John Metcalf (1) (1938–)

Two novellas and two shorter works comprise The Museum at the End of the World, which features John Metcalf’s erudite, beleaguered and occasionally inebriated alter-ego Robert Forde, who last appeared in the novella Forde Abroad. It’s nice to see Forde still casting a jaundiced eye upon a world that mystifies, disappoints and occasionally offends. “Medals and Prizes” covers Forde’s entire life: his formative years as a jazz-smitten teenager growing up in 1950s England, his college years and his decision to emigrate, his first teaching job in Montreal, and his later life as an elder statesman of Canadian letters being awarded the Order of Canada. In “Ceazar Salad,” Forde is smarting from a hostile review of his recent novel. Venturing out of the house to do some errands, he encounters more that drives him to distraction, beginning with an epidemic of ungrammatical signage that nobody else seems to notice or care about. In “The Lives of the Poets,” Forde is committed to a long-term sentence as Writer-in-Residence at the University of New Brunswick, where once again there is much to try his patience. And the title story finds Forde and his wife Sheila on a bus tour of the Black Sea and environs, where Forde, ever alert to the world’s absurdities, amuses himself by observing the squalid state of everything around him and remarking playfully upon the eccentric behaviour of his fellow travelers. The comedy is boisterous, the humour drawn in broad strokes. But the stories also display an endearing wistfulness, reminding us that Robert Forde, despite the grievances and railing and howling into the void, is a thinking, feeling human being. The Museum at the End of the World, coming to us late in the author’s career, is a gift for which we can be grateful and provides confirmation that Robert Forde and John Metcalf have not mellowed one bit.… (altro)