Graeme Gibson — Perpetual Motion [1981]

Graeme Gibson was one of the novelists at the helm of the Canadian avant-garde scene of the 1960s and 1970s (there being no scene thereafter), alongside his wife Margaret Atwood, Chris Scott, Steve McCaffrey, Gail Scott, Audrey Thomas, and numerous others. His own output is slim: four novels and two non-fiction titles on birds and wildlife, plus one collection of conversations (Eleven Canadian Novelists). Five Legs from 1969 is the seminal modernist opus, utilising the then-popular stream of consciousness lark (with Communion its partner). This is Gibson’s third. A remarkable and bizarre tackling of the historical novel, Perpetual Motion concerns Robert Fraser, a man from Mad River, Ontario in possession of a mastodon skeleton obsessed with creating a perpetual motion machine in spite of his banausic (a word that recurs often in this novel) background. Mixing poetic description and close character narration, alongside a more ponderous tone (with strange shifting of tenses), the style here is unique, refusing to allow the reader to sink into the familiar furniture of the conventional historical novel and keeping him or her perplexed and concerned as the focus and timbre shifts over 280-odd pages, from 1860 to 1879. The Fraser clan is the focus, alongside the cast of oddball characters that populate the father’s life, among them the Irish creep Rochefoucault Hackett, the unprankable Eddie Shantz, and the eccentric Prof. Carruthers, whose tale of a Royal banquet inside the Iguanodon provides some the funniest material in the novel. The depressive and disturbed materfamilias, the robust daughter Annie, amd feral son Angus provide the familial baggage and heart of the matter. Set-pieces include a startling hanging scene, a mass cull of wild pigeons, and the bone-rattling finale when the machine is tested to a packed crowd. The rumbling of the industrial age, the harshness of the rural life, the bawdy backchat of the barrooms, and the psychodrama of the family are rendered vividly by Gibson’s brilliant hand in an elliptical and fabulous work. The character name Robert Fraser is reused in his final novel, Gentleman Death (perhaps mirroring the use of Felix Oswald in his first two novels), where he appears as a novelist. Praised by Annie Dillard, Alice Munro, and Timothy Findley, this novel is one of the better ways to spend six hours. Gibson retired from the fiction-writing biz in 1996 (Atwood, however, is still at large. There is no God).

Editions:

Hardback, McClelland and Stewart, 1982.

Hardback, St. Martin’s Press, 1982.

Paperback, Bantam, 1984.

Paperback, Penguin, 1988.

Paperback, New Canadian Library, 1997. Reissued 2010.

Bibliography:

Novels:

Five Legs, Anansi, 1969.

Communion, Anansi, 1971.

Perpetual Motion, McClelland and Stewart, 1982.

Gentleman Death, McClelland and Stewart, 1993.