Anakana Schofield’s BINA

If you’ve come all this way here to listen to me, you life will undoubtedly get worse. I’m hear to warn you, not to reassure you.

So says Bina, the narrator of Anakana Schofield’s 2019 novel BINA: A NOVEL IN WARNINGS. I’m a big fan of Anakana Schofield from way back, since her debut MALARKEY and follow up MARTIN JOHN. Her championing brought Helen Potrebenko’s TAXI! to my attention, and I still hold that it’s THE essential Vancouver novel. Read it!

Like Schofield’s other novels, BINA’s flashiest feature is its voice. It speaks directly to you with Bina’s urgency and exasperation. It draws you in and holds you close. Bina has a lot to say.

Among a lot of other things, BINA is also a crime novel, at least as much as, say, Jen Sookfong Lee’s THE CONJOINED was a crime novel (and it was, slightly, discussed as such). You hear people complain sometimes that literary novels (and BINA is first and foremost a literary novel) don’t have a plot or don’t flow or are hard. BINA has a plot, Bina has flow, and BINA is challenging but not hard. It doesn’t spoonfeed you, it demands participation, engagement from the reader, but you don’t need George Saunders over your shoulder telling you what’s going on.

I had this idea, earlier in the year, that we should make 2025 THE YEAR OF BINA. We should all read it, we should all talk about it, we should celebrate Schofield and encourage her to keep writing (I have no doubt she has kept writing). If you’ve ever seen my closets, you’ll know I’m not an organizer, so this is as far as I got with that great idea.

Let me know if you’ve read it, let’s keep talking about it. Have you read BINA and TAXI!?

SMILEY HAPPY PEOPLE

I remember seeing Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy around a lot when I was a kid, reading every Hardy Boys novel and Star Wars comic I could find. This, I knew, was an adult book, something very different from the cheap, gimmicky kids stuff I gobbled up. It intimidated the shit out of me.

I still haven’t read it. But I have read four earlier John Le Carre books that feature, at least slightly, George Smiley. And they don’t disappoint but also are mostly made of the same stuff as the kids stuff. Two big differences are pace and perspective. Which are arguably the best things about these novels. I’ve been reading 90s reissues that have introductions by JLC himself, and they are great in themselves.

Call for the Dead and A Murder of Quality are basically Agatha Christie type whodunnits with postwar malaise, but then The Spy Who Came In From The Cold pushes out into a less formulaic thriller, it’s almost like a Manchette novel. And then The Looking Glass War completely subverts the expectations of a spy thriller. They’re all tremendous fun, if depressingly relevant, and I’m looking forward to what’s next: THE KARLA TRILOGY. Then, maybe, I’ll watch the Alec Guiness series.

Manchette/Tardi

comics

Every time I visit the Carnegie Library I see it. An oversized collection of Jean-Patrick Manchette and Jacques Tardi collaborations: STREETS OF PARIS, STREETS OF MURDER. Finally, I bring it home. It doesn’t fit in my backpack, I’m carrying it in a tote, worried I’ll forget it on the train if I fall asleep. It’s too big, too raunchy to read on public transit.

Five pages into the first story, deeply noir private eye riff “Griffu,” it’s starting to feel like a chore, wading through these genre tropes. But by the end of the volume’s second feature, “West Coast Blues,” I wish there were a thousand more volumes. I could read this forever.

It’s been a while since I’ve read Manchette, but I think that’s how it usually goes. He lays it on thick at the start, and his characters are, with few exceptions, so unpleasant, but he keeps digging and he takes you places with these common ideas that are exciting and fresh, even fifty years on. Filtered through Tardi’s cartooning, the riffs become even more irreverent, but there’s an elegance added too, particularly in Tardi’s framing and composition.

Thanks for reading! See you next time.