4 ~ Sunday, June 13, 1993 - North Shore News GRAEME GIiBSON'S new novel, Gentleman Death, may not be everyone's cup of tea, but if spoke to me more powerfully than any book I’ve read in years. So naturally 'm recommending that you read it — with the caveat that if you aren’t a reasonably travelled middle-aged English- speaking Canadian male with an interest in literature (ideally, a writer yourself} and have not ex- perienced the loss of a loved one, or plenty of existential angst, Gib- son’s offering may amount to nothing more than exquisitely good writing. Put it this way: 1 can’t remember the last time | wanted to write a personal letter to another author to tell him how much his book moved me, I'm not quite sure which genre Gentleman Death falls into. Gibson begins by plunging the teader into what seems like a con- ventional piece of fiction, maybe a spy story, but suddenly stops, throws the pages aside, as it were, and switches to an autobiographical mode, revealing himself as a novelist with serious doubts about the worth of his art. Not just his art, but art itself. “What the hell am I trying to get at, and what's the point?”’ he interjects in the midst of his nar- tative, “When I'm working well 1 manage to grind out an average of two hundred and some words a day... But, and here’s the point, in the time it takes me to find my two hundred words over a hun- dred species of plants and animals become extinct. “Which is to say that for every two words of this, my deathless bloody prose, an irreplaceable form of life vanishes forever. It’s a sickening thought. ’ “Even if | were far better tha’ lam, the Lowry, the Beckett, or Kafka I once believed I had to try to be, my accomplishments would be no less irrelevant because the Earth is dying and we’re the cancer, the rogue cells, the cells of death,.”” This, after all, is the central question of our age.” ; Artists are supposed to be the antennae of the human species, and, as such, they ought to be in a state of extreme vibrational stress. ‘Hf they aren't, they aren’t pay- ing attention. And then what good is their art anyway? One can make the argument that bad (which is to say ignorant) art is as much a part cf the prob- lem as the politics of denial and -xploitation. {t amounts to little more than one more opiate for the masses. Not so Gentleman Death. As the book progresses, Gibson, having abandoned his initial fic- tional narrative, then abandons his autobiographical musing as well, and takes off in another di- rection entirely with yet another bit of fiction, creating yet another batch of characters. We no sooner get to know these People than he casts them aside too, and once again falls back on the telling of his own personal story. For the reader, it’s like being carried along a tightrope, trusting, but not at all positive, that the tightrope walker won't stumble into banality or, worse, silliness. It is well worth enduring the tension, however, For what ¢inerges from the pages of this, book is a ‘sophisticated examination not just of the psychological dynamics of the relationship between an author and his creations (goad stuff as this is in itself), but an unblinking look at the face of death itself, and its meaning for the individual. If, indeed, it has a meaning. As one of his characters puts it, it may very well be, certainly the evidetice strongly suggests, that nature only cares about species, not individuals, I found it painful but extremely therapeutic to. read Gibson’s descriptions of the deaths of friends, his father, his mother, and his brother, and his rumina- tions on his own inevitable finish -which comes to the fore when it _ looks for a moment like he might have a cancer tumor himself. “Preparing to shave one morn- ing several weeks after Father’s funeral I discovered Death himself had entered my body. “*Not the cruel fellow of scariet corners, not Death who comes as a stranger, but that lean inevitable harbinger of mortality, of succes- sion, the Gentleman whose guise is time... It was no longer my fa- ther’s life standing between the rest of us and the horizon. “It was mine... it had become my turn at the gate... Untit then it Gur mission: To make the best travel and in the world... in Canada had been my fate, as it had been my father's, to help obscure the face of Death, to perhaps divert his attention from the others for a bit.” Lest, by extracting this quote, | leave the impression that Gibson's book is morbid or depressing, let me add that the point he finally reaches is very much the opposite. I don't think it’s giving too much away to report that the character in Gibson's book (the real character, himself} breaks through to an understanding in the end that puts him beyond merely fearing death to a level where he sees with ‘astonishing clarity that 1 didn’t want to live forever." {tis no small thing coming to terms with one’s own mortality. Yet, in the end, what can one do? 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