{"id":11880,"date":"2020-10-18T09:59:35","date_gmt":"2020-10-18T08:59:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=11880"},"modified":"2020-10-18T10:08:35","modified_gmt":"2020-10-18T09:08:35","slug":"ed-seaward-fair-reviewed-by-phoebe-walker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=11880","title":{"rendered":"Ed Seaward | <em><strong>Fair<\/em><\/strong> | reviewed by Phoebe Walker"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Ed Seaward |\u00a0<em>Fair<\/em> | The Porcupine&#8217;s Quill<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p class=\"western\"><span style=\"font-family: Arial, serif;\"><img decoding=\"async\" style=\"margin-right: 10px;\" src=\"https:\/\/i.postimg.cc\/HsrBYxFS\/9780889844315-RH.jpg\" width=\"220\" align=\"left\" \/> <i>Fair<\/i><\/span><span style=\"font-family: Arial, serif;\">, the first published novel from Canadian author Ed Seaward, offers the reader a warped pilgrimage into the underbelly of Los Angeles, trailing in the footsteps of lost soul, Eyan, as he flies low under the uneasy influences of pint-pot street tyrant Paul, and a wandering, dishevelled scholar, known simply as \u2018the professor\u2019.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"western\"><span style=\"font-family: Arial, serif;\">Eyan\u2019s magic cloak of social invisibilities\u2014solitary, homeless, jobless\u2014ostensibly makes him an ideal flaneur in the City of Angels\u2019 sinister reverse face. His Los Angeles manages to feel at once limitless and claustrophobic: he meanders through sticky days and danger-filled nights at his own helpless pace. His way markers are usually the people he encounters, or counts on encountering: the coffee vendor on the boardwalk; the friendly waitress at a local diner. His own personal history is revealed in short, painful showings: his complete tooth lessness, at the age of twenty, is explained by a bout of violence from one of his mother\u2019s boyfriends; we learn that his mother and sister abandoned him, as a teenager, after he chanced upon them performing a joint act of prostitution. The one protective figure in his early life, Larry, another of his mother\u2019s boyfriends, also disappeared early on: \u201cEyan always knew Larry was not long for Mother\u201d. <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"western\"><span style=\"font-family: Arial, serif;\">The professor\u2014half father-figure, half spirit guide\u2014and Eyan are brought together by Eyan\u2019s childhood friend Marc, who himself lapses into street living, fuelled by substance abuse, for a time, before being spirited off by his family to \u2018the clinic\u2019. Despite his own street lifestyle, the professor is, somehow, mysteriously solvent: \u201cThe myth of the professor and his money: hidden somewhere and, from time to time, the professor leaves, walks and retrieves a little of the money, then returns\u201d. Things settle into a cautious routine as Eyan and the professor become accustomed to one another\u2019s company. The symbolism and structure of Milton\u2019s <\/span><span style=\"font-family: Arial, serif;\"><i>Paradise Lost<\/i><\/span><span style=\"font-family: Arial, serif;\">, which the professor begins to read to Eyan, loom large throughout the narrative, which pointedly \u201cstarts in the middle\u201d. The professor pontificates; Eyan makes desultory notes: <\/span><span style=\"font-family: Arial, serif;\"><i>Omnipotent<\/i><\/span><span style=\"font-family: Arial, serif;\">, <\/span><span style=\"font-family: Arial, serif;\"><i>Adamantine<\/i><\/span><span style=\"font-family: Arial, serif;\">,<\/span><span style=\"font-family: Arial, serif;\"><i> Darkness visible<\/i><\/span><span style=\"font-family: Arial, serif;\">, as he\u2019s told, approvingly, \u201cyou do not have the worst vice, the vice of over thinking.\u201d The professor, on the other hand, lives up to the stereotype of his name, spouting gobbets of history alongside his parsing of the poem: \u201cA hippodrome was an ancient Greek race track where they held chariot races, like the Roman Circus\u201d [\u2026] \u201cShould I tell you of Messalina, Eyan? Maybe not. What need do you have to know of the wife of Claudius?\u201d [\u2026] \u201cIn the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries [\u2026] great battles soaked red the fields of England, and men caused death with broadswords and longbows\u201d. <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"western\"><span style=\"font-family: Arial, serif;\">Speech, particularly when the professor is around, always seems to take on this slightly convoluted register: Marc says \u201cMy friend has not been to the sea in so long that we declared a need for a pilgrimage and here we are with you.\u201d Ponderously, the professor answers: \u201cOr perhaps it is a quest [\u2026] A quest for the boy of whom Marc forever speaks.\u201d Marc appears again to jumpstart the plot by introducing small-time crook Paul\u2014another old classmate\u2014who, under threat of violence, co-opts Eyan as a drug mule. Peripatetic and often invisible, Eyan has his uses, trudging obediently about the city on this new business, delivering parcels of drugs to one of Paul\u2019s small army of droogs, \u201cthe brackish boys\u201d. Between drops, he returns to the professor: they eat hamburgers at a friendly diner; they rest in the heat of Skid Row, alongside most of the city\u2019s homeless population; they continue\u00a0 through Milton\u2019s verse. Eyan ultimately begins drawing parallels between the poem\u2019s fiery chasms, and his own personal and literal landscapes, peopled by demons and lost souls.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"western\"><span style=\"font-family: Arial, serif;\">Throughout all of this, we veer between a limited and an omniscient third-person perspective. Eyan\u2019s own thoughts, once they\u2019re loosened from the professor\u2019s cerebral posturings, are pointedly uncomplicated. Encountering two women, \u201cEyan wonders if they will be allowed to ride the Ferris wheel or the carousel or if they are too fat. Maybe they don\u2019t want to ride those rides though. Maybe they want to eat red candy apples and blue candy floss\u201d.\u00a0<\/span><span style=\"font-family: Arial, serif;\">If the intent is to emphasise Eyan\u2019s almost total effacement by the wicked streets, the result is almost too effective: even in this slight novel, as its central character he\u2019s often subsumed by the wandering plot. Although he guides the narrative, his character can sometimes read as resistant to interiority. We swirl in the slow current of his thoughts, \u201ca timeless sack of memories\u201d, which return repeatedly to the same points of safety\u2014Larry\u2019s easy kindness; sitting with Marc after school, watching cartoons. We don\u2019t penetrate much further, and if this is a device meant to convey Eyan\u2019s cultivated detachment, his larger, protective recoil from any attempt to understand him, or to harm him, it also has a perhaps unintended effect of muting our impulse to care about him. That would be a clever indictment of the reader, a textual mirroring of the same trap of societal indifference to which Eyan falls victim. <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"western\"><span style=\"font-family: Arial, serif;\">The tone of the writing seems to aim at a kind of sparseness, a poetic distillation of the language into one elegant register. Though as Eyan wanders again between Skid Row and the Boardwalk, as we\u2019re confronted repeatedly with Paul and his cronies, as Eyan\u2019s dulled thoughts shade into the professor\u2019s florid monologues, the effect is occasionally more monotonous than incantatory. The book\u2019s ultimate messages are in some ways straightforward, with Eyan a symbol of all the harmless individuals who slip through the cracks of a shamefully uncaring society. But the conclusions about who, or what is to blame for this are less clear\u2014if there are indictments, they feel personal rather than structural. <em>Fair<\/em> ultimately leaves its readers to mull over the formidable Miltonian parallels around sin, fall, and redemption, and draw their own conclusions.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>by Phoebe Walker<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ed Seaward |\u00a0Fair | The Porcupine&#8217;s Quill &nbsp; Fair, the first published novel from Canadian author Ed Seaward, offers the reader a warped pilgrimage into the underbelly of Los Angeles, trailing in the footsteps of lost soul, Eyan, as he flies low under the uneasy influences of pint-pot street tyrant Paul, and a wandering, dishevelled [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v20.2.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Ed Seaward | Fair | reviewed by Phoebe Walker - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=11880\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Ed Seaward | Fair | reviewed by Phoebe Walker - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Ed Seaward |\u00a0Fair | The Porcupine&#8217;s Quill &nbsp; 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