Prairiefire
A Canadian Magazine of New Writing
Summer 2006
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Front and Center Magazine
Reprinted from Issue #14
Toy Gun
By Dennis E. Bolen
Anvil Press, p. 336, $26.00
Review by Philip David Alexander
Picture this: You work a dirty and difficult job on Vancouver’s mean streets. Your boss Myra is a by-the-book woman who watches you like a hawk. Your caseload includes a crackhead security guard who is still pulling robberies and thinks he’s got you fooled, a repeat offender hooker and the damaged son of a criminal who was once under your watch. This is the world of Barry Delta, parole officer and protagonist in Dennis E. Bolen’s third Delta instalment Toy Gun. The first two Delta books were Stupid Crimes and Krekshuns. Both offered up engaging plots and were peopled with vivid characters. Delta himself was (and is) tough, philosophical, cunning and surprisingly, vulnerable. Bolen really mines the inner workings of Delta in this story. In the process, he delivers a two-fisted character study that puts the reader right on the damp and gloomy streets that Delta trudges.
Delta still dodges people who would like to see him dead and there is definitely plenty of action and chiselled, almost hardboiled, prose:
“Barry parked on an eastside street so iffy he wondered if he would ever see the government car again. In this particular block he had once heard gunshots in the middle of the day. Down the street the stripped hulk of a not so old SUV rusted on bare rims. Hookers stood on opposing curbs. Pugilistic men with shaved heads patrolled in cars with blacked-out windows. Asian gangsters dined for free in terrified noodle houses.”
But to call Toy Gun a crime or procedural novel would be to sell the whole work short. Toy Gun is about a man who clashes with the people he needs most and bends over backwards to offer the often undeserving reprobates on his caseload a second kick at the can. In Delta, Bolen gives us a man who is filled with both compassion and dedication for all that his job entails, with anger and confusion for the fallout that has poisoned his personal life.
One of the chains Delta carries is his womanizing. Consider this excerpt where Barry Delta is pondering an argument he’s just had with his wife Tanya:
“ … for a moment the intimacy of their struggle moved Barry, brought him closer to Tanya, yet the iniquitous presence of others in the room – known by him, hidden from Tanya – scorched him like acid. Sitting with them were all of his female friends … He was nauseated and wallowing, a swimmer in refuse with no chance of rescue and years gone by without a clean breath.”
Toy Gun is filled with powerful moments that add up to knowing Delta so well you can’t help but hang on, white knuckled, to see if he works it all out. This shadowing character study, with its beautifully rendered moments between Delta and his wives and lovers, might put the reader in mind of Denis Johnson but the overarching theme of a hard man pursuing a fleeting redemption, attempting to bust out of an emotional jail he helped create, is pure James Elroy. And when it comes to novels filled with criminality and complex characters, I can't think of a higher compliment. On a sad note, Toy Gun is reportedly the last of the Barry Delta trilogy. Let’s hope Bolen has second thoughts and decides for at least a quintet.
Source: http://www.ardentdreams.com/blackbilepress/frontandcentrereviews.html
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British Journal of Canadian Studies
1999; vol 14; Pt. 1; pp. 147-148
Dennis E. Bolen, Gas Tank & Other Stories (Vancouver: Anvil Press Publishers, 1998), 186pp. Paper. $14.95.ISBN 1-895636-15-9.
Brutality, death and moral vacuums are the stuff of Dennis Bolen’s new collection of short stories and novellas. Bolen’s reputation to date rests largely on his ability to represent the underside of contemporary society with gritty, unflinching accuracy. Gas Tank & Other Stories will confirm this distinctive Bolen territory with its blend of understated grotesquerie and a social realist’s concern for human lives blighted by neglect, indifference and exploitation. Each piece in the collection focuses on the individual's capacity to absorb threat and damage—physical, psychological, emotional—and still endure. But Bolen also shows how human capacity for resilience and survival is much darker and more ambivalent than our cultural myths of heroic suffering suggest. Most of the men—and it is noticeably men, not women—who are the focus of his imaginative dissections are hurt by circumstances they cannot control: a motorcycle accident, a childhood of neglect and sexual abuse, the insane demands of officer in the Great War, soul-numbing manual labour. Often against the odds, the protagonists somehow cope with the capricious brutality of twentieth-century life, but the transformations which they undergo as a result are disturbing. The central character of ‘The Fatality’ recovers from his motor accident, but when his brain damage increasingly impedes his capacity to integrate with others, he commits suicide to the shock of the adolescent narrator, and the callous knowingness of his father. Richard, the private in the impressive First World War novella ‘Fight’ survives the 'familiar hell' of trench warfare, but only by becoming a savage, crazed, killing-machine, a skilled choreographer of ‘an artful blood-ballet’. Jerry, the thoughtful peacemaker and supportive colleague on the assembly-line in ‘Workers’, deals with the psychological frustrations of his limiting job through sadistic sex and physical attacks on his wife.
In the end it is violence which is the resonant theme of Bolen's collection. Everything—and nothing—provokes it: international conflict, personal disappointment, abusive treatment, boredom. And in ‘Gas Tank’ and ‘Toba Inlet’ a frenzy to destroy, to align oneself with acts of bizarre annihilation is represented as an inexplicable, irrational, but irresistible impulse. Bolen's down-to-earth and clinically spare style works well in constructing a world where there are few ideals or comforting myths to sustain the spirit. ‘Workers’, with its self-consciously poetic rhythms and coined diction, vaguely reminiscent of later Joyce, seems more strained in its attempt to foreground crude colloquialisms and mean-spirited attitudes—the verbal and mental equivalents of the physical brutishness highlighted in other stories. Nonetheless the overall effect of the
collection is powerful. Bolen's vision of the contemporary world makes uncomfortable reading. For many, violence is an occasional aberration or an unattractive feature of the more squalid sections of society but, in Bolen's landscape, everyone experiences violence of some kind as a tool of control and in turn logically embraces it as a means of self-assertion against indignity and alienation. Gas Tank reinterprets our world as one dangerously but inevitably consumed by ‘concentrated rage’ and a fervour to do damage.
Maureen Moran
Brunel University
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