Jack Bottomly: Threat to National Security

A review of Ray Smith's The Flush of Victory: Jack Bottomly Among the Virgins, hit my mailbox yesterday. In the interest of full disclosure, dear Thirsty readers, I type it out in its entirety here. To say it is negative would be an understatement. But I found it also quite funny, especially the bit at the end where our dear reviewer seems to suggest the book poses some sort of national threat. I completely agree, of course: this book is a threat to national security, morality, the remaining shreds of our military honour. If we can get this into a 2nd printing, I'll be quoting liberally from this review. Forget the Globe: "a dark, Swiftian distaste for the human animal runs beneath ... as defiant as anything Smith has published in the course of his shape-shifting odyssey as an outsider to mainstream literary culture"; forget the Star: "A New Canadian Hero Arises ... Long May He Romp." I'd much rather this: "Vulgar and raunchy ... bring(s) the honour and pride of those who serve in Canada's air force intelligence circles to a never-before-reached low. ... has .. the potential to cause any number of problems -- in Canada and abroad."

Anyway ... the review.

Vulgar and raunchy, the "shenanigans" of fictional character Major Jack Bottomly, second in command of DNDI/Air bring the honour and pride of those who serve in Canada's air force intelligence to a never-before-reached low.
If you can stomach the crude smut that is so liberally sprinkled throughout the book, you will come across a plot involving unlikely bedfellows. In the spirit of global accord that preceded the SALT II talks, agents from Russia, England and the US "team up" to crack a coding device that was created on a shoe-string budget by a Canadian professor. Casualties include several agents as well as two older 'birds' -- an Australian Neptune and an Argus.
Bottomly is the antitheses if everything known about those who serve in the air force blue (actually green -- for this fictional episode begins in 1979). He is a foul-mouthed, filthy-minded, beer-guzzling lazy lout wqho schemes (somewhat successfully) to defraud Canadian taxpayers. In teh end, he also helps plant a 'nuisance' virus that infects intelligence computers around the world.
Author Ray Smith, who teaches English literature at Montreal's Dawson College, has a flair for languages. His ability to phonetically capture the nuances of English as spoken by those who were not born and raised in English Canada merits the occasional chuckle.
The author plans for this book to become the first in a series of Bottomly misadventures by the dastardly Bottomly. With the development of this "off-colour" character, the author has garnered for his hero the potential to cause any number of problems -- in Canada and abroad.
Future episodes will not be on my reading list.

Globe Review of Ray Smith's Flush of Victory

A first for Biblioasis: This past Saturday, we had two reviews in the Globe & Mail. In this post, Charlie Foran's review of Ray Smith's Flush of Victory; in the post below, George Murray's review of Eric Ormsby's Time's Covenant. Though both were good (and positive), Charlie Foran's in particular is everything a good review should be: thoughtful, considered, and well-written, placing the book within the larger context of the author's body of work. I think the fact that he pulled this off in1000 word or less quite impressive.

It's also worth mentioning that Biblioasis is republishing all 4 of the books Foran singles out as being Smith's best work as part of its Renditions series. Cape Breton is the Thought Control Centre of Canada was published in November of last year; Night at the Opera will be released this month; Century next Spring; and Lord Nelson's Tavern sometime thereafter. Century in particular is a stellar piece of work, one of the best short novels I've read in a long time, deserving of canonical status. Hopefully there will come a time when Ray will acquire the readership and reputation he deserves.

Don't wait for our edition of Century: go to Abebooks and pick up a copy. It was published by Stoddart, in 1986 (I think); you could probably find yourself a copy for 15.00 or less. Well, well, well worth the investment.

Now ... without further introduction, Foran's review.

Inside the spy story lurks a Swiftian darkness

CHARLES FORAN

July 14, 2007

THE FLUSH OF VICTORY

Jack Bottomly Among the Virgins

By Ray Smith

Biblioasis, 334 pages, $23.95

Print Edition - Section Front

Enlarge Image

The long, singular career of Ray Smith is testament to the virtues and perils of literary wanderlust. An irreverent voice in the earnest early days of CanLit nationalism, the Nova Scotia native launched smartly with the 1969 story collection Cape Breton is the Thought Control Centre of Canada, a book whose title alone merited its canonization. Two years later, the Halifax-rooted novel Lord Nelson Tavern struck a still more original note, offering bite and insight, charm and sentimentality, in stylish, often wildly funny prose.

Fifteen years later, Smith, now a teacher at a Montreal college, reappeared with Century. A series of linked fictions that charted calamitous recent European history while meditating on the limits of art to affect moral change, Century marked a starling escalation in ambition. Here was an artist reborn after long silence with new seriousness and range.

With Smith's next novel, 1992's A Night at the Opera, the aesthetic canvas was altered once again. Set in a town in postwar Germany, with glances back into the murk of medieval lore, this satire of provincialism and petty-mindedness was likely meant to echo the habits of contemporary Quebec. While a bravura literary performance, the book was almost too lost in its own ornate conceits to persuade. Two subsequent novels set in "real" Montreal were bitter and blunt in this regard.

The Flush of Victory: Jack Bottomly Among the Virgins isn't going to be accused of excess subtlety. Ray Smith's latest is not only a broad farce, half inspired and half silly, but also a straightforward spy romp, closer in spirit to the black comedy of 1960s pranksters Terry Southern and Ken Kesey than any fancy metafictions. It is also pan-Canadian in the sweep of its bemusement, and its ire.

Major Jack (Bummo) Bottomly is an intelligence officer for the Canadian Air Force. The year is 1979, and the repellent Bottomly is resigned to ending his Ottawa career in a haze of booze and boredom and inappropriate remarks to, and lunges at, women. To his surprise and delight, he falls upon a plot to steal a local aircraft. Better still, the operation seems the improbable brainchild of both the KGB and the CIA. Finally, Canada will get to play with the big boys.

"This is the real spying," he says of the covert intelligence game, "and, of course, it is exactly the kind Canadians are still forbidden to do. We are not allowed to send men in trench coats to lurk about the Kremlin, we must not try to subvert visiting Russian ballerinas, and we are sensibly forbidden to do over-flights. Canadian pilot brought down near Minsk: 'No shit, tovarich: it looked just like Moose Jaw to me!' "

Assisted by his even more Rabelaisian Aussie sidekick, Bluey Jones, Bottomly sets out to foil these assailants upon sleepy Canadian sovereignty and imbibe as many "chilled tubes" of beer, preferably the Australian brand Foster's, as the bladder allows. Espionage is pure slapstick, including an attempt by our antihero to shoot a tire belonging to a Russian spy that ends with him plugging a "fat old broad" in the backside, and enemies are incompetents, most notably a "poufter" secret agent couple. The plot, suitably labyrinthine for a faux-thriller, is the excuse for pokes at various pretensions and self-delusions, domestic and international.

Jack Bottomly himself is a stereotype, and Smith has almost too much fun cataloguing his determinedly offensive views and utterances. As the title suggests, The Flush of Victory also enjoys a good toilet joke, over and over, and probably wouldn't temper the scatology even if begged. For all the surface sheen to the picaresque, a dark, Swiftian distaste for the human animal runs beneath. The difficulty of assigning obvious targets to the book's deeper impulses keeps the reader off-balance, never quite sure where to laugh and where to wince.

In this sense, the novel is as defiant as anything Smith has published in the course of his shape-shifting odyssey as an outsider to mainstream literary culture. Canadian writing, then as now, is unreceptive to the scabrous, the calculated outrage. It struggles with bookish conceits of any kind, as a matter of fact, preferring its fictions straight, no-chaser, with as little formal innovation as possible. Even simple satire is a tough sell.

According to its publisher, The Flush of Victory is first in a series of proposed Bottomly stories. Wonderful indeed if such bar-room/bathroom farce gains Ray Smith a wider audience in late career. For long-time admirers, however, especially those of us who took special delight in his literary daring, his willingness to reconfigure the form for each new book, the further misadventures of Major Jack Bottomly are unlikely to birth anything as genuinely bold as Century or A Night at the Opera.

Charles Foran's most recent novel is Carolan's Farewell.

A New Canadian Hero Rises

A review in the Toronto Star this Sunday, for Ray Smith's new novel, The Flush of Victory.

Bummo Bottomly is a shamelessly rude, incorrect, drunken boor – long may he romp

There is a generic moment in some films called a "pat-the-dog scene" where the hero performs a gratuitous act of kindness or decency that demonstrates his essential goodness. Patting a dog on the head, or standing up for the weak and the defenceless, or simply espousing some virtuous, progressive cause, encourages us to identify with such a figure. It's a trick that always works, since we like to think ourselves better than we are.

The opposite of a pat-the-dog scene doesn't have a name that I know of, but what it looks like can be seen near the beginning of Montrealer Ray Smith's The Flush of Victory. Major Jack "Bummo" Bottomly of Canadian Air Force Intelligence, drunk as always, is crouching in an alley, trying to shoot the tires out from under a car belonging to some Soviet spies. After a few spectacular failures, including a shot that goes down the street and hits a "fat old broad" in the bum, his mission is accomplished. Alas, a young feminist "hippie broad" has seen what he's up to and belts him with a two-by-four. Turning the tables, he kicks her in the knee and then knocks her out with a blow to the head.
He starts to make his escape from the alley but then, determined to prove that chivalry is not quite dead enough, returns to stick his hand under the unconscious girl's clothes to paw her breasts. He is delighted to find she isn't wearing a bra.

Welcome to 1979, those hard-drinking, bare-knuckled days when men were men, chicks were broads, and "poufter" was a rather faggy British word for a fag. Major Bottomly, our intrepid and verbally dexterous narrator (plus all-around misogynist, racist and homophobic pig), is a middle-aged military bureaucrat stationed in Ottawa – which means he has nothing much to do or even look forward to in life beyond drinking, wanking and thinking up new ways to steal from the government. Then one day, out of the gray, he uncovers what appears to be a joint KGB/CIA operation to hijack one of our airplanes.
The ins-and-outs of the crazy spy story that follows are a bit hard to follow, but not that important anyway. Jack has schemes of his own, and along with his Australian counterpart and long-time drinking buddy, "Bluey" Jones, he is soon having a series of misadventures involving high finance, low nightlife and international intrigue.

The resulting farce is an entertaining and shamelessly obstreperous romp that holds nothing sacred. Stereotypes abound, from the bovine and illiterate secretary at Jack's office to the laboriously affected pair of gay secret agents cruising on Jack's tail. But Bottomly himself is a great Canadian original, more than just a beer-bellied, lecherous clown with piles. At least some of his "crude, boorish, drunken, incompetent colonial" persona is a deliberate disguise, since "you're always better off when the opposition underestimates you." He is also a wonderful storyteller with a flair for the snappy wisecracks and cut-and-thrust ribaldry, which, along with carefully prepared detonations of sheer slapstick, make the book so funny.

What wears thin is not Jack's crudity or loutishness but rather the juvenility of so much of Smith's material. His sense of comedy here is dominated by childish pranks, fart jokes and bathroom humour. There are at least half a dozen scenes that involve some calamitous misuse of the "bog." This is going to the porcelain well a bit too often, even for those with a taste for such stuff.

In general, Smith's literary model, aside from the genre elements, is Wodehouse, both in terms of his arrangement of mounting comic catastrophes as well as in the furiously paced dialogue. With regard to the latter, the "Pommer" influence might also explain the mix of so many British colloquialisms (like "poufter" and "bog") with the less sure handling of some of the North American vernacular. The speech of a young computer nerd, for example, is heavily sprinkled with the ubiquitous (and a bit anachronistic) "like" but it almost always appears in the wrong place. It even shows up at the end of sentences as an interrogative, which has to be the only position in spoken English it simply can't go.

The Flush of Victory is the first in a projected series of Jack Bottomly adventures. If the first instalment is any indication, such a franchise may turn into a test of this nation's tolerance for rude humour. I hope it's a test we pass. After such a spirited launch it would be a shame not to have Jack back for another campaign, looking out for his own best chance and coincidentally standing on guard for thee.

Alex Good's website of book news and reviews is goodreports.net.

Ray Smith is Heading Home

Ray Smith is packing the last of his belongings and preparing to leave Westmount for Cape Breton. The Westmount Examiner and Wayne Larsen say farewell.

Turning the page: New book, new life for Ray Smith

by Wayne Larsen

Turning the page: New book, new life for Ray Smith

As one of CanLit’s original enfants terrible of the late 1960s—barging onto the literary scene right in that sweet spot of rebellious creativity—Ray Smith can never be classified as a ‘conventional’ or ‘traditional’ writer; that label was forever denied him four decades ago with the publication of his first book, ‘Cape Breton is the Thought-Control Centre of Canada.’

But then, Ray Smith has never been one for labels. And anyone familiar with his relatively small but potent body of work will agree that no author of Smith’s quirky versatility deserves to be categorized at all.

The only thing that can ever be safely stated about Smith is that he is among the country’s best yet under-appreciated writers — a novelist and satirist of the first order whose witty and irreverent prose have surfaced once again in a brand new novel, ‘The Flush of Victory: Jack Bottomly Among the Virgins’.

As the first in a projected series of what Smith describes as Bottomly misadventures, the title character is introduced as a Canadian air force intelligence officer hot on the trail of a bizarre series of military murders and other assorted crimes, misdemeanours and absurdities. The result is a complex, comic tale that unfolds like a walk through an unfamiliar neighbourhood — you never know what awaits around the next corner.

The narrative style, different again from most of Smith’s previous work, fluctuates between elegant and downright rude and never lets up in its sheer lack of respect for anything even remotely respectable. As usual, nothing is sacred in Smith’s topsy-turvy view of the Canadian establishment. And in the grandest tradition of contemporary satire, he gleefully shoots down everything in his path. This may be Major Jack Bottomly’s misadventure, but the very bureaucratic military setting provides Smith with countless opportunities to flaunt his gift for lampoon — and he takes full advantage of each one.

"Jack is not the kind of guy you'd want to spend a lot of time with," Smith says of his

character — a man whose flaws really do fill a book.



Going home

The publication of ‘The Flush of Victory: Jack Bottomly Among the Virgins’ comes at a major turning point in the author’s life. He has recently retired from a 35-year career as an English teacher at Dawson College, where he became well-known among hundreds of students over the years as ‘The Man Who Loved Jane Austen’ — not coincidentally the title of his 1999 novel.

Not only that, but after living in Westmount since 1982, first on Burton Avenue then in a basement apartment on Grosvenor just above Sherbrooke, Smith is moving out.

Now, he says, he’s going home.

Home for Smith is Mabou, a village on Cape Breton, where he was born and raised. He may have lived and worked in Westmount for most of his life, made the daily trip to Dawson along Sherbrooke Street and buried himself in research at the Westmount Public Library, but hearth and home has always been the house built by his grandfather in Mabou, a dozen miles from Inverness.

Smith speaks of Mabou with the affection and pride of a true native son. Describing it as the most musical village in Canada, he claims that if he were to take a 4-iron and hit a golf ball in Mabou, chances are it would fly over someone who has a CD out. Names like Rankin, MacMaster and MacIsaac — giants of the East Coast music scene — drop left and right as Smith describes his neighbours and their relatives.

Cape Breton may not be acknowledged as the thought-control centre of Canada by most Canadians, but from now on it will serve as the creative centre of the universe for one of our most original literary minds. He is leaving Westmount, but with more of Jack Bottomly stories on the way, we definitely have not heard the last of Ray Smith and his finely tuned sense of the absurd.

• 'The Flush of Victory: Jack Bottomly Among the Virgins' by Ray Smith is published by Biblioasis and is available at most bookstores.

Heeeere's Jackie ...

Ray Smith's The Flush of Victory: Jack Bottomly Among the Virgins, came back from the printer yesterday, and is set to be unleashed on the world. A pseudo-Canadian espionage farce, it has been waiting to be published for close to 30 years. When I called Ray today, he was out on the porch, waiting for it to arrive. I'm quite excited, and proud, to finally be able to give it to him.

It should not have taken so long. Bottomly is perhaps the most despicable anti-hero in Canadian literature -- sexist, loutish, conniving, drunken, immoral, insulting, depraved, thieving, lazy, and just about anything else you might care to add -- but there's more to him than this. His most compelling virtues: he is never boring, often terribly funny, and a sharp eyed critic. He -- and Smith, through him -- have targeted many of Canadians most cherished assumptions: that we are peace-loving and open-minded prominent among them. "Scratch a Canadian," Bottomly tells a Swedish banker he's trying to swindle, "You'll find a lout." A lot of people might disagree with him, but after reading this book it might prove difficult not to add loutish-ness to the list of Canadian national characteristics.

So, why did The Flush of Victory take so long to get published? From what I gather, because the handful of publishers who saw it before me feared it would give too much offense. I've worried for a few months now about the reception this book will receive. There will be those who will miss the humour, the satire, and the rather pointed barbs. There's nothing I can do about this.

As a friend of mine said recenty, "Bottomly's a crude piece of work ... but you would have to be an idiot to find him offensive." That there will be idiots out there, I'm quite certain, but it is certainly time to stop worrying about them.

THE TRUTH OF MAJOR J. BOTTOMLY’S CONFESSIONS VERIFIED

Ray Smith's savage farce, The Flush of Victory: Jack Bottomly Among the Virgins, is at the printer and due back mid-month. A pseudo-Canadian espionage (Canadian espionage? Is that farce enough for you?) thriller about a loutish anti-hero who sets out to profit from a joint CIA-KGB conspiracy to steal a clapped-out Canadian airplane, it is, in the language of back-cover bumpf, uproarious. But there's more to it -- and Bottomly -- than may be immediately apparent.

Speaking of back cover bumpf, here's The Flush of Victory's:

Author Ray Smith has correlated the recent electronic version of the Confession with the Dubai Typescript and the even earlier Hong Kong Holograph. In a feat of unparalleled investigative journalism he has travelled the world corroborating the sordid and still highly sensitive details which are to this day denied by the intelligence services of five nations. A saga of perjury, peculation and perversion.


- The murder by CIA operatives in Vancouver of Captain E. Saunders of the Directorate of National Defence Intelligence/Air

- The murder by Squandron Leader Charles Kingsford Jones of the Royal Australian Air Force of an officer of the RCMP.

- The murder of the CIA agent known only as 'Hubble', trampled to death by horses ridden by rogue RCMP officers.

-The embezzlement by computer fraud of millions of Canadian Government Dollars and the involvement of Zurich through the Zurcher Kreditanstalt.

- The unlawful confinement in Ottawa by officers of the Royal Canadian Navy of agents of SIS and their subjection to incessant buggery.

Among many other, even more horrific occurences...

Sleuth Smith has done for the RCAF, the CIA, SIS, and the RCMP what Woodward and Bernstein did for Watergate.

____________________________________________________________________

Also, advance (quote-unquote) reviews:

“. . . As solid a case for the re-introduction of book burning as I’ve read in many a year. And, come to think of it, public hanging . . .”
—Albert O. Mangle

“Hilarious, but unfair to the Navy.”
—Captain Jack McClelland, RCN (ret.)

"I was very . . . unamused.”
—Northrop Frye

“If you publish this scabrous trash, it will set Canadian Literature back fifty years.”
—Desmond Pacey

“Maudzie Cawlisss!”
—Societe Saint-Jean-Baptiste

“Does that son of a bitch expect to get his royalty cheques in the mail?”
—CUPW

“I think we might just have a look at Smith’s income tax returns.”
—CUPE

I’ll have his *?!#%*!% balls for bookends!”
—Paul Hellyer

____________________________________________________________________

With any luck, old Jack should finally be bookshelves across the country by month's end.