Man Who Hated Emily Bronte, The by Ray Smith
A comic satire of contemporary Montreal by the man who redefined experimental prose for Canada. This is a comic counterpart - not a sequel - to Ray Smith’s previous novel, The Man Who Loved Jane Austen, his melancholic take on family division and nationalist politics in late-nineties Quebec.
This is a brisker and lighter novel than Jane, one that returns to Smith’s signature weirdness.
Hired to teach in a junior college, Will Franklyn has come to Montreal expecting a life to proceed much as it had in Nova Scotia where he grew up, or in Edmonton or Edinburgh where he studied. But `in Quebec everything - all law, all logic, all human behaviour - is topsy-turvy.’ Trusting and bemused, Will manages - just - to stay sane in the midst of lunacy.
In this novel, a companion to his sombre The Man Who Loved Jane Austen, Ray Smith demonstrates once again that he is a master of comic fiction, leading us a merry chase round the mountain. The familiar places are there - Schwartz’s, the St. Viateur Bagel Shop, the Big O - but lurking behind every familiar certainty is the unexpected, the bizarre, the topsy-turvy.
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