show scorn her image—and by juxtaposing, end it?

This is satire-as-found-poem, then, except it’s all artfully contrived at the same time. But if so, why does Bursey need to contrive so to have us step so far into a provincial (in both senses of that word) political bloodbath? So that we might feel that returning were as tedious as go o’er? I think that the tedium is there to not only make the satire take root, but flower and bear fruit: only via a full immersion in the mer of merde of politics, he very modus operandi of our own locus standi, our Polis!, can we reader/voters possibly locate the gumption to try to change things—not that the novel takes a stand of any sort on that matter, of course. It forces us to do all of that work ourselves, like any good (post-?) modernist work.

So I performed that labour, chased down allusions, translated bits of Latin and tried my best to find a path through this unweeded garden (this parliament of foules) of forking paths, but the undistinguished, indistinguishable “Honourable” Government and Opposition stymied me at every turn, I’m afraid. They rule, in turns, over an unnamed, unsung Atlantic province somewhere in 20C Canada, and argue over ever-diminishing economic and social prospects: the global recession is never-ending, it seems, and as Canada is largely about resource extraction by multinationals and little else (we are “hewers of wood and drawers of water”, someone once said—I think: I’m tired of looking stuff up now), no one seems to want to buy what we have to sell:

Mr. Gascoigne: The Hon. gentleman has not recovered from his of four years ago, and is very bitter.

Mr. Tucker: I am being deflected, Speaker. To get back to my remarks. This Province has enormous resources, in a weak world market, and has great potential for tourism and as a retirement spot for United Statesers who come here –

An Hon. Member: The what? Who?

Mr. Tucker: – from violent parts of Canada who want to come to a place where crime is low, the air is clean, and services are good. To the Member, that’s what I call people from the U.S., and I think it’ll catch on. United Statesers. Why are not the Ministers out selling this Province to foreign investors?

So, despite valiant efforts to sell us down the river (and to invent new terms for our owners), unemployment is up and revenues are down, and the government decides to cut spending and raise taxes on the l’il folks, all while playing footsie with the corporations who have driven the province from one environmental crisis to the next (not only are coal mines on fire underneath whole towns, but Mr. Bursey seems to have anticipated some of the worst features of climate change, as a storm has utterly destroyed another town, and the government has abandoned it to outlaws a la Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (minus the distractions of Tina Turner).

Minus almost any distractions at all, this friggin’ novel! Almost. Cos I came to L-O-V-E the para-texts that are sprinkled reasonably liberally (somewhat conservatively, that is, as a Republicrat or Demublican might) amongst the many transcriptions of “Provincial Legislature Proceedings” (including, but not limited to: “Statements by Ministers and Members”, “Notices of Bills and Motions”, “Orders of the Day”, “Question Period” and [get this] “Recess”—which I could use a little of just now myself). These para-texts take the form of emails between civil servants serving the House, principally between the Clerk or chief administrator and the newly-appointed Director of Hansard, the body responsible for transcribing and editing the utterances of our betters, I mean elected officials, on the floor of the House. The Director has just inherited an institution which is just as dysfunctional in its own small way (i.e. in every way imaginable, and it’s all smalltime, all the time, i.e. TinPot Teapot Tempests, lemme tellya) as the Big House itself. For the transcribers are trapped in a prison house of unparliamentary and unintelligible language, and it is their job to make the pols posteriors look good for posterity: they clean up the grammar, prettify the rhetoric (such as it is, and such as they can), and substitute euphemism whenever necessary (read: alot <– that’s “a lot” to you, chump—ed.) for outright vulgarity (Pop quiz: quick, if you can translate “Hear, Hear!”, “Oh! Oh!” and “(Inaudible)”, you’re hired!) all over the place.

Like I said, these emails really kept me going, cos they betrayed traces of humanity exorcised elsewhere in the novel by the traditions of Hansard, and by the (erm, dare we call it “traditional”?!) de facto manner of comporting oneself in the House of Commons. Exchanged back & forth by some somewhat well-meaning Babbits, they provide indirect hints (as with everything else in this novel that forces you to interpolate simply everything) as to what working life is like for the invisible Gregor Samsas of the bureacracy—for people like myself, of course! And what happens to them is what you would expect to happen in a recession (i.e., no real spoiler, amirite?): layoffs and cutbacks amid the non-functional HVAC and antiquated CRT screens.

Now, until reading this, I knew almost zero about parliament, but I came to love it when the main parties (and later, after a close election, the smattering of little ones as well), kept the lone Independent Member (sent from Coventry!) from speaking, by not granting her “leave” to take the floor. This showed their pettiness and childishness in extremis, and I think it is meant as an analogy for their contempt of us other little people as a whole:

Speaker: Does the Hon. Member for Coventry have leave?
Some Hon. Members: No leave!
Speaker: No leave.

It just keeps on keepin on, for her like that, O my brothers! World without end.

Which brings me to how this whole book might be read as a kind of analogy for the entire Weberian nightmare in which we live and toil—and upon which I will wrap up here. One of my other favourite gestures is the repeated use of scheduled “Petititions” sessions, in which the following phrase keeps being repeated—because, I presume, that is how grateful law-abiding subjects of the Crown ask for “more soup, please sir”:

We, the undersigned, humble and obedient citizens of this Province, who uphold and respect the democratic laws of this land, do hereby petition the government to….(my italics)

To…you know. To please listen to us. For once.

Is V:AN (kinda catchy, no?) thus a petition to the parliament of readers? I don’t think so. I think it is a shot across our bows (ok, it’s late here, and the cliches are coming fast), to get us to wake up and smell the bitter coffee grounds, to challenge us to come up with something better than this (and by “this” I do not mean this novel, of course (which is truly one-of-a-kind), but this (inaudible) thing called representative democracy. Oh! Oh?

No: Hear, hear, Mr. Bursey!

n.b. Verbatim was first published in 2010 by Canadian publisher Enfield & Wizenty, but was given an international republication in 2017 by Verbivoracious Press, and features an excellent Afterword by the German academic and fellow Pynchon scholar, Sascha Pöhlmann.

After the re-publication, I did an interview with Jeff Bursey for Raintaxi magazine, which can be read here

Finally, I reviewed Jeff Bursey’s third book, Unidentified Man at Left of Photo in my roundup of top 2022 reads here