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Mount Royal

by Basil Papademos

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times: Montreal, 1989. For Johnny, a drug merchant and bisexual prostitute, the metropolis represents “one of the last big Western cities where you can have a life of tarnished opulence without needing some idiotic job.” Like a bad habit, Montreal wraps Johnny “in the low thrum of her busted avenues, in the musky smell of her filthy waters. She gets me excited with her vulgar tongue and sultry decay.”

Decadence has its attractions, and Basil Papademos, a former resident of Montreal now living in Thailand, does a good job describing a milieu heavy on tarnish and decay. A catalogue of sex, drugs, violence, and more sex, Mount Royal has little in the way of a story to tell, but rather moves quickly through a series of vignettes based around the hookups between users and pushers, prostitutes and johns.

Johnny’s acquaintances fall into two groups: friends in low places and strangers in high ones. Among the former are vaguely artistic but underemployed and unmotivated bohemians of the kind that can be found in much contemporary urban fiction. Meanwhile, the economies of sex and drugs being based on exploitation, a darker picture emerges of the rich and powerful degenerates who constitute a grotesque ruling elite. This class is mostly associated in the novel with government mandarins: bureaucrats, public servants, and the like. Perhaps this is simply a way of underlining the hypocrisy of their existence, but it also comes across as a very Canadian resentment of the establishment.

Papademos is writing in the tradition of gutter realism, and the “street” here is almost a character in itself. Certainly, the underside of Montreal is memorably evoked. In other respects, however, the novel is more conventional, if better written than most examples of this sub-subgenre. While lively and frank, the sex scenes follow the general rule that the more graphically described the proceedings are, the less probable they seem. And the book concludes with a loose and predictable denouement that has Johnny’s gang dissolving through a combination of death and distance. One gets the sense Papademos wants us to feel sympathy for Johnny and his friends, but in the end they are not a lost generation, but a wasted one, and thus are hard to really care about.

 

Reviewer: Alex Good

Publisher: Tightrope Books

DETAILS

Price: $19.95

Page Count: 250 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 978-1-92663-943-7

Released: June

Issue Date: 2012-7

Categories: Fiction: Novels

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