Meaningful Mystery

    Ethical is a word that has legs in the new
millennium. We can buy green funds that promise
conscience salving, ethical investing. Ethical giving
encourages food bank donations as a replacement for
Christmas presents. Ethical eaters munch raw, real,
non-genetically modified food. And now, with his new
novel, "Coyote", Saltspring Island's Brian Brett
offers us an "ethical thriller."  
    American defense attorney Alan Dershowitz, who
defended O.J. Simpson, took credit for inventing the
genre during an 1999 interview about his book "Just
Revenge"in the online magazine,"Salon". "I'm gonna
write small novels and try to create a new genre- the
ethical thriller. Some books are plot-driven, some are
character-driven. Mine is ethical issue driven." 
    "Coyote" is one of those too. Simply put,it's a
mystery with meaning. Veteran readers of mysteries and
thrillers may find nirvana in this novel. Brett's
added some tantalizing ginger to their familiar cup of
tea.  
   "Coyote"'s action revolves around a
nineteen-seventies ecoterrorist called Coyote, who
blew up bridges,and liberated animals from testing
labs. He supposedly died in an attempt to wreck a
factory called ChemCity. Now it's 1993 and a man named
Brian has come to Artemis Island,an imaginary Gulf
Island, to find Coyote and write a book about him.
Brian's been tipped off by a lover that Charlie, an
old hippie, might be his man. 
    It's apparent Brian has problems of his own after
he finds Charlie, moves into his treehouse,and tries
to learn the truth about him. At the same time, a
major sub-plot is developing back in Vancouver that
has Corporal Kirsten Crosby and uptight RCMP Inspector
Janwar Singh looking for the killer of missing women.
Before long, Singh also ends up on Artemis, seeking a
herbal cure for an ailing stomach at the hands of
alternative healer Wren. 
    The novel is a page-turner. Brett suspensefully
converges story lines by moving Brian and Singh
through the Gulf Island of everyone's dreams. Brett
says Artemis Island is a cross between Hornby,
Texada,and Saltspring Islands with a bit of Pender
Island thrown in. His eccentric island characters are
funny, ring true, and people the novel with tales of
transformation and oddball living.  
    Just like on a "real" Gulf Island, much of the
populace of Artemis has fled lives of pain and
dissatisfaction to become the dancer, writer, potter
or healer within. Festus,son of the storekeeper at
Mecca, the center of Artemis civilization, is a friend
of Charlie's, able to fix anything, and suffering from
a genetic syndrome which ages him prematurely and may
cause his death by the age of twenty. Jake is an
island old-timer who insists that Singh finish off an
entire bottle of whiskey, telling him "Then drain your
glass and let's get down to business. I'm not the
cheap type that leaves a half-bottle on my table." 
    And then there's the Narrator.  
    Remember, in a Shakespeare play, when an old guy
stepped up and started talking, diverting your
attention, and giving you juicy tidbits about what was
going on? He was kind of annoying and kind of
intriguing. Sometimes he lied. He interrupted the
action, but he also made you stop and think. 
    In plays like Hamlet, Shakespeare may have drawn
upon what's been called a menippe satire. Menippus was
a Greek cynic and satirist who discussed serious
subjects in a spirit of raillery. A menippe drama is a
fiction with a multiple inner plot structure and a
special character, a narrator, who is like a proxy
author. In "Coyote", you might say ethical thriller
meets Menippus.  
    "Coyote"'s Narrator is a special character who
eggs us on through the novel's multiple plots while
discussing ethical issues which drive the characters,
from human experimentation on animals to the listing
of chromosomal syndromes recommended for abortion.
Brett says he wanted to portray the inner dialogues
that are part of life. "I wanted to capture the
feeling of being completely alive in your body." The
Narrator's a wild card with the power and freedom to
examine both human arrogance and frailty. For
instance, we humans can think we're more important
than rivers and rocks, but the Narrator introduces us
to the concept that we're nothing but slime. 
    "He told me about slime moulds. If you grow them
in a culture dish, they stick to themselves,
propagate, grow inwards while building tiny, nearly
invisible cities at first. When the miniature cities
become unwieldly, when the food is gone, and there are
too many cells, they explode, sending out spore
explorers in every direction, creating new cities,
until ultimately, they fill the culture dish, turning
it into one heroic metropolis, having consumed
everything, including themselves, as they fold up and
collapse inwards. "That's us," he said."  
    Brett based the character of Coyote on an
eco-saboteur called "The Fox", a school teacher who
engaged in a campaign of eco-sabotage against Chicago
area firms in the early seventies and has never been
caught or identified. Brett is an active
environmentalist who says he is against ecoterrorism
and the philosophy that the ends justify the means.
"All the monsters," he says, "think they're right."
Brett was bent about a blurb about him on his book's
back cover which says "He is an eco-terrorist like
Coyote, but his weapons are stories."  
    In "Coyote", Brett doesn't so much inflict bodily
harm as try to penetrate the heart of the matter. But
what the Narrator tells us about Festus, who Brett's
called "the mutant boy" only grazes the edges of a
story that is yet to come. Brett, like Festus, was
born with a rare genetic syndrome, which he'll talk
about more in his upcoming memoir, called "Uproar is
Your Only Music", to be published in May. As in
"Coyote", and his ground-breaking cd of "talking
songs","Night Directions for the Lost," which blends
music and poetry, "Uproar" crosses genres and is half
poems. He showed "Uproar" to his mother, since it will
lay bare family secrets and she understood that, as he
says, "I need to tell my tale." "In fact," he adds, "I
always try to write a book that my mother can read."  
    Brett also has a supportive writing community. He
is a well-known Canadian poet and literary figure who
had some input from friends like Margaret Atwood and
Sean Virgo during the process of writing "Coyote". But
the word "literary" often doesn't have legs, and it
would be a mistake to pigeonhole a talented genre
experimenter like Brett with it. "Coyote" isn't a
stock thriller, but it is an entertaining read. 
    Brett's poetic skills show in the book's clear,
evocative sentences,refined over the fourteen years it
took to complete it. There aren't long, slow, what
might be called "pretty" descriptive passages in
Coyote. Time-outs from the plot belong to the
Narrator, and Brett makes his voice engaging, bitter,
funny, but not preachy. In true thriller mode, the
ending is a shocker.  
   "Coyote" began as a seventy-five page essay on
ethics and the environment. But Brett decided to use
fiction to portray his ideas. That choice was a good
one. 

	Victoria Times Colonist
	Pat Burkette

Back to Coyote