In the fictional town of Wilhelm, there is a police station that looks like a church. Look too closely, and the metaphors begin to slip out at the sides. Is the author saying that the police are uncritically revered, or that Christianity is becoming more muscular? That eminent domain has gone too far?\u00a0<\/p>\n
If I had to guess, I would choose a simpler message: that there is beauty even amid brutal things. Eddy Boudel Tan\u2019s \u201cThe Tiger and the Cosmonaut\u201d tells<\/a> the story of Casper, a Chinese-Canadian man raised on the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia, who returns home when his father unexpectedly goes missing. Casper confronts the racism he faced in childhood while rediscovering the strange, enduring beauty of his forested hometown. The novel oscillates between mystery writing, slice-of-life literary fiction, and a thinly veiled critique of Canadian racial politics.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Tiger and the Cosmonaut\u201d takes place against a larger backdrop of anti-Asian discrimination in British Columbia. In the 1880s, about 6,500 Chinese workers were hired<\/a> to construct the western sections of the Canadian Pacific Railway, marking one of the first waves of Asian migration to Canada. They were paid<\/a> between 40 and 70 percent of the wages of their white counterparts and were often made to work<\/a> on dangerous terrain without adequate safety equipment.<\/p>\n Discrimination was not limited to the workplace. Several municipal governments in British Columbia forced<\/a> Chinese families to live in different neighborhoods, and some graveyards even segregated<\/a> the dead. Anti-Asian hostility came to a head<\/a> in 1907, when white rioters smashed windows and destroyed entire businesses in Vancouver\u2019s Chinatown and Japantown. This history sits behind Tan\u2019s account of present-day Asian erasure and fear.<\/p>\n In \u201cThe Tiger and the Cosmonaut,\u201d it is the Chinese-Canadians \u2014 a group often depicted as deferential in popular media \u2014 who act out viciously against a stifling white majority. Casper is quiet and mild-mannered in the first few chapters, but grows progressively more frustrated with the way he is treated. \u201cYou\u2019ve followed the rules your whole damn life,\u201d Casper\u2019s older brother says to him at the book\u2019s climax. \u201cHow\u2019s that working out for you?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Casper breaks things and watches things get broken, but the novel\u2019s violence often has a softer edge. When buildings burn down, they \u201cburn bolder and ever more luminous, a magnificent sight.\u201d When Casper\u2019s relationship with his boyfriend grows strained by political disagreement, they lie \u201cstiff and straight\u201d in bed, but the moonlight still \u201cescapes around the edges of the closed curtain, softening the darkness.\u201d Even the Wilhelm town jail is tiled with marble. Almost nothing is entirely ugly or brutal.\u00a0<\/p>\n – Advertisement –<\/p>\n Tan\u2019s prose is often heavy-handed. The novel manages to combine a dizzying array of social issues \u2014 police brutality, homophobia, migration trauma, sexual extortion, and even teen pregnancy \u2014 without getting deep into any individual experience. Occasionally, the symbolism is garish. Casper\u2019s family has a decaying, half-built observatory in their backyard, ostensibly representing their decaying, half-built family. The book ends with the family reconciling and reconstructing the observatory in a painfully SparkNotes-friendly literary device.\u00a0<\/p>\n Even the most beautiful passages are punctuated by the protagonist\u2019s strangely academic internal monologue. Tan\u2019s narrator uses words like \u201cfetishize\u201d and \u201cqueer male desirability\u201d to talk casually about his own life. He relays well-trodden political messages with obtrusive clarity. \u201cHe\u2019ll never comprehend the indignity of having to play the role of the good, quiet, obedient outsider,\u201d Casper complains, referring to his white boyfriend.\u00a0<\/p>\n I don\u2019t think these messages are wrong, or that it is unrealistic to have so many political injustices crop up in one family. Most people have a lot of problems brewing in their lives at once. Plenty of these problems are political. The difficulty, I think, is that academic language tends to sterilize fiction. It takes the reader outside of the text and into a more analytical frame of mind. It makes the characters less convincing because most of us don\u2019t relate to our lives through social theory. It\u2019s like when the Wiggles performed<\/a> a song about social distancing \u2014 the politics are just a little on the nose.\u00a0<\/p>\n It is perhaps because of this sterility that the moments of dramatic tension land so vividly. A couple decades before the novel begins, Casper\u2019s twin brother, Sam, goes missing. The later chapters of the book are dominated by a good old-fashioned mystery: Where did Sam go? And why isn\u2019t anybody talking about it?\u00a0<\/p>\n The story is just on the cusp of realism. There are no goblins here, but there are charming coincidences and eerie imagery. Sam disappeared on the night of the Whistler Festival, a Halloween-like holiday that the residents of Wilhelm celebrate each year. The woods of Wilhelm are foreboding; the tree trunks have begun splitting, \u201ctheir insides spilling outward in tumours sticky with sap.\u201d In moments when the book\u2019s self-conscious politics become most difficult to tolerate, its strange scenery is a great source of delight.<\/p>\n It is difficult to write politically in the 21st century because each word seems to carry more weight than it did before. Most conservatives would no longer say that something is \u201cproblematic.\u201d Most liberals would no longer talk about \u201cfamily values.\u201d There seems to be a shrinking vocabulary through which to express political conviction without partisan baggage. This problem is clearest in journalism and academia, but it infiltrates fiction too.\u00a0<\/p>\n – Advertisement –<\/p>\n The best parts of \u201cThe Tiger and the Cosmonaut\u201d are when the narrator doesn\u2019t know what to do with himself. Casper grasps for his thoughts, \u201cbut they keep slipping through the cracks like eels in a broken basket.\u201d It is in these moments of uncertainty that I find Tan\u2019s protagonist most legible and most human.\u00a0<\/p>\n Sometimes it takes an imperfect novel to clarify what a better one might look like. My hope for fiction is not that it becomes less political, but that it becomes less precise \u2014 that authors capture the haziness of experience rather than the sharp clarity of opinion. Most of us, after all, are ambivalent creatures.<\/p>\n – Advertisement –<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the fictional town of Wilhelm, there is a police station that looks like a church. 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