Introducing A. J. Somerset

The winner of the 2009-2010 Metcalf-rooke Award is A. J. Somerset.

Combat Camera by A. J. Somerset is that very rare thing, a really superbly realized Canadian novel. It concerns Lucas Zane, a celebrated photographer who has burned out emotionally after covering battles in most of the wars of the late twentieth century. He has come to the end in Toronto, drunk, hallucinatory, all ambition fled. He earns the rent by taking photographs for Richard Barker, an impresario of shoestring-budget pornographic movies. On the set he meets "Melissa" and the novel explores their involvement.

Zane says at one point in the book:

I'm sure you'd like a nice, pat explanation for my life. Something to tie up all the loose ends: I left it all behind after witnessing unspeakable horrors, etcetera, that left me reduced to a whiskey-soaked shell. You'd like to think you're in some tale of sin and redemption. I guess we all like to think we're walking through some grand, redemptive story. Well, we're all going to be disappointed. Disappointment is one of the two fates that we must all eventually meet.

I ran out of horror a long time ago. You start with conviction, and then you just end up sad. You know you aren't going to stop anything. You'll be off to cover another war tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that and the day after that until you retire, until you just give up and leave the job to the next quixote. You realize that all the things you thought and believed were all bullshit. You just get tired out, and you can't feel anything anymore but a kind of distant sadness.

God looks down on his children and shakes his head. Free will, he thinks -- what was I smoking when I came up with that one? You drop one tab of acid, eight days later you got snakes in the Garden of Eden.


Zane tries to make a comeback by constructing a photo-essay about "Melissa's" life, a stripper and porn-chick utterly lacking a heart of gold. Zane's reflections on camera angles, available light, film stock and shutter speeds -- all the by now obsolete technology of his years of fame -- form a hymn to the beauty of art. Though Zane himself would deny that.

But the power of the book lies in its voice, a voice that is restless, ceaseless, meandering, tragic, sometimes very funny, a mind and voice that maintain an almost hypnotic grip on the reader.

Combat Camera is one of the finest Canadian novels I have ever read.

-- John Metcalf

A. J. Somerset has been a soldier, a technical writer, a programmer, and a freelance photographer. His non-fiction has appeared in numerous outdoor magazines in Canada and the United States, and his articles have been translated into French and Japanese. He lives in London, Ontario with his wife and children. Combat Camera is his first novel.

As the winner of the Metcalf-Rooke Award, A. J. Somerset will receive:

- a $1500.00 cash prize, presented by Steven Temple Books
- a publishing contract with Biblioasis, with publication set for September 2010
- a leather-bound copy of Combat Camera
- publication and profiles in The New Quarterly, Maisonneuve, CNQ: Canadian Notes & Queries and elsewhere
- a U.S. and Canadian marketing Campaign
- a Toronto TINARS launch, an Ottawa International Writers Festival appearance, as well as other festival appearances
- a regional book tour

The other shortlisted authors for the 2009-2010 Metcalf-Rooke Award were:

Laura Boudreau. A Cat Starving Its Way Through Winter (Short Fiction)
Daniel Griffin. Stopping For Strangers. (Short Fiction)
Lauro Palomba. Measuring Spoons. (Novel)
Cathy Stonehouse. Something About the Animals. (Short Fiction)

For further information, or to arrange an interview with A. J. Somerset, please contact Dan Wells at biblioasis@gmail.com