You see that copy of The Innocent Traveller lying discarded on your bedroom floor, forgotten from only months ago? Pick it up and dust off that cover. It’s a neat little package, not too short and not too long. An adequate length and weighing in at roughly 245 pages, the timeline of which covers roughly 100 years, correct? Absolutely. Amazing, isn’t it, to think that that entire century fits neatly into 245 pages? An entire lifetime in fewer than 300 pages. Neato. And yet, what is even more amazing is that in these 245 pages and span of roughly 100 years… Nothing happens. This book was so painful to try and get through I can with safely place it alongside Andy Warhol’s movie Empire as to how exceedingly thrilling this book was. For those that haven’t endured it, Empire is a continuous shot of the Empire State Building at dusk, which clocks in at roughly EIGHT HOURS in length (I’ll give everyone the SparkNotes version: nothing happens). Hopefully that paints a clear enough picture.
What’s more, this novel is so clinical and detached when it comes to human emotion, as if this nothing just sucks the life force out of it. It makes me wonder if perhaps James Lipton left Inside the Actor’s Studio for vacation and wrote this novel for poots and giggles. Even the most “insignificant” death in this novel should cause any character to have some, even remote change in emotion… No matter how increasingly vapid they may be. Yet Topaz, our alleged protagonist and heroine, shows nothing. Instead she is resolved to only being happy and positive, and sickeningly juvenile. It even seems as she over-stepped the perspective of not wanting to grow-up, and actually resolutely denied herself the ability actually to grow-up (and we all know where the last person who “never wanted to grow-up” ended up. Neverland… Ranch). If such lack of emotion is supposed to pull off an air of comedy due to the original, uptight Victorian setting… It fails. Even Eugene Ionesco brought humour to the dry, disturbing formality of Victorian Brits. However Ethel Wilson’s The Innocent Traveller just falls flat and stays there. So, forgive me if I’m not rushing to grab the defibrillator, but some things are just meant to be.
Furthermore, in response to Prof. Ogden’s comment in lecture that ran something along the lines of: Ethel Wilson is god and she gives eternal life with the written word. So, Mrs. Wilson is deciding to play god, eh? And she is deciding to give something eternal life… I think by this point this sounds all too familiar to the reader by now. What happens when someone decides to play god and bring back to life something that really should just stay dead and buried? Well, for one it usually turns out that what this “creator” once thought was something special to share with the world turns out to be really not that great, the “chaotician” is a giant douche the whole time and then the dinosaurs eat EVERYONE! (“Ethel, our lives are in your hands and you’ve got butterfingers?!”) The only thing is that I don’t see anyone clamouring to make an amusement park ride called “The Glorious Non-Adventures of Topaz Edgeworth.”
Once again, it seems the nothing has struck to destroy what could have been a thoroughly enjoying read. First the nothing destroys Fantasia and now it has decided to prey on poor, innocent Canadian literature?! Inconceivable!… And yet, I feel no remorse for seeing this particular book be ravaged by the nothing. Is that cynical? Yeah, probably.
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