The Antigonish Review
Issue 121
Mary Bames
Pontypool Changes Everything by Tony Burgess. Toronto: ECW Press,
1998. softcover, 276 pp., $17.95.
Caesarea by Tony Burgess. Toronto: ECW Press, 1999. softcover,
246 pp., $17.95
Tony Burgess' career has taken an extraordinary turn with the publication
of his novel, Pontypool Changes Everything. His first collection
of short fiction, The Hellmouths of Bewdley, was published in 1997,
and a new novel Caesarea, was released in the spring of 1999. A resident
of Wasaga Beach, Burgess has finished a screenplay of his novel Pontypool
Changes Everything, this work soon to be adapted for the screen by
Bruce McDonald and his film company, Shadow Shows. Presently, Burgess
is at work on a fourth book, a collection of short fiction.
On the surface, Pontypool Changes Everything seems to be a horror
novel but Burgess' writing eschews such a label as the author writes a
fascinating and dark tale of civilization Rone awry, where violence erupts
and deaths occur until bodies pile up like a strange holocaust. It is
a frightening novel, told from a third-person point of view, in which
Burgess draws his readers from their hiding place in the closet asking
them to step inside the uncharted mind guided by the author's nightmarish
imagination. Burgess, a relentless explorer, uses his past as an artist
to jolt his audience from their complacency by painting wild and intense
images across the pages of his book.
This complex novel, lingering in readers' minds long after the book is
set aside, is not a fairytale with a happy ending, and there are no heroes
or heroines. If there is a villain, it is a virus which runs amok throughout
Ontario. Burgess'work involves a motley group of people living in a society
where humans have lost their ability to speak to each other. In Pontypool,
Ontario, a virus erupts invading the brain, the mouth, the throat of its
victims, these places left vulnerable because people have sought artificial
means of communication. The virus knows when to attack, which words and
phrases are susceptible, and soon the wretches turn into zombies, resorting
to cannibalism.
Burgess leads his readers into a delusional, wintry landscape where language
deteriorates, where loss of memory occurs, where there is a loss of knowledge
of how words are stored, and how they are retrieved. People begin to devour
one another; it is a country where children become monsters and murder
each other. Although his work presents a disturbing vista, the author
splashes sudden strokes of lyricism on his canvas with his description,of
Detective Peterson; "He has a penalty box chin and eyes that recede way
up into the cheap seats, the greys..." or in another instance, "a dragon
of wire coat hangers".
Readers seldom get close to the characters in the novel; they only walk
so far when they fall victim to the virus. One of these characters is
Les Reardon, a garbage truck driver and part-time drama coach, who carries
in his vehicle, a tattered copy of Ovid's Metamorphoses. This work
is one full of a disillusioned and unstable society in which people and
objects are transformed into other forms. Io, in Ovid's book, is a goddess
who has been transformed into a cow thus alienating her from her loved
ones. Burgess, by using a virus to change humans into monsters, separates
his characters from the community of humanity. He employs this book as
a motif to expand his narrative. His intention is to evoke an uneasiness
to remind his audience the universe he has created is an altered state
where safety does not exist, where home is illusory. His novel houses
the theme of alienation within the mind, how humans become strangers unto
themselves, how the lines of reality and delusion blur and cross boundaries
into a country where confusion reigns. Readers become aware of this element
when the author uses the third-person point of view to intrude on his
own novel and ask; "What is an autobiography? What can fairly be said
to lie within its bounds, share in its purpose? Is there someone hidden
in Les Reardon?" It leaves readers walking on the edge wondering where
they are and yet, this world is one designed by the hands of man. In his
depiction of events and people, Burgess has remained truthful.
Some critics suggest that this novel is a parody of society - but, is
it? A society where people use every mechanical device invented, fails
to implement the most precious one, that of speech. People have forgotten
how to communicate with one another, to say something meaningful. The
words spoken are empty, gibberish. Parody? One wonders if the madness
has begun for modem language is abrupt, violent and war-like. One also
wonders if Burgess' rendition of a cannibalistic society also includes
the cannibalism of language.
This breakdown in communication, the incapacity of humans to speak in
a meaningful way, reveals itself in Burgess'latest book, Caesarea,
where the local poet, Kyle Finn, begins to speak drivel; Eye/(DO)n't C(ARE)
anyMORE. /Eye/ w-(as all) ways WRONG. /Eye j(US)t w(ant) to D(eye)." As
Kyle loses his language, he fails in the art of writing. His life becomes
chaotic and later, he commits suicide, his death signifying a sad reflection
on the society in which he lived, for when the poet dies, there is no
one left to tell the world about art. Burgess' universe is out of balance
where alienation overpowers assimilation. The reader finds no resuscitation
as the author fashions his tale at a frenetic pace, as grim, self-appointed
shadows march across his black canvas.
Is there an end to this madness? In a vignette towards the end of Pontypool,
the character, Greg/HP, stands in a hayfield and experiences an epiphany;
"As long as I can see the moment everything changes." The moment is infinitesimal
but it is enough. The feeling is infectious, but unlike the virus which
afflicts the characters in the novel, this spirit generates a passion,
an understanding of what writer and reader desire - a mystical union of
enthusiasm for the word to touch the far shore of language.
However, readers expecting a denouement to Burgess' surreal world will
be disappointed. Just as the character, HP, comes to a safe place and
readers begin to relax, Burgess startles his audience with the question;
"Now what?"
Burgess' latest novel, Caesarea, is a story that appears flat, his characters,
two-dimensional, his tale splintering off in several directions, hellbent
for nowhere, careening around images of gratuitous violence. The mayor,
Robert Forbes, a male Stepford-type, outwardly perfect, who must solve
the town's sewer problem, and the town treasurer, Marion, who sleeps in
her car, are but two of Burgess' odd creations. No one in the town can
go home for, the author writes, the people ofcaesarea are already there,
only smaller.
Further exploration of this theme reveals that going home results in
a sterility of character or a madness for which there is no restorative.
In Caesarea, returning home leads to a merging of two parts of
the same person, the sterile with the adulterated, causing havoc within
the community. Trolls appear to be at work in Burgess' outlandish landscape,
carrying off his inventions and replacing them with their own evil counterparts
but this is not so. Whereas, the characters in Pontypool Changes Everything
are victims of a virus and invoke empathy, in Caesarea, Burgess'
characters have become monstrous metaphors of degradation destroying everything
in their path. Humans are the viruses of modern society, rabid and rampant.
So it is then, that the Mayor and his counterparts, officials of a general
public, use guns, weapons which render communication non-existent, and
wreak chaos and confusion upon a small Ontario town.
The public may shrug off Burgess' writings as ludicrous or condemn his
images as tasteless to the point of nausea; but, Burgess' horrible narrative
is deliberate and should bear a reading. By envisioning this alienated
hinterland, the writer has given voice to the shadowy world of the mind.
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