AUTHOR'S FIRST WORK

NV civil
parodies

servant
system

in his new book

IT ALL started when Brother Sebastian scaled the abbey
tower with his climbing gear, hung over the cdge and
urinated, accidentally hitting the bishop below.

After that, it was decided that
the good Brother Sebastian needed
a little holiday, and east he is sent,
ending up as a civil servant in the
Nation’s capital. .

So begins Srother Sebastian's
Little Holiday, a just-published
parody on the civil service by a
civil servant —- North Vancouver's
Jerry Bartram, 43.

After a day embroiled in the
labyrinthine workings of the civil
service, Bartram would come home
and set pen to paper ‘‘scribbling in
the evenings’ for six months as the
book virtually wrote itself.

“tt (the novel) was inspired by a
course in Ottawa for senior man-
agers and held in a former semi-
nary — the whole layout and at
mosphere of the place,’ explains
Bartram, a six-year civil service
veteran and now the director for
conservation and renewable energy
in B.C. and the Yukon.

On his holiday, Brother Sebas-
tian encounters, among other peo-
ple, a Machiavellian member of
Parliament, but the politician is
painted with such a broad brush
that Ottawa-watchers will find no
one MP fitting the bill.

In a world where the civil service
is apt. to look humorlessly on such
a literary undertaking by one of its
fold, Bartram. has skilfully
tempered the tale so as not to incur
the wrath of higher-up mandarins.

“(I was fairly careful,"’ Bartram
says of portraying real-life people
in his novel. ‘‘That’s one reason

why we have a femate Prime
Minister in the thing.”

In his travels, the good brother
learns the use and interpretation of
press releases, discovers twitchy
feporters and revels in cestasy
found and lost.

A former editior of the B.C.
Catholic newspaper, Bartram
found himself at times bewildered
and bemused during his first days
in the civil service. and some of
Brother Sebastian's experiences
mirror his own.

From colleagues and employers
who have read the book, com-
ments arc not unfavorable. ‘‘A
kind of typical comment would be
‘Jerry, this book isn’t very real-
istic, there’s too much sex in it.
Everybody knows civil servants
don't have sex lives."**

But civil servants, at least, do
have a sense of humor, as witness-
ed by Brother Sebastian's rise and
fall in political favor as he ventures
picaro-style through the tumultu-
ous cosmos of the civil service.

“It’s deliberately done in that
(picaresque) tradition where an in-
nocent makes a trip...and = en-
counters various things along the
way,’' he explains.

Although now busy writing two
plays, Bartram does not discount
further tales of the sage Brother
Sebastian. ‘‘You never know about
a sequel."’

CAPTAIN’S Lo@: STA®DATE 2603-5
ENTERED REVERSE TIME WARP TODAY, DID
LupeH ON EARTH ATEMERALD PARK WITH

SPocK ANDTHE GANG.

— KIRK

13- Friday, January 15, 19838 - North Shore News

Try
organic
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PAGE 17

NEWS photo Neil Lucente

NORTH SHORE resident Jerry Bartram Joosely combined his experiences working for the Roman Catholic
church and the civil service into a just-published book.

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