Barry Webster

Review published in Book Slut: http://www.bookslut.com/fiction/2012_11_019579.php

Canadian author Barry Webster's whimsical, perversely playful fiction has garnered numerous accolades; indeed, his 2005 collection, The Sound of All Flesh, took home the ReLit Award for best Canadian short story collection. With The Lava in My Bones, Webster brings his talents in the shorter medium to bear on the medium of the novel. As a debut novel, The Lava in My Bones is witty and mature, and painstakingly intertextual, in its nearly seamless segues from teen angst to social commentary, from the use (and, most times, the overuse) of magical realism to a universal tale of the search for love and self-acceptance. However, where The Sound of All Flesh succeeded in its brevity and the far wider scope for which a story collection allows, The Lava in My Bones reads too redundantly like a short story stretched far beyond its logical narrative constraints, a series of vignettes tied together loosely by the themes of family, social ostracism, and the motherly ties that bind -- not to mention the oedipal ties that strangle when they can no longer mold according to social and cultural expectations.

The Lava in My Bones begins with Sam Masonty -- a geological expert on climate change "who'd gotten a BA, MSc, and PhD in eight years" -- barred from reentering Zurich and imprisoned in his native Ontario, where he commences not only his first relationship with another man, Franz, but his curious habit of eating rocks ("If you love something, you put it in your mouth"). Sam vacillates back and forth between recalling Canada's vast natural expansiveness to his lover who knows only the monotonous tedium of life in his own country, "Switzerland, the most land-locked country in the world." Webster's skill here is in presenting a relationship between two men that plays into self-parodies of queer life while also eschewing them: although Sam and Franz enact a doomed love affair, one that comments on queer subculture insofar as it emphasizes taut bodies and designer clothing, the body is less the focus than are the ways in which desire can be viewed as something intimate and yet something dangerous.

Webster foregrounds this theme of desire in a prologue that situates Sam's inchoate queer identity in terms of the grandiose and fantastic world of fairy tales; in these tales, Sam encounters "lovers who bit off each other's organs and when they opened their mouths, birds flew out," all the while recognizing that "these tales were telling the very story of his life." The magical realism found in these tales makes its way into the main narrative: during the height of Sam and Franz's relationship, snow falls in Zurich despite the fact that it is summer; Sam's academic work on climate change ("Rocks bear the imprint of the weight of our bodies... rocks record the details of someone's life") becomes personal when Franz first swallows a rock and then tempts his lover to appease his own wish to be closer to the core of the earth; and Sam's malevolent, religious mother appears at the foot of the bed he shares with Franz, casting judgment and externalizing Sam's own conflict about his sexual identity.

These fantastical elements carry over into the subsequent vignettes, episodes that are sieved through Sam's main narrative as we return to him for grounding. (It is no wonder that as each thread in The Lava in My Bones is titled after the four elements, Sam's element is that of the earth.) As Webster extends his terrain to introduce the reader to Sam's family, the reliance on magical realism becomes more of a crutch than a quirky trope that would allow the novel to flow more smoothly and inventively. We are introduced to Sam's sister, Sue, who begins to ooze honey from her pores; Sam's maritime father who is obsessed with mermaids; and Sam's hyper-religious mother who enlists the help of the Virgin Mary to save the souls of her far-from-normal children. Although the mother's vigilance is one of the most absurd flights of fancy in the novel, it does, all the same, emphasize an intertextual debt to literary and cultural sources; to be sure, in spite of his unique voice in characterizing a mother who feels she has not done enough to steer her children in this world, one is often reminded of the omniscient, phallic mother figure in Guy Maddin's film Brand Upon the Brain!

Franz later admits in his own vignette: "In truth, I did not want you, Sam. I wanted the space that surrounded you... The German language is so damned sexy; just hearing it gives me a hard-on; no wonder you wanted me, Sam." This clumsy juxtaposition of Webster's major themes here is made all the more so by this point in the novel; the introduction of first-person narratives grants us more subjectivity for tangential characters than the reader receives in Sam's more major and profound sections. In fact, the narrative distancing results in further displacing the main character along divisive lines that belie Webster's overt attempt to dismantle them: time and space, language and confusion, love and shame, and reality and fantasy are dichotomies that are less blurred by the cacophony of voices and the overwrought structure of The Lava in My Bones than they are fixated and made more resoundingly separate.

Webster certainly has a way with words, and this is largely what carries the reader through his debut novel. Less focused than his short fiction, The Lava in My Bones still explores similar themes of longing, the search for love, and the desire for self-acceptance; at the same time, due to the novel's excessive length and its chorus of voices -- many of which seem to be dead-end paths on a road already labyrinthine in terms of structure -- one comes away feeling as though language is the primary focus, especially how language can render magical the otherwise marginalized existence of the sexually and socially outcast. Webster's uniting thematic here is definitely praiseworthy in its message of tolerance, but it is one that is often lost among eaten rocks, mermaid infatuations, oozing honey, and the many fairy tales and films that overpopulate his novel.… (plus d'informations)

The Lava in My Bones is surely one of the most rollicking and exuberant novels to come along in many years. This deeply complex novel follows the adventures of a professional geologist named Sam. Sam was born and raised in Cartwright, Labrador, which he left at the first opportunity in order to free himself of the influence of his religious fanatic mother. Sam has never considered himself homosexual, and yet on a visit to Switzerland for a conference shocks himself by falling in love with man named Franz. Their vigorously physical relationship proves overwhelming for both of them, and Sam returns home to Canada, where he suffers a breakdown and is institutionalized. Meanwhile, Sam’s sister, Sue, still living in Cartwright, begins sweating honey and is followed by swarms of bees. Bullied because of her affliction and sick of her mother’s unforgiving and proscriptive brand of religion, she longs for Sam to come and take her away. Her wish comes to pass when Sam, determined to return to Switzerland and Franz, escapes from the mental institution and makes his way from Ontario to Labrador, where he will catch a boat and cross the Atlantic with his sister. Sam undergoes a shocking transformation during his journey, and his and Sue’s plans are derailed when their mother discovers their scheme and stows away on the boat. Franz meanwhile has undergone a transformation of his own, which Sam discovers when they are finally reunited. In The Lava in My Bones Barry Webster imagines a world which shares little more than its geography with the one in which we live. This is a world in which absolutely anything can happen. One character’s thoughts influence another’s actions thousands of miles away. Changes to the structure of the earth’s core are manifest in the creatures living on its surface. The human body is a pliable instrument, which knows things and reacts to them in ways the body’s owner cannot foresee or control. For a book in which outrageous events occur on almost every page and sometimes seem to happen at random, it adheres to a strict inner logic: all aspects of human and natural existence and experience are interconnected. We are part of the earth, and the earth is part of us. Webster’s novel is also a celebration of being alive and sensually aware. Love takes many forms in this book and I would wager that the phrase “erect penis” does not appear with equal frequency in any other work of fiction. The Lava in My Bones is a wild and enjoyable ride but be forewarned that it should be approached on its own terms because there are no antecedents in Canadian literature. Expect the unexpected.… (plus d'informations)