Prof seeks romance (and tenure) in Paris

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This article was published 24/06/2017 (3350 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In this new novel by Manitoba-born, Quebec-based Byron Rempel, Anna Hill is fascinated by the history of romance while craving a romance of her own. As an assistant professor of medieval history at McGill University in Montreal, she is not quite 40 and hoping for tenure.

Anna goes to Paris, ostensibly for a conference, but she intends to connect with a young Frenchman named Christophe, who is her idea of the romantic lover she craves. That plan doesn’t go well, but she will not give up.

Byron Rempel is the author of a previous novel, True Detective, and a memoir, Truth is Naked, All Others Pay Cash. His new novel, which has all the nutty twists of a farce, offers a variety of characters in promising situations, but it is difficult to warm up to Anna, likely because the prose is often too ornate.

Two other characters — Anna’s neighbour Jackson (Zap) Zaporzan and Julia, a Harlequin romance editor — steal the show from Christophe and Anna. Zap has a way of showing up at critical moments, sometimes to help Anna with house problems — such as a broken window or snow on the roof — and sometimes, it seems, to protect her.

Christophe is an arrogant prof whose view of students is that they are “tendrils of hormone and moan” and that “the university would be vastly improved without them.”

Academia is nicely satirized, as in the names of four journals devoted to Anna’s field: Journal of Medieval Torture and Academic Suicide, Journal of Medieval Nitpickers, Journal of Medieval Fluffery and the Journal of Medieval Whosits, where she hopes to send her article, Slut-Shaming in Post-Intentional Phenominology.

Upon arrival in Paris, she hauls her suitcase off the luggage carousel “with no gallant offers to help. She would have refused anyway. She had to open the suitcase right there to get a pair of shoes, and would not want strange men to catch sight of any flimsy underwear, or what she believed was an even flimsier research paper.”

Steeped as she is in the history of romance, Anna starts writing a novel set in 10th-century Spain about a nun falling for a Moor.

Since she sees herself as the nun and Christophe as the Moor, she weaves her own experiences into her book, sections of which are presented in The Bodice Ripper. She’s convinced that historical romance is easy to write; it needs “little more than a few upswept capes, a horse and some vague past.”

Some of her escapades — a ski trip that goes awry, getting stuck in a window, making an appearance at her aunt’s funeral — show a distinctly un-academic Anna.

To describe heavy snow falling in Montreal, Rempel writes: “Now the opera arrived on the wings of snow sirens from the arctic. They sang for her, the tow trucks and plows under the street lamps at dawn. Chorus with tuques low and scarves high. Nordic burqas. The arias of spinning tires on ice, the crescendo of cars rocking forward, backward, searching for traction. They invaded her dreams until she woke to find her scenery frozen, its corners rounded and its colours erased by monotone white.”

Such prose, while picturesque, blurs the action. Sometimes it is difficult to understand what is really going on, bringing to mind veteran editor Richard Cohen’s dictum: “Simple, clear prose is not the only way to write, but it is the best.”

Dave Williamson is a Winnipeg novelist and founder of the Creative Communications program at Red River College.