The Last Days of Lacuna Cabal

March 1, 2009
A heavily embroidered coming-of-age tale.

With its unstoppable word flow, footnotes, classical shadowing and dual narrators, Dixon's debut is an energetic, self-absorbed bag of tricks. Its preoccupation is a curious book group, the Lacuna Cabal Montreal Young Women's Book Club, which aims to live out, as far as possible, the story of the book under consideration. Currently it is meeting on the top floor of a disused warehouse owned by Anna, whose lover Dumuzi and his roommate Coby—who recently fell in love with book-group member Emmy—are co-opted into the group to help act out the book its members are currently"reading." The book is one of the world's earliest, the Epic of Gilgamesh, introduced in the form of ten stone tablets engraved with cuneiform lettering which Runner, another member, reads aloud in translation. When Runner dies suddenly, her younger brother Neil takes the tablets and stows away on a ship, unknowingly tracing Gilgamesh's steps to Bahrain. Also woven into the fitful story line are themes of sexuality (Anna is experimenting with prostitution), surrealism (Emmy is striped) and politics (it's 2003 and the Iraq war is under way), all adding to the sense that this diffuse first novel would benefit from greater focus and less indulgence.

Full of sound and fury, yet inconsequential.

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March 1, 2009
The Lacuna Cabal Montreal Women's Book Club has been meeting regularly since its members' McGill student days when a couple of them attended a reading of Michael Ondaatje's "In the Skin of the Lion". Since that time, although their selections have been the standard literary book club fare, their discussions have been anything but. They don't so much read the books as reenact them, going so far as to find appropriate settings for each. Their latest discovery is a book written in cuneiform on clay tablets, which turns out to be "The Epic of Gilgamesh". The narrative begin to go off the rails with the introduction of a fitzbot, a directional device that eventually leads the characters to Iraq, the original setting of the epic, where one of the members is eager to locate the "Baghdad blogger," whose postings she has been avidly following. Despite having many of the ingredients of a good book club readthe atmospheric Montreal setting, the casual name-dropping of popular Canadian books and authors, and the unusual cast of book club membersthis imaginative novel comes up a little short. For libraries catering to serious-minded book clubs.Barbara Love, Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont.

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