Sentenced to love

>> Will Jeffrey Moore's Prisoner in a Red Rose Chain ever escape?

by JULIET WATERS

The first time I read Romeo and Juliet, when I was a teenager, I discovered an extraordinary coincidence. Not only did I share Juliet's name, but according to a line spoken by her nurse, we also had the same birthday. I attached great significance to this. Clearly it meant that I was destined for transcendent love, or at least literary fame. Many, many years would pass before I could face the possibility that this might be nothing more than just a weird coincidence.

In psychiatric parlance, this delusion of destiny is called "magical thinking." Apparently it's a phase that persists until one feels powerful enough to risk making important life decisions on one's own. Judging from sales of the Celestine Prophecy, many people never outgrow it. To be honest, I still have vulnerable weeks where I prefer to leave my life decisions to Rob Brezsny. So sympathy is due to Jeremy Davenant, narrator of Prisoner in a Red Rose Chain.

He is driven by a strong belief that Shakespeare holds the key to the mystery of his destiny, a fantasy planted by Jeremy's mother's ex-boyfriend, Gerard. When Jeremy was young, Gerard put him though a coming of age ritual: blindfolded, he was told to pick a page in a book, rip it out and keep it with him always.

The page Jeremy chooses is from the S section of a literary dictionary. It gives information on Shakespeare, the sonnets, the Dark Lady, and also something about Shakuntala, a romantic heroine from Hindu mythology. Later in life when Jeremy is going through a time of crisis (his beautiful but boorish girlfriend has left him, and his fake academic credentials may soon be exposed) he fixates on this page and on a woman who seems to fit the role of his Dark Lady/Shakuntala.

He describes her in a poster, soon after she disappears the first time: "MILENA MODJESKA. TALL, JET-BLACK HAIR, DEEP TROUBLED EYES, LARGE DISDAINFUL MOUTH. LAST SEEN ON RUE VALJOIE WEARING WHITE T-SHIRT, TORN GREY VEST, FADED BLACK JODHPURS, BROWN BOOTS. REWARD."

Jeremy is convinced he is destined to marry Milena. This, despite the fact that she is a radical, frigid, slovenly feminist with no interest in marriage, and almost less in Jeremy. And despite Gerard's warning that "marriage is not a word but a sentence." And despite living in Montreal, a city with the lowest marriage rate in the Western World.

If New York is the city that never sleeps, then perhaps Montreal is the city that never commits. Whether it be in saying yes to the person we love, or in saying no to the country we're part of, Montrealers seem to have become addicted to a life of uncertainty. Which makes Prisoner in a Red Rose Chain a stunningly appropriate romantic comedy for its setting.

If Jeremy doesn't seem to have much of a gift for marriage, he certainly has a gift for sentences. The tale he narrates is literate and often hilarious, told with both wit and slapstick. Especially in its satire of academic life, it pulls off a complex but entertaining mixture of Umberto Eco, David Lodge and Jerry Seinfeld.

Favourite minor characters include Victor Toddley, a sensitive, idiotic "male studies" columnist for a Montreal weekly called Barbed Wire. And Jacques de Vauvenargues-Fezensac, a cynical failed academic who works as a theatre critic for the same paper. And of course Gerard, gambler, possible bigamist, a man of "epic dissipation" and a poignant Falstaff to Jeremy's Hal.

Author Jeffrey Moore (nominated for this year's QSPELL first book award) never entirely punctures the magic that keeps Jeremy precariously floating through life. And even though Jeremy does renounce his magical thinking, to the end the novel retains all the charming ambiguity and mystery of love. :

Prisoner in a Red Rose Chain by Jeffrey Moore, Thistledown Press, pb, 395pp, $21.95. Jeffrey Moore will be reading, along with other QSPELL nominees, at Chapters, Sunday, Nov. 28, 2pm