Mini Book Expo review of Revenant

The Vancouver Writers Festival blurb about Revenant describes the novel, Tristan Hughes’ third, as an ‘extended -though not uncritical - love letter to Ynys Môn.’ The Tower and Send My Cold Bones Home are his first two novels.

That hadn’t occurred to me. The village of Ynys Môn, where three friends meet on the 13^th anniversary of the death of the fourth member of their childhood gang, seemed the least important element of the novel. Setting isn’t everything. What matters about Ynys Môn is not that it is geographically or socio-politically unique, but rather that it’s a quintessential ‘home’ place - one of the ones time forgot, where nothing ever changes. Set on an island, a certain regression is inevitable when you revisit the scene of your youthful follies.

Del’s gang of Ricky, Steph and Neil reunite to finally process Del’s death. Neil has never left Ynys Môn, Ricky returns – perhaps rightly – with a great deal of trepidation, and Steph floats back, perhaps seeing it for the first time. “You only learn how to see things properly when you’re alone.” Del, who delighted in cartwheeling across the beach, blissfully ignoring the shocking flash of her white panties, digging a bicycle out of the mud, and eventually trying to row a stolen boat to another island, is at one and the same time the only who really got away and the one who anchors the rest to the island.

The writing is lush and often self-consciously lyrical. Entering it is like wading into a warm sea of words that gently lap at you till you’re floating on them. Still, there’s something slight about it that makes me hesitate to recommend it to people – I found myself reluctant to reread it in the course of writing this review, and I’m not sure why that is. Hughes is a writer of promise, but that promise is yet to be fulfilled. Perhaps it's that his characters recount the events of their past, but don't seem to have processed them that makes this morally - ethically - psychologically - an ultimately unsatisfying read. Hughes is working on already well-trodden ground. That means the bar's set a little higher in terms of characterization, since hundreds of authors have already explored the same themes.

A native of the Welsh Island of Ynys Môn (Anglesey) and Atikokan, Ontario, Tristan Hughes will be appearing at the 2008 Vancouver Writers' Festival on October 24 as part of the Flights of Fancy event with Andrew Davidson and Elizabeth Knox, and at the Sunday brunch hosted by CBC's Sheryl MacKay (North by Northwest).

Embedding video isn't as easy as it seems, apparently

I'm preparing a seminar tentatively titled Social Media for Luddites (Luddites being some of my favourite folk, of course). It's such a vast and burgeoning field, and unless you really want to be at your computer 24/7, it's hard to really get in deep with all of the amazing software enablers. Erm, perhaps that's 'applications.' I was surprised to see myself described as an 'alpha' flickr user, but had to admit that I do log on to flickr everday, I regularly post photos (when I can download them from a camera, anyway), and I do participate in groups. I've kept my contact list on flickr deliberately small, and the number of groups in which I participate is very limited, although I do respond to invites from groups that ask me to post one of my photos. Perhaps the most heartwarming experience I've had on flickr was an email I got about a year after I posted photos I'd taken (and tagged) at Vancouver's Mountain View Cemetery. A man from the UK emailed to say I'd helped him track down a long-lost relative for the family genealogy they'd compiled - they'd known he'd emigrated to Canada but didn't know where he'd ended up.

Anyway, as part of my research and seminar prep, I'm delving a little more deeply into LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook, and as usual, the Lee LeFever videos are a good place to start. Here's the one CommonCraft has prepared on Twitter, as posted on YouTube.