Book Review

By Derryll White

Lauchlan, Mike and Jerry Auld (2015). A Jazz Guide to Banff… and the Universe.

This is a collaborative novel, two authors attempting to create one unifying voice – Ravi Singh. They are careful to blend the supernatural with the real, emotion with nature, greed and envy with humbleness. The language is upbeat, a blend of artistic-insular with muscular-mountain, much like Banff itself. And the authors are successful in obtaining one unified voice in the collaboration.

I am a huge fan of the comedic ‘Big Bang Theory’ so almost right away I am enjoying this book. It does have a jazz beat to it, a sense of jamming and mixing the flow of ideas, morphing the language, the beat of a Raven’s wing.

I always thought that the large orange bridge crossing Kootenay Lake just north of Nelson was the centre of the cosmic universe. A Zen Rōshi told me there were seven lines of cosmic force converging there. The authors, however, are convinced the cosmic centre is in Banff. I do hang out with a scientific/artistic/soulful lady who uses Banff as the centring point of her world. Hmmmm! Things to consider.

There are times when I balk, when the text jars me and makes me mad with its impudence. “Even stories have memories,” the authors say. I would say that story is memory. Even the extemporaneous ones draw on the past, as do the authors with their many references to myth and religious texts (perhaps the same thing?).

They merge physics and math with music, posing that math brings “a visual form, to music’s audible beauty.” In the text universes flow in a myriad of possibilities, with parallel constructs recognized. Weird – a little – but also challenging and exciting and echoing as a text within the known confines of the Bow River Valley. For Ravi Life is a daily jam session. Just how big is our universe? Only the Japanese butterfly knows, flapping her wings in the hurricane.

I think the authors lose the jazz when they get too deep into science. It’s fun, but it is also cold in the presumption that all can be known, charted and described. When a person has wonderful, gratifying sex with a treasured and respected partner, a fusion is created larger than the act and more cosmic than the parts. For me there is an indescribable sense of moving outside myself and into an other – not merely physically but emotionally, metally, elementally. There is no science – there is only the eradication of everything except the merging of souls, hearts, like minds. That is the “Big Bang” I can understand. And right there, the authors can stick science where the sun don’t shine. “Our math, Ravi’ our math has to stay physical.”

In the end boy gets girl and the universe gets renewed. Really, it’s all about the journey anyway. And no question, “A Jazz Guide…” does take the reader on a trip. I enjoyed it and would suggest it to thinking, analytical readers.

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Excerpts from the text:

THE GUIDE BOOK – “Ravi,” she said softly, ‘it’s not an intuitive concept but everything you see and touch is only information manifested, merely data that is processed and interpreted by your brain. That information is like a map, a guide book, so to speak. And all of this information, up and down, back and forth, yesterday and today, can be described in just two dimensions. Just like the mountains here can be accurately represented on a flat map, for example.”

UNIVERSAL MYSTERIES – …Tyde and I arranged to meet for a dawn patrol, as she called it. Tyde is convinced that the underbelly of the world is exposed at that hour; if anything interesting goes down it would go down then. Big things begin, starting small and discrete, at the crack of the day.

ATTITUDE – It was a joke at first – keep your edge – that has become normal.

BANFF – To me these peaks never look the same. Each morning that I step out and see them I stop, examining them. Have they moved? Of course not but something has: the clouds, the sun, the light, the snow. It’s these big heaps of compressed stone, ripped out of the earth, that are my muses – just because they have so many facets. They aren’t your Calgary skyscrapers, whose shot at grandeur is to simplify construction down to the angles of a perfectly cut gem. Nope, this is the chaos of nature. It’s like looking at the stars and trying to grab at the infinity of the universe.

SCIENCE – “All based on sound math, he contends. Black holes absorb all light – everything – into themselves, but we still know that they’re there. The information that describes them isn’t absorbed, it just sits on the black hole’s surface like an unread book. But we can know about it. That information is like a detailed inventory of where, when, and what is inside that gravitational death pit. The rest is extrapolation, I guiess: what’s good for the black hole.

PLACE – More than that, this place is my sheet music. Its landmarks and locations dictate the form, its rhythm, repeats, codas, its head, and its bridges. For me, Banff, is a chart well practiced and familiar. Every pass brings greater understanding of the form, and an increasingly effortless performance.

WHAT SCARES ME ABOUT SCIENCE – “The sum total of human lives is information, Ravi,” he explained. “In the end we’re all nothing but discrete bundles, huge organized collections of data, petabytes of it, describing position, direction, intersection, construction, inclination and predilection. We’re dynamic. logical objects, stored in the vast holographic surface of our perception. We’re tossed in sequence into the mix along with the trillions and trillions of other similar bundles of information.”

– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them.  When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org

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