Globe & Mail reviews Combat Camera

Oh, look — I have a blog. I’d almost forgotten, what with Christmas and all that kind of stuff. And what with the chore of resisting that post on how the gun lobby is its own worst enemy. Never blog about politics, I say.

Where was I? Oh, yes: the Globe & Mail, our esteemed national newspaper, has got around to reviewing Combat Camera. I guess they needed to hold something back to keep themselves busy in the cold, dark winter months. Anyway, the reviewer called it a “violent, funny, thought-provoking novel.”

Somerset – a one-time soldier and a freelance photographer – paints a convincing picture of Zane’s messed-up head: The reader follows as his mechanical eye scans a bleak, desolate Toronto, paying more attention to the lighting on people’s faces, their potential to become still images, than anything else. All that can puncture this barrier – his iron lens, as it were – are Zane’s horrifying war flashbacks.

Yet he maintains a consistent sense of humour – self-deprecating, gruff, curmudgeonly.

In the spirit of not commenting on one’s own reviews, not even the tripe written for the National Post by one Michel Basilieres, a man whose employment as a creative writing instructor despite his manifest inability to read bodes ill for Canadian writing, I’m not going to complain about the Hemingway thing. Inevitably, someone was going to make that comparison.