Some might argue this book is about Internet entrepreneurs or morality or globalization, but the colophon -- "Copyright 2002, Andrew Pyper Enterprises Inc." -- most accurately foreshadows the dominant subtext of The Trade Mission: the business of fiction. The bottom line influences The Trade Mission to such a degree -- and at the expense of art and craft -- that it's necessary to analyze the book accordingly.
Careful investors had some inkling of trouble long before his Queen West book launch, however, given Pyper's failure to report earnings on The Trade Mission. His "literary thriller" Lost Girls, was a blockbuster -- film rights purchased, a positive nod in the New York Times, an Arthur Ellis Award -- that converted Pyper into a Celebrity Author. It earned Pyper a $500,000 advance from HarperCollins/Dell (God bless you Anne McDermid, super agent) whereas The Trade Mission significantly underperformed. How do we know this? Because neither McDermid nor Pyper leaked The Trade Mission spreadsheet to the press, while McDermid stopped short only at skywriting the half-million sum. (What this annual report omits is Kiss Me, Pyper's first collection of short fiction, initially published by Porcupine's Quill, which earned him nearly nothing, yet is better than both novels combined.)
Sadly, an APE Inc. factory does not yet exist. Eventually, monkeys in $1,000 eyeglasses and gin-soaked black turtlenecks will slouch in their Aeron chairs, pausing to filch drags off Stuyvesants between paragraphs. For now, APE is a one-chimp operation, which means Andrew Pyper shareholders -- or, if you prefer the more colloquial term, readers -- have no one to blame but the bossman for this unsatisfying trip into the heart of darkness.
While The Trade Mission might not take "psychological suspense to an almost unbearable new level" as the book jacket promises, incertitude is provided through questions such as: Is it possible for a literary stylist to mind his language within the "thriller" genre? Does the resultant "genrature" highlight the best or worst tendencies of each form? And most importantly: Is Andrew Pyper still a literary writer?
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When an author produces a bad book, it is the reader, not the writer who is tortured. And by no small coincidence, the middle portion of this novel revolves around the systematic infliction of pain upon its main characters. They are Jonathon Bates and Marcus Wallace, two dot-com wonderkids who go to Brazil to pitch their new website, with an entourage of investors and a Portuguese translator named Crossman (who is also the narrator). The first "gotcha" moment is announced in the clean, declarative style that is the Pyper trademark: "We see our first blood two days later." At the risk of neutering some of the "unbearable" psychological suspense, the computer klatch does not see blood, but instead guarana, a syrupy fruit drink splashed on marble tile.
The horror, the horror!
Despite enduring such a messy trauma, the group manages to embark on an eco-tour up the Amazon and are soon captured by pirates and then, well, who really cares what happens next? Suffice to say, The Trade Mission is "a narrative patchwork that, when sewn together, resembles something close to a whole." Here I am not quoting from one of the unfavourable book reviews The Trade Mission received, but Crossman, explaining how interpreting language is like constructing chronology.
I overlook plot because it is the "literary" portion of this literary thriller that concerns me, since Pyper has genuine talent in this regard, as Kiss Me proved. But something went wrong between his first collection of short stories and his debut novel -- if there is such a thing as Patient Zero, then there can also be a Sentence Zero. And it is this: "I'm uncomfortably aware of my buttocks squishing and slipping against each other like mating seals." That is courtesy of Lost Girls, and if you enjoy such soft-core linguistic pornography, it's time to reconsider your CN&Q subscription. The Trade Mission provides the feminized metaphorical equivalent: "Even her breasts are businesslike, thumping up and down inside her T-shirt like a pair of fists bringing a point home on the boardroom table."
The mating seals passage inspired Philip Marchand to write that "Pyper's sense of metaphor is uncertain" in his Toronto Star review, before concluding "These and other imperfections indicate Lost Girls was a couple drafts short of being ready for publication." We are flashed the aforementioned breasts early in The Trade Mission and things do not improve. Pyper is mastering the art of temporary vividness, a synaptic flash that rapidly decays because his imagery is too flat and thin: "Illness comes and goes like some unwelcome waiter, laying down steaming plates of nastiness, then clearing them away just as quickly." This kind of language is second-rate Douglas Coupland, were such a thing possible, making The Trade Mission a collection of fleeting literary pleasures that deserve to be imprinted on rice paper to best reflect their worth and permanence. Here are his thoughts on deadly fish:
Soon all of us are jerking demon dentures into the hull, where they clack uselessly against each other. As it turns out, piranha aren't as frightening as all those matinee horror movies and National Geographic pictorials had us led to believe. They are nothing more than dime-store novelty items. Sardines dressed up as Halloween vampires.
Demon dentures? Dime-store novelty items? Sardines dressed up as Halloween vampires? This vaudeville schmaltz suggests Pyper has neither the time nor the inclination to agonize over his word choice.
If the entire book read like a dime-store detective novel, then at least his consistency would be a virtue. What is so frustrating is that Pyper is still capable of crisp, memorable sentences such as this: "Each step is like moving into suckerpunches of stink: burnt machine oil, caramelized shit, gasoline."
Not only is the language foul, but a lack of economy has crept into APE Inc. In Lost Girls, old coffee is described as having "islands of turquoise mold floating on its surface" while in The Trade Mission, it is conjured as "tectonic plates of mold sliding into each other to form new continents on the brackish surface." The former is a tidy eight words, the latter twice as long and half as effective.
A moratorium on punctuation metaphors also would have improved this novel. This is not a crime unique to Pyper -- numerous other writers seem convinced that finding descriptive inspiration requires glancing only so far as the keyboard beneath their fingertips. In The Trade Mission we get "the curled question mark his body makes lying on its side" and "Barry rolls into the long grass poking up next to the fire pit, squeezes himself up into a tight comma." This bad habit first appeared in Kiss Me, in the story, "The Author Shows a Little Kindness" with "curled close to each other in the shape of two semi-colons under the sheet" and continued in Lost Girls, with "her spine a slippery semi-colon under the cheap lingerie."
Speaking of which, one wonders if Pyper has replaced the "S" key of his typewriter with a dollar sign. The ending of The Trade Mission is pure Hollywood and throughout the novel one senses a desperate attempt to attract the attention of film producers. A key scene late in the novel comes replete with its own signature soundtrack moment (Neil Young's "Heart of Gold"), akin to a Charlie Kaufman script. Most telling, movie and TV metaphors are present throughout, making the job of the hypothetical screenwriter that much easier:
Are these metaphors appropriate? There is an argument to be made that such descriptions are signature flourishes of CanLit young turks like Russell Smith, Lynn Coady and Kevin Chong, who boldly dare to insert Pop Culture into their writing as they try and save us from our stodgy, bleak, rural selves. The mediated perspective of characters like Wallace and Bates might also be meant to touch upon the imaginative paucity of their twenty-something generation (both are twenty-four years-old). As Crossman says of Wallace, "All of America is in him. Every slasher flick, pool party blow job, microwavable snack product and skipped class. Unprincipled but proud, rich in trivia but poorly read, viciously easygoing."
It is reasonable that two shallow young men might reach for the language of cinema, just as 9/11 descriptions of the WTC drew parallels to Hollywood blockbusters. But Wallace and Bates are not the narrators. That job title belongs to Crossman. And she is a thirty-eight-year-old with a Ph.D. in economic history. So we are justified in expecting a more age-appropriate voice. Except, here and throughout the novel, Crossman consistently disappoints us, because she is a non-entity devoid of ambition -- this by her own admission. Lost Girls crackled in places because the narrator, a despicable mildew stain named Bartholomew Crane, charmed us despite -- and because of -- his faults. Pyper, who has been called to the bar but has never practiced, somehow managed to tunnel into the mind and nostrils of a Toronto lawyer and cocaine addict.
But Crossman has no drug addiction, no terrible past, no joie de vivre -- nothing interesting to redeem her. The best scene in The Trade Mission occurs when the boys visit a whorehouse in Manaus. It's a success because Crossman isn't there to witness it, instead reconstructing the event from their stories told afterwards.
Most often, Crossman serves as the literary equivalent of a silent movie title card. Early in the novel we are given this: "I stand at the back of the room and hold them there for as long as I can. We all do. A last look at how things are, before they turn into whatever comes next." With only a brush and a bucket of green paint, Pyper could have turned Crossman into a chalkboard and simply jotted plot points directly upon her, such as he does here:
What happens now?
A lot happens now.
There is no order to it, but it doesn't collide together all at once, either. It simply arrives.
Gunshots.
As a narrator, Crossman is ultimately too conscious of her role to foster a sense of willing disbelief. A page after the gunshots, Pyper has Crossman think it "curious how someone could be conjuring these words in the midst of all this terrible activity." It is curious, yes, but not credible.
* * *
Kiss Me was published in 1996. The 2,000 or so people who bought and read that collection of short stories drew tremendous pleasure from the experience. The remaining 30 million or so Canadians remained ignorant of Pyper and his literary charms.
Lost Girls was released to hype commensurate with its massive advance. It is safe to say that those who enjoyed Kiss Me were disappointed with Lost Girls. But 350,000 other readers worldwide were taken in by Pyper's "genrature" -- a mix of thriller pacing and flashes of the literary. It isn't difficult to see what sort of audience Pyper wanted to cater to next time out.
The Trade Mission, however, moves Pyper squarely into genre fiction. It is now the bedrock of his brand. After The Trade Mission, the triumph of Kiss Me becomes a dismissible anomaly. But Pyper does not want us to forget he is capable of "pure fiction." Which is why we continue to see his work in obscure journals like Taddle Creek ("The Rat," Christmas 2002). Street cred is the subcultural term that best conveys the intent of such bursts of literature in brief.
But if Pyper is to remain in the fiction business, he should make writing well his primary action item. His decision to write thrillers is a financial decision that is beginning to erode his aesthetic abilities and considerations. "Accident," his short story in the 2002 Toronto Life fiction issue, felt forced. Marchand, discussing The Trade Mission in his Best of 2002 column (we all makes mistakes), notes that "Pyper's prose often seems a bit strained, as if you can see the verbs and adjectives sweat, with an effect that sometimes borders on the precious."
Literary tension normally refers to the narrative engine that powers a work of fiction. In this instance it reflects Pyper's struggles between honing his craft and lining his bank account. He seems to think he can do both. The effort required to meld these contradictory desires is becoming evident, however. He could afford to write another collection of literary, as opposed to commercial, short stories -- even, God forbid, a Literary Novel. If things continue apace, he can't afford not to.