This year marks the 200th birthday of British novelist Charles Dickens and even though he’s been dead since 1870 that isn’t stopping the BBC from heartily marking the occasion. And, honestly, that’s OK with me.

The celebrations kicked off after Christmas, just before the dawn of the new year, with a three-part adaptation of one of Dickens’ most celebrated titles Great Expectations.

Now, for those new to the blog, my wife and I love a good mini-series based on a British novel. Dickens’ Little Dorrit, which I reviewed in a roundabout way last year, is simply one of the best mini-series you’ll find. Considering we both love Great Expectations, the novel, we had high hopes. The cast looked promising too with Gillian Anderson, a great actress in her own right, and David Suchet who all fans of British detective dramas will recognize instantly.

Unfortunately, this particular adaptation, has been aptly coined by my wife as “Great Expectations for Dummies.”

The whole problem hinges on the brief nature of the mini-series. Three parts is hardly enough time to properly tell this story. As a result, a lot of what is left inferred and implied in the novel (and, my wife adds, in an earlier serialization) must be explicitly told to the viewer. This ruins a lot of both the character and plot development. Things seem incredibly rushed and entire storylines are deleted for the sake of simplicity. If you’re expecting to meet the beloved aged-P, for example, you’re shot out of luck.

Sadly, what could’ve been a great adaptation of a great novel ends up being somewhat of a rush job. Compare this mini-series, a tiny adaptation of a colossal work, to something like Little Dorrit, which was thirteen-part mini-series based on a Dickens novella, and, well, the proof is in the pudding. A good adaptation takes the real meaty, interesting bits and lets us dig into them. A shoddy adaptation tries to cram hundreds of pages into a ten-minute parley. For connoisseurs of great television, Great Expectations will satisfy (and the Art Direction is absolutely breath-taking!) but for those who were looking forward to a thorough and successful adaptation, in the history of other great adaptations, you’ll have to look elsewhere. Dig up your VHS copy of the last BBC adaptation, says my wife.

Favourite Films of 2011

I had a quick look around because I was curious and it seems like Tree of Life is topping everyone’s lists this year. We have it in the queue but haven’t got around to watching it yet. I’m curious now though and I wonder if it would change things if I were to watch it first.

The curious bit, however, about the two films that did make my list is that both feature the unmatched Paul Giamatti as the leading actor. This wasn’t intentional but when I looked at everything I’d watched this year and boiled it down to just a couple of my favourites… Do I have a particular bias towards anything that Paul Giamatti does? Perhaps. Is he undoubtedly the best actor working in Hollywood right now? Yes, sir.

Barney’s Version

Barney’s Version is a brilliant take on the novel by Canadian literary heavyweight Mordecai Richler. I remembering having to read The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz in my O.A.C. (Grade 13) English class. I probably only understood about a third of what I read at the time but I can certainly appreciate a heavily nuanced and deeply moving plot a lot more now that I’m older. Barney’s Version is a movie about love, marriage, family, and memory. It’s wonderfully-acted (duh), well-written (duh), and unfolds itself in a fantastically pleasing fashion distilling all the very best parts of a well-developed Woody Allen movie. Complicated, comedic, and charming sums it up pretty well too.

Win Win

Win Win follows in the same genre of comedy as another of my all-time favourite movies Lars and the Real Girl. I’ll sum it up like this: Small town, quirky characters, social conundrums, and the kind of plot that sometimes seems like something you couldn’t make up if you tried. Like Lars, we’re treated to ninety minutes of some truly great and wholly surreal story-telling about people, a place, and a number of situations we’d never even thought about before. In this film, Giamatti plays and small-time lawyer and high-school wrestling coach as if he were born for the role.

Favourite Music of 2011

I have to be honest here, I’m losing my touch a little bit. It used to be that I’d troll around the Internet for hours every week seeking out new musical entrees to dig my teeth into. This past year, between teaching, walking the dog, union work, and taking a couple of extra courses online I haven’t had the opportunity to avail myself of a whole lot of new music. I worry I might’ve missed something great—it keeps me up at night.

Paul Simon, So Beautiful or So What

If you ever get a late night phone call from a heavily-disguised voice saying they’ve got me hostage and won’t release me unless you pay $1,000,000 the first thing you should do is ask some kind of question that only I can answer, just to prove they really have me and that I’m alive. If you asked who my favourite artist of all time is the answer, bar none, is Paul Simon. If the hostage-takers say differently then I’m probably already dead.

I didn’t love Paul Simon’s 2006 Surprise. Musically it had a lot going out and I loved that but Simon felt vocally weak, tired even. I don’t like tired Paul Simon. I used to put on Surprise and long for the Graceland days when Paul was younger and more energetic and I worried that maybe, finally, the great Paul Simon was on the out and out. Of course, I was absolutely wrong.

So Beautiful or So What is Simon’s greatest album since Graceland. It’s a guitar album—which is a pretty awesome direction for Simon—and features a lot of songs driven by virtuosic guitar melodies. It’s clear that Paul Simon has some serious guitar chops and he didn’t want us to forget. Both lyrically and musically this album is an absolute powerhouse. It runs the gamut from slow, lyrically rich near-ballads to lyrically rich up-beat, foot-stomping tracks and even some songs that are both.

tUnE-yArDs, w h o k i l l

Be honest, the first thing you think when you see a band name stylized like that is, “Avoid!”

Fortunately for me, when I first year about tUnE-yArDs it was on the CBC Radio’s Q—if I had actually seen their name first I probably wouldn’t even have given them a chance. Prejudice avoided!

tUnE-yArDs is mostly New England-based Merrill Garbus and a whole lot of loops. Her first album, I gather, was recorded entirely on cassette tape and was a one-woman show. 2011′s w h o k i l l is studio-produced and features help from some of her friends as well.

How to describe how great w h o k i l l is? I’ll say a few things. First, Garbus evidently spent some time in Kenya, a place that I’ve been to as well, and adapts a lot of African percussion rhythms into her music. Second, there are saxophones. Third, well OK, tUnE-yArDs is like a jazz, afro-funk, nouveau politique explosion that packs so much power I feel like you could take this record, play it for the people of North Korea, and instantly the entire country would rise up, overthrow their government, and democratically elect a new leader. Oh, and it’d be a she.

Bon Iver, Bon Iver

I missed the Bon Iver craze the first time around. Despite the best efforts of my good friend Andrew, I never really bothered with Justin Vernon’s 2008 For Emma, Forever Ago. I heard all about the mystique of being locked in a cabin in the woods, writing and recording using an old reel-to-reel recorder or something like that. I liked the idea but, for whatever reason, not enough to actually do any investigating. Finally—through what must’ve been an act of compassionate grace from the God—I decided to check out Bon Iver’s self-titled second album.

What how.

Bon Iver (2011) is like a sonic dream that Brian Eno would be envious of. What sets this album a part from everything else released in 2011 is the kind of depth packed into every track. The songs are stories about people and places set to music that can only be described as something out of someone’s wildest imagination. It’s soft and subtle and you kind of just float a long but there’s so much going on at the same time that you’re swept away just trying to take it all in. Not to mention Vernon’s now-trademarked vocal delivery which is, also, like something out of a dream I had once.

R.E.M., Part Lies, Part Heart, Part Truth, Part Garbage (1982 – 2011)

It turns out that half of my picks this year were thanks to one particular friend with very good musical tastes.

I’ve always liked R.E.M., kind of in the background. Growing up when I did I missed my chance to like them when they were at their very best so whenever I thought about accessing their catalog of music it always seemed a little bit daunting. Where to begin? I knew, from loving Taking Heads, that I would like their early stuff but I was dying for some kind of career retrospective, something to serve as an overview.

Thankfully, Part Lies, Part Heart, Part Truth, Part Garbage came out and it was a steal on iTunes—40 tracks for $16. As far as retrospectives go, you really can’t go wrong here.

Favourite Television of 2011

It’s been a decidedly good year for television and if I’ve been remiss when it comes to seeking out good new music I think I’ve compensated in terms of what we’re watching these days. There’s a lot out there so it’s been a bit of a challenge picking out just a couple but here they are.

The Good Wife

The Good Wife is a legal drama with a lot of layers. Underneath the normal case per episode format is a pretty hefty plot line about politics, adultery, and corruption—a depth that sets it a part from all the other legal dramas that came before it. It’s as much a character study as it is a series of cases to be solved and that’s what I like about it. It’s timely and relevant and tackles big issues with a great cast of characters.

Once Upon a Time

From some of the people behind the epically successful LOST, Once Upon a Time takes a bunch of fairytale characters and plunks them down in the real world with absolutely no idea who they are. Like LOST, Once Upon a Time plays with the idea of alternate universes, alternate identities, memory, and mystery. I’ll say this: Finally, a show that we can really sink our teeth into.

Honourable mention goes to shows that have become reliable stalwarts like Modern Family (which never ceases to be funny) and Being Erica (which ended its run in dignity after jumping the shark mid-season).

The only thing less impressive than Greg Long’s skills as a writer are his skills as an investigator.

In The Making of Bigfoot writer and self-professed journalist Greg Long sets out to uncover the truth about the famous Patterson-Gimlin film. The Bigfoot film. Captured in the late 1960′s the film features about forty seconds of an unknown bi-pedal creature walking across a creek in the middle of the woods. Allegedly filmed in Northern California by two amateur Bigfoot hunters (Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin) it has been the subject of much controversy since its release forty years ago. Greg Long decides to put all the questions and controversy to rest, once and for all and by the end of the book he is satisfied that he’s done exactly that.

Let me be clear though, if I handed in The Making of Bigfoot as a term paper in University I would receive it back to me, almost immediately, chalk-full of red pen.

Since the controversy surrounding the infamous film revolves around the question of whether or not it was a hoax, Long’s decided approach was to interview those close to the film’s creators, Patterson and Gimlin. Of course, lending to the film’s controversy is the fact that Roger Patterson died of cancer shortly after the film was made (in fact he was suffering from a remission during the period of time in which he filmed the “creature”) and Bob Gimlin, supposedly tired of the publicity, has refused interviews since shortly after Patterson died. With those who actually made the film not talking Long’s task was a decidedly difficult one, he had to gather material evidence and witness testimony from second-hand sources.

Indeed, written as a kind of road trip diary, much of the book is comprised of Greg and his wife Pat traveling up and down the Northwestern United States interviewing anyone with a connection to Roger Patterson and the Bigfoot film. Quickly, the book takes its fatal turn.

What separates Greg Long’s effort from real journalism is simple. Early on in the book, indeed in the first pages, Long has already made up his mind about Roger Patterson. He is a crook and a con-man. Based on character sketches from those that knew him, Long quickly concludes that, absent of any shred of a motive, Patterson faked the famous film.

The sketch painted by Long’s witnesses presents a Roger Patterson that can be interpreted, I would argue, in two different ways. Long’s interpretation largely ignores an overwhelming amount of the information that he himself gathered.

Long argues that because Patterson was bad with money—constantly borrowing from friends and not paying them back—he was a thief and a crook. He argues that because Patterson never had a job and instead bounced from invention to invention, money-making scheme to money-making scheme, often bringing along friends to help finance his adventures, that he was a con-man. These interpretations of the evidence, from a very early point in the book, colour Long’s entire endeavour.

Instead, I would interpret Patterson in an entirely different light. Based on the same witness statements that Long relies on, I see Patterson as an inventor, an entrepreneur, and an artist. Born into extreme poverty, Patterson never had a real handle on how to use and hold onto money. He was a rodeo cowboy, a performer, and was constantly thinking up new wild ideas and schemes but lacked the commitment and dedication to see them through. In his wake he left a trail of half-finished ideas, half-baked schemes, and a lot of debtors but he wasn’t a crook, he wasn’t a thief, he was a product of a very active imagination, with a bad grip on bookkeeping. Long, a working class man himself, takes an obvious affront to Patterson’s lifestyle, he points out several times that Patterson is somehow less reliable of a person because he never held down a job or because he didn’t use money wisely. The only evidence that Patterson ever intentionally cheated anybody is in Greg Long’s imagination. An assumption, from the evidence, that being raised in poverty damned Patterson to having a difficult time handling his finances is a far more reasonable conclusion to draw.

Indeed, Long wields dangerous prejudices against Roger Patterson and, I would strongly argue, his conclusions, made hastily at an early stage in the investigation, clearly taint the rest of his research.

But, if it were down to mere prejudice against the lead figure in his investigation perhaps I could look past that. After all, we all bring biases and prejudices into our work. It’s difficult to have a perfectly open mind. But Long is guilty of far more than simple bias against one of the actors in the Bigfoot drama.

Greg Long is arrogant and his kind of self-righteous, crusader mentality appears, like his thick bias, in the very early pages of The Making of Bigfoot. In a mere breath Long accuses the entire “Bigfoot community” of a vast global conspiracy to cover up the truth about Roger Patterson and his Bigfoot film. Without even a whiff evidence Long repeats this claim several times over throughout the book. Supposedly ignorant of the numerous books, films, and lectures that have been presented on the subject of debunking the film and the person, Long repeats his claim over and over that he is the single person to uncover the truth that he is providing us with the “inside story”.

More so, Long’s real folly is his claim to have found the “man in the suit”. In the course of his research Long runs into Bob Heironimus, an associate of Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin and the man that claims to have worn the ape suit in the famous Bigfoot film. Realizing that he may finally have the nail to put into the film’s coffin, Long jumps head-long into Heironimus’ story.

Now let me just say, as an aside, that Greg Long does some excellent investigative work. I truly don’t want to take away from all of the hours and the effort that he put into his book. What I take offense with, and indeed what spoils the whole thing, is his incredible bias and arrogance. I could write a great essay on the Boer War in South Africa but if I take the opinion, before I’ve barely begun, that the British were in the right then I’m obviously going to neglect a lot of the facts that lend themselves to the Dutch.

In the case of Bob Heironimus’ story, Long makes up his mind far too soon and ignores some crucial pieces of information. Between the film and the interviews with Long, Heironimus has had thirty years to tell his story and he hasn’t. Long ignores the fact that in this huge span of time Heironimus has had ample opportunity to do his research, to look into the facts and figures of the Patterson film, and to invent a plausible story of his own. Heironimus, Long argues, can walk just like Bigfoot. But Long again neglects the fact that he’s had thirty years to study and perfect the walk. Heironimus tells a convincing tale of how he was roped into playing the Bigfoot character but, on a map, cannot even provide the location of where the film was made.

To understand the extend to which Long’s bias clouds his investigation it’s important to realize that, despite being accused of a global conspiracy, less than a decade after the film was released Rene Dahinden, a famous Bigfoot enthusiast, comments on his own investigation into the film in his book Sasquatch. Dahinden, who did extremely extensive ground research immediately following the film, concluded that there were a number of people claiming to have worn the suit—Heironimus included—and that Bob himself, even immediately after the filming, couldn’t nail down the film site’s location. Instead, Long is acting as if he has just discovered these claims. Ignorance of facts like these, in my opinion, is inexcusable journalism.

As The Making of Bigfoot proceeds Long’s argument develops around his two main pieces of evidence. First, that Roger Patterson was a liar, a cheat, and a crook. He wanted to make money with his Bigfoot scheme and that was reason enough to fake a film. Second, Long believed that he had proof that someone, Bob Heironimus, wore the Bigfoot suit. For him it was case closed.

But enter Phillip Morris. Morris, now an industry leader in costume manufacturing, was at the time of the Patterson film an amateur television personality and part-time costume designer, creating ape costumes from a shop in his basement. Morris explains to Long that Patterson contacted him in the late 1960′s looking for an ape costume to “have some fun” with. In the course of Long’s thorough interview Morris explains how he made the costumes, how they were worn, and how he’s positive that the Bigfoot in Patterson’s film was a man wearing one of his costumes. While Long passes off this interview, near the end of his book, as a relatively mundane occurrence and frames it as the final nail in the Patterson film’s coffin, there are a number of concerns—large ones—that he merely glosses over.

The first huge concern is the description of the costume itself and how it was worn. The in-depth description provided by Morris, who claims to have made the costume, differs significantly from the description of Bob Heironimus, who claims to have worn it. Differences involving whether or not there was a zipper and how the arms, hands, and feet were attached are substantial. Incredibly, Long makes absolutely no mention of these gross differences instead settling for the fact that since he found someone who claims, without any material evidence, to have made the costume for Patterson, he must be telling the truth. Nor does Long bother to question or revisit Heironimus’ claims about how the suit fit or was worn in light of the new ostensibly damning evidence from Morris.

What’s more, Long ignores substantial evidence which arose in the aftermath of the Bigfoot film. Despite claiming that an international conspiracy was covering up the truth of the Patterson film, comments to Bigfoot investigators (investigating the veracity of the film!) from major production outfits like Disney and Universal Studios were unanimous in the fact that such a costume—the Bigfoot costume—could not have been produced commercially at that time (the late 1960′s). Interestingly, despite the world’s leading motion picture companies claiming that it would be impossible to create Bigfoot, Long is ready and willing to believe that an amateur costume maker created the suit in his basement.

The tipping point in The Making of Bigfoot came for me near the closing pages of the book. Long, in a video-cassette-fueled tirade, rails against just about everybody in the Bigfoot field, people who have “let themselves be persuaded” to believe in Bigfoot. Truly, this isn’t Greg Long the journalist or Greg Long the investigator, enter Greg Long the scientist!

Egged on by his ever submissive wife, Pat, Greg fast-forwards, pauses, and slow-motions his way to his own seemingly plausible conclusions about Patterson’s Bigfoot. Ignoring all of his collected evidence and hard-earned interviews he goes on to mock and shame professionals who have attempted to recreate the Bigfoot walk, and professors who have come out in supportive of the ape-like behaviour Patterson’s creature exhibits. Long, who in this scene knows better than all of these experts and career academics, methodically proves to his wife and, in turn the reader, why they are all wrong.

Despite tenured academics, following intense motion-tracking gait analysis, claiming that the Bigfoot walk could not be replicated by humans Long assures us that even he can walk just like Bigfoot. Despite tenured academics, using high-powered microscopes in University labs to analyze the original film footage for minute facial details, Long claims that he can see the eyes of Heironimus behind the Bigfoot mask. Despite experiments which have proven, conclusively, the approximate weight a person or creature would have to be to leave footprints at the depth of those found at the film site (they’d have to be very heavy), Long claims that anyone could just stomp really hard and leave those marks.

It’s an episode indicative of the pages that came before it. It’s inexcusable, absolute arrogance. It’s a simmering to the surface of long-held beliefs and tensions that Long kept buried down inside throughout his interviews and throughout his research which, as I’ve argued, effected his perspective from the start. It’s Long’s extreme bias.

Whether or not there is such a thing as Bigfoot, whether the Patterson-Gimlin film is a hoax or an authentic piece of evidence, Greg Long has, unfortunately, proved nothing.

While I commend Long for his tireless work, his biases, his prejudices, and his arrogance get in the way of any real conclusions. Instead, Long’s conclusions are based on his gut feelings, his opinions, and tainted by his bias against the character of Roger Patterson, and towards the seemingly truthful nature of his Bigfoot, Bob Heironimus. Long ignores key pieces of information, he draws hasty conclusions, and he makes vast unsubstantiated claims. In the end, while getting some of the detective work right, Greg Long fails to produce anything resembling a reasonable conclusion and, from me, receives a failing grade.

Douglas Coupland is one of my favourite authors, not to mention an absolute Canadian gem, but his last novel, The Gum Thief, felt tired and phoned-in to me. So, when I began to read his latest novel, Generation A, I wasn’t wholly optimistic. What I found though, as I went, is that Coupland is far from tired and while I don’t think he’s been at the top of his game recently—since jPod, I’d say—Generation A is nonetheless a winner.

Like the novel that it’s based upon—arguably Coupland’s greatest success—Generation X, Generation A styles itself as stories within a story. It collects together a handful of characters who are connected by a very interesting singularity and tells their stories. Like most of Coupland’s work, the novel is narrated in the first person except, in this case, there are several first-people and we hear the story, or stories, from several different perspectives. That alone is pretty interesting because Coupland has collected together some pretty interesting characters. And, the stories themselves—the plot, as it were—is pretty interesting too. Coupland is turning his zeitgeist-capturing antenna towards the near-distant future and telling us what he sees.

The stories within a story bit doesn’t really begin in earnest until closer to the end of the book when the characters are cobbled together and forced to storytell. For me, here’s where warning bells began to sound.

I worried that Coupland had, for lack of a better word, lost it. The Gum Thief, like I said, felt tired and bored. And here’s Generation A, marketed as a book which “mirrors” Coupland’s wildly successful Generation X. Is this where an author turns, I wondered, when he’s lost his craft? Is this how to cash in on a bit more of your cache? Doing that tired old story within a story thing? It didn’t work in The Gum Thief. I didn’t think it’d work here either, but I was wrong.

In fact, Generation A is compelling. I didn’t expect it to be.

Instead, the short stories told by Coupland’s characters were interesting. As stand alone vignettes they were great and truly illustrate Coupland’s prowess as a writer. Later, when the stories told by these characters begin to blend together, begin to draw off each other and intertwine to form a larger narrative it’s down right neat. But it isn’t merely a collection of stories, it’s a critique on the act of storytelling itself. It’s a narrative on the process and the importance of creating and telling stories, set in the highly-connected, not entirely unfamiliar distant future.

At times I had to get over the poor use of language and some pretty feeble writing but, at the same time, I had to remind myself that these stories were written by their characters. It’s not Coupland choosing a particularly ill-fit word: it’s his characters. At times it was a bit to get around. I don’t particularly relate to a guy who carves out crop circles that resemble giant genitalia, and I’m not wholly interested in what he has to say about parties, but I can understand the choice to write from that point-of-view.

While Generation A wasn’t the kind of finger-in-the-wind zeitgesit-capturing phenom that its spiritual prequel was,  it’s still a good book. It reminds you of the importance of telling a story. The interconnectedness of our high-tech world. It’s a book that, by its own nature, justifies its existence and, in the end, I think I’m OK with that.

To any aspiring writer, learning that The Bishop’s Man is only Linden MacIntyre’s second novel is surely nothing short of depressing. MacIntyre’s story of one priest’s journey through the Catholic Church’s abuse scandals reads like he’s a writer who’s had lots of practice. He has, in a way. In the non-fiction realm, Linden MacIntyre is a well-known, award-winning investigative journalist. The host of Canada’s The Fifth Estate on public television and the often guest host of The Current on public radio, MacIntyre clearly has a prowess for fiction too.

The Bishop’s Man follows a priest as he lives, works, and survives through the abuse scandals that rocked the clergy in the early nineties. The story is set, in large part, in picturesque Nova Scotia. It’s here, in the details, that MacIntyre first impresses. His descriptions of the bleak maritime harbors, harsh maritime weather, and the lonely, solitary existence of his priest is the kind of stuff usually reserved for poets. It is, if I can put it plainly, remarkable use of language and imagery.

For his part, MacIntyre’s approach to scandal and abuse isn’t a finger-pointing or a blame-laying. Instead, he casts his main character as a kind of tragic hero, and this is probably closest to reality. MacIntyre’s priest is the bishop’s man, the man who’s job it was to fix a range of unpleasant situations within the church, but he is as much a regular man as anybody else. He’s troubled by what he’s done, and what he does. He’s a victim, often, of situations and of his calling, his vocation. He doesn’t like the men he’s charged with disappearing or the issues he’s charged with addressing, and struggles with what to do. The Bishop’s Man isn’t a book about laying blame or about easy answers but a book about messy life. It’s a book about real struggles and it’s here that the real power of MacIntyre’s message lies. The message that life is complicated, life is messy, and often life is hard.

MacIntyre explores the issues in The Bishop’s Man with a certain poignant clarity. His narrative moves effortlessly through time, drawing on situations and events from the past and weaving them into the present. His characters, as a result, live in a world rich with meaning and history. Like ourselves, like our realities, MacIntyre’s characters understand the importance of the strings that bind them to their pasts, their personal demons. MacIntyre’s flashbacks, often woven right into present-time narrative, are interesting and so fluid that, set against the backdrop of the snowy, frozen Maritimes, give his novel the feeling of a waking dream.

MacIntyre’s book follows in the long tradition of Canadian fiction: stories about our cold, foreboding winters and vast empty landscapes. But in that lineage, it deserves an important place. The Bishop’s Man is a well-executed piece of fiction, nearly, I argue, a piece of poetry. It takes us, along with its characters, deep into the human spirit—the spirit of suffering—and asks important questions. With the Catholic Church, again, entering a time of potential crisis this novel is more important, more poignant, than ever. It doesn’t offer easy answers, it doesn’t seek to pacify or lay blame, instead, MacIntyre offers us the human condition; life, in its coldest, hardest form. And to understand, this is where we must begin.

Maria picked up Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend off the non-fiction new releases rack at our library. She knows me so well.

It was a pretty good read, in a way. Through the course of the book, the author, an “independent scholar” with a fairly strange name, Joshua Blu Buhs, sets out to frame the legend of Bigfoot in terms of its larger societal impact. From the outset, this seemed like a pretty interesting idea. I’ve had an interest in Bigfoot since, I think, I discovered my own big feet (size 12, not bad) so a book about society and the Bigfoot monster seemed like something good to read. But it was, to be sure, a little bit too good to be true.

Now, for those interested in Bigfoot, this book is a great read. In fact, Loren Coleman, a cryptozoologist and the foremost expert on Bigfoot gave this book a decent commendation but, as a view of Bigfoot in the bigger society, it isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and certainly isn’t what the author claimed he set out to explore. I mean, it’s good, but it isn’t sociology.

Instead, Blu Buhs takes us on a wild ride through the history of Bigfoot. Beginning with the infamous Yeti—the Abominable Snowman—Blu Buhs traces the history of various sightings and expeditions surrounding these “wild man” creatures. He introduces us to a whole collection of characters, Bigfoot enthusiasts and skeptics alike, who are colourful and wild in their own ways, all of them. (Seriously, what a host of characters.) We follow Blu Buhs through regional expositions, through newspaper archives and delve into aboriginal folklore and myth, and all of this is interesting, for what it’s worth.

But Bigfoot falls apart in two areas, and the first is an absolute deal-breaker.

In its outset, Blu Buhs says that he is setting out to understand the legend of Bigfoot and its impact on society, around the world. Big claim. Interesting goal. But he fails, utterly, to deliver. Instead, Blu Buhs gets lost in the person of Bigfoot, tracing back sightings, following up on leads, and taking us down through a maze of evidence and circumspect. Yes, that’s absolutely interesting, but it isn’t what he said he was going to do. When Blu Buhs does get down to sociological introspect it’s usually tacked onto the end of a chapter, it’s usually wholly half-baked(!) and it’s most certainly absurd. While a few interesting facts remain, like the impact of monster movies on independent cinema in the 1970′s, the large assertions and suggestions made by the author are unforgivable, lame, and seem to lack any real work on his part. And to be fair, I remember the feeling too, of tacking on a swiss cheese conclusion to the end of a term paper while not really believing it at all. Forgive me, Prof. Gorman.

The other major failing of this book is its chronology and immense roster. On the one hand, the number of intriguing personalities in the history of Bigfoot is wonderful. But on the other hand, it’s immense. The sheer number of characters that Blu Buhs is trying to work with makes the book very difficult to follow at times. I found myself constantly trying to remember who was who and, several times, although positive that a person hadn’t been mentioned before, their sudden appearance lacks any perspective or backstory. As if I should know who they were. The other bit is the chronology: the book jumps through time like the survivors from LOST, and while I like LOST, it can be damn confusing. Blu Buhs hovers in 1967 only to jump to 1972 then back to 1965, ad nausem. It’s a bit much.

All told, I liked this book, but probably because I’m a diehard. The history is interesting, engaging even, at times, but it isn’t the sociological investigation it claimed to be. I doubt anyone with a more pedestrian interest in Bigfoot would have the time or patience to sort through this tome at all.

I received Douglas Coupland’s Shampoo Planet for Christmas this year. At the same time I received the Talking Heads Greatest Hits record. This is an omen.

Understanding Shampoo Planet, I think, is the same as understanding what Talking Heads were doing back then. It’s about the future. It’s about a time in history when technology, innovation, and invention are racing forward at light-speed. At the same time, things are beginning to decay. Global warming is beginning to catch up with us; toxic waste and acid rain are seaping into the common lexicon. Advertising is everywhere. It’s all product, product, product, and this is called progress—a Shampoo Planet. This is what the Talking Heads are about, in my opinion, and this is what Coupland is getting at too.

This is Coupland’s second novel, following up on his incredibly successful Generation X. It feels like a second novel. It feels full of energy, packed with excitement, buzzy and confident. The novel follows a twenty year-old protagonist, a budding entrepreneur, obsessed with technology, the future, and business. His favourite book, he confesses, is the biography of a successful C.E.O., he expounds his love for things and his shower is a shampoo museum. At the same time, he senses decay all around him. His family is crumby, wrapped up in pyramid schemes and bad relationships. His town, once dominated by The Plants—factories which produced all kinds of wonderfully toxic and terrible things—are shutting down, the government moving in to clean up. He searches for meaning but things are moving so fast.

If I had a complaint about this book it would be about the section somewhere near the end. For the most part, Coupland’s writing style is crisp, quick and future-forward—it suits the plot well. But near the end it gets a bit mushy; the plot moves quickly, but the writing can’t keep up. It feels a bit stretched, but Coupland recovers in a huge way and comes through with a brilliant and honest conclusion to his character’s odyssey.

All told, Shampoo Planet is wholly authentic and that’s its selling point. If there’s one thing that Coupland is very good at, in my opinion, is taking the temperature of the times. Shampoo Planet is that temperature reading. Coupland nails it. Here he’s embedded deep in a culture that he understands very well: it’s the future, then, and it’s a great read.