Stage Business by Gerry Fostaty

Canadian writer Gerry Fostaty’s first novel is a delight from start to finish. Fostaty takes up the eminently reasonable but hitherto underused concept that the acting profession is excellent training for undercover police work. An acting troupe improvises their way through street theatre of the life-and-death variety, using their acting experience, stage props, and street smarts to outwit a drug gang that has kidnapped the son of a friend.

What makes the novel especially engaging is its essentially amateur nature and its proximity to the lives we lead now. The details of searching for teens through internet web links are intriguing: Twitter feeds, Facebook profiles and the tendency to geotag locations could ultimately unravel our most ambitious plans. Easily available online data is something the police, ramped up as they are for bigger fry, are unlikely to use. They would go at the problem with more force, but less cunning.

The “bad boy” nature of the kidnapped teen is all too familiar. Son of a Parliament member on the verge of reelection, he acts out his resentment at his lack of parental attention by involving himself in illegal drugs, which means the police are not welcome participants in the search. Our leading man, Michael, begins a half-hearted and desultory web search for information about the kidnapped boy to ingratiate himself with an attractive actress in his troupe. That initial foray actually yields clues which eventually turn the hunt for the missing boy into a major production.

The willing suspension of disbelief is critical in stage productions, and likewise with this wonderful series. This is street theatre of the best sort. Set during the Fall election and theatre season in Toronto, this art is close to home in all ways. Check out this very cool and arty trailer for the book below. Highly recommended for a completely refreshing change of pace.



You can buy this book here: Tweet

Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands by Judith Schalansky

Dip into this lovely small atlas anywhere and enjoy the fruits of Schalansky’s many years’ labor cataloging, mapping, labeling “Fifty Islands I Have Not Visited and Never Will.” The drawings have a timeline and scale; they are labelled with longitude and latitude and are pinpointed on a globe. Each drawn island has contour with shading showing mountains, water, and plains. Each location sports a short introductory essay often including reports related by the earliest discoverers, or seafaring men who came upon these remote locations and told of what they found. The flyleaves show the islands pinpointed all together. A masterpiece of careful description, this wallet of dreams is something special for the sailor in all of us.

Consider this short essay about Pagan, a Pacific island 2,670 km from Manila and 840 km from Iwo Jima, discovered in 1669 by Diego Luis de Sanvitores:

The tallest mountain range in the world is underwater – where the Pacific plate converges with the Philippine plate in the Marianas Trench, several kilometres deep – and its smoking volcano cones rise out of the ocean.
Pagan is a double island of two of these volcanoes held together by a land mass. At its narrowest point, it is only a few hundred metres wide.

The village of Shomushon lies at the foot of Mount Pagan in the north. Its people want to be evacuated because smoke has been rising from the summit for some time, and there have been earthquakes. But no one takes any notice. They say the volcano is not dangerous.

On 15 May 1981, it erupts, spewing fire, hurling rocks and shooting fountains of lava into the air. The sky turns black; it rains ash and smells of sulphur and burning earth. The raised huts in Shomushon shake, and a flood of lava spread though the palm trees. Soon the first crackle of fire in the village is heard. The mayor sends a message by short-wave radio - This is it! Come get us! – before the sixty villagers flee, crossing the narrow neck of land to the south. They take refuge behind a mountain ridge and pray to be spared from the glowing river.

When they are evacuated by air shortly after, only the rooftops of Shomushon can be seen above the layer of brown ash. On Pagan, there are now 20 million tonnes of tuff stone, the material of the Colosseum, the Pantheon and the Baths of Caracalla.

I am offering a giveaway of this paperback to a reader of this blog. Sign up below and I will use random.org to choose a respondent December 15, 2014. Happy holidays!

A winner has been chosen! Thank you everyone!


You can buy this book here: Tweet