Product Description

With section titles like `e-mails to the coast', `Accelerator', `Decelerator', and `Postscript: Three Teachers', the narrator of The Syllabus -- M -- digresses, fantasizes, catalogues and invents, slowly recovering the strands of childhood exploration and adolescent obsession, joy and morbidity, that have led him to both alienation and freedom. First friend, first love, first sex, inklings of vocation: all of the elements of the Bildungsroman are here, but put in a high-speed blender that tracks the hallucinatory smears they leave on the mind. Using a collage-like technique that mixes times and genres — flashing forward and backward in a narrative that is, by turns, confessional, meditative, lyrical and comic — The Syllabus traces the crooked path by which one student makes his way through, and beyond, the proscribed syllabus.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1021456 in Books
• Published on: 2002-10-30
• Released on: 2002-10-15
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 216 pages

Amazon.ca
The syllabus, in the case of this fragmentary first novel set in Toronto, refers to the details of the narrator's educational and sexual life, "a memory tree ... endlessly branching into stems, leaves, roots." The view is perceptive, at times inventive, at times scattered, but always written with an energetic, refreshing rush of language. Many young writers have written about their schooldays, but seldom in such a grade by grade, teacher by teacher manner, and seldom with so much insight and humour. The characters the narrator summons from his past, both teachers and fellow students, are utterly familiar yet unique: Case, his young friend addicted to speed (in a go-cart, no less); Bull, the near-adult still in grade school who knows all about sex; Mrs. Ellroy, a high school friend's wanton mother; Miss Edwards, the prim piano teacher still living at home.

Barnes is particularly adept at finding the humour in painful situations, his decrepit Hyundai, for example: "I pour money into it. Cash it often excretes immediately." Regular education is soon followed by a syllabus of the narrator's sexual education, with a focus on his greatest love, Desina Van, whose "arranged" groom is about to arrive any day from India. Despite needless experimentalism in the first several chapters and a tedious description of building a bookcase near the end, this is an engaging novel about the travails of never growing up. --Mark Frutkin

Review
'This is a funny book. There are moments of pure childhood stupidity and ignorance that made me laugh out loud. Particularly hilarious is a moment when a boy in high school, determined to get back at the person who is stealing his lunch, carefully empties an Oh Henry chocolate bar of its "solid core of caramel" and refills it with lead shavings, cat excrement, litter and other awful things. He then seals the chocolate bar back up and delights in imagining the victim's response to the first bite: "One stupefied grunt when the taste cuts through the sugar, then bleats and yelps rising to a terrified crescendo, subsiding (very, very slowly) to the deep anguished lowing of a gored steer." ' -- Michelle Berry Globe and Mail

Review

`This is a funny book. There are moments of pure childhood stupidity and ignorance that made me laugh out loud. Particularly hilarious is a moment when a boy in high school, determined to get back at the person who is stealing his lunch, carefully empties an Oh Henry chocolate bar of its ``solid core of caramel'' and refills it with lead shavings, cat excrement, litter and other awful things. He then seals the chocolate bar back up and delights in imagining the victim's response to the first bite: ``One stupefied grunt when the taste cuts through the sugar, then bleats and yelps rising to a terrified crescendo, subsiding (very, very slowly) to the deep anguished lowing of a gored steer.'' '

Customer Reviews

Five-star writing in a three-star plot
True photographic memory is a rare gift, one all-too-often ascribed to first-person narrations of both fictional and autobiographical persuasions. To give Canadian author Mike Barnes credit, the narrator of his novel The Syllabus not only admits to the selective amnesia of his past, he revels in it.

Now, if only he had something interesting to say.

The Syllabus is Barnes's modern version of the epistolary novel, telling a story through a series of e-mails (rather than the traditional posted letters) sent from the anonymous narrator 'M' to his psychologist friend 'W'. W is designing a research project involving the mystery of memory, looking for "symmetries and asymmetries," and has asked M, a former classmate with a criminal record, to contribute his reminiscences to the project. Specifically, those memories involving school.

Despite discovering that "my first two years of school seem to have made absolutely no impression on me at all," M becomes a willing albeit skeptical subject. He begins piecing together fragments of his past, searching for the random ingredients that formed his adulthood, "like a skyscraper sitting on a foundation of air and a few thin, dangling cables."

The process is halting at first. As he illustrates in the lazy vernacular of e-mail, "mostly i'm aware of how much i've forgotten. the spaces where knowledge used to be. sometimes with bits of recognizable debris and rubble . . . sometimes just craters. holes that once had substance, meaning."

Hidden pathways to memories reveal themselves through his search, but he learns to distrust their accuracy, wary that they may be "stretches of time so blank, so bland, that adult memories must spice them to make them palatable, retroactively granting them the significance they must 'naturally' have had."

Despite the contemporary trappings of the email format, The Syllabus is a relentlessly conventional novel, a routine examination of personal growth from youth to maturity. M is a man terrorized by the outward haphazard nature of his past, striving for some semblance of meaning within the randomness of fate.

There are times when Barnes's obvious knack for writing overcomes the familiar terrain of the plot. A deceptively simple prose style, combined with a sometimes inspired gift for metaphor, captures the melancholy air of an adult realizing the twisted gloriousness of a child's life. There is true joy and sadness within the pages as M recalls his short time with Case, his first childhood friend who may eventually become a sociopath.

The fractional nature of memory is what drives the first half of the novel, the quest for meaning underneath childhood happenings. The cabalistic nature of elementary school, the adulation lauded to the obvious leaders of the classroom: Barnes paints these scenes with aplomb, crafting tiny portraits of time that adults obsessively replay in their minds.

As M passes through the years of recollection, his memories become more elaborate, illuminating his transitions through first love, first friend, first rebellions. Yet oddly, as M's story gains clarity, it slowly loses its potency. M's eventual move into adulthood, fraught with unspecified rebellion and sexual obsession, is unquestionably well-written, but somehow lacking in immediacy. In displaying more, Barnes removes the mystery, leaving a callow young man who cannot sustain either the reader's interest or empathy.

There is a promising talent on display inside the pages of The Syllabus. Barnes clearly has the ability to craft phrases that "plant their own pictures in the mind . . . like vine roots that appear to stop at a margin of white, but actually twine underground beyond it, out of sight." The mundane nature of M's story proves too powerful to resist, however, strangling the vine roots of Barnes's words, leaving them dying in the dirt.