The Best Laid Plans rides the political high and low roads
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) has an annual competition called Canada Reads. In today’s pop culture world, with all its inane offerings, the public broadcaster’s annual battle of the books is a refreshingly smart oddball. It’s format: each of five celebrities chooses his or her favourite Canadian book, defends it against fellow panelists over five weeks and one title is voted out each episode until one remains, the book that all of Canada should read.
This year marked the 15th annual competition and the winner on the theme of “starting over” was Lawrence Hill’s The Illegal. He also won in 2009 for The Book of Negroes.
In the pantheon of winners and other nominees, the competition offers readers a great variety of quality fictional works from which to stock their libraries and fill their imaginative worlds. Books like Joseph Boyden’s The Orenda, the 2014 winner about a Jesuit missionary, a Huron elder and gifted young Iroquois girl in early Canada, and Miriam Toews’s A Complicated Kindness in 2006, which told of teenage Mennonite Nomi Nickel’s dream about New York City.
It’s a quality stack of formidable titles. Among those winners was Terry Fallis’s comic first novel, The Best Laid Plans.
The Canada Reads 2011 winner and recipient of the Stephen Leacock Award of Humour is notable almost as much for the story behind the story as the book itself.
Fallis, tired of waiting for a literary agent or publisher to take on his book, recorded a reading of his novel then released it in chapters as a podcast. His story grew in popularity and he decided to publish the book on his own.
Then he won the Leacock award and the rest was/is history. The story was even spun off as a TV series starring Jonas Chernick as Daniel Addison, the disillusioned political staffer in the office of Liberal Opposition Leader George Quimby (Mark McKinney), and his handpicked unlikely candidate for office, Angus McClintock (Kenneth Welsh).
That TV series and those awards breathed new life, and sales, into the book and convinced me to pick up a copy from the shelves at my Windsor Public Library branch. I wanted to read what all the hype was about.
The title and epigraph — from the Robert Burns’ poem To a Mouse— sets up one of the main themes of the book, as related by Muriel Parkinson, an old grand dame of Canadian politics and perennial Liberal loser in election campaigns. She goes back to the days of Prime Minister Mackenzie King, whom she worked for, and tells young Daniel that before the young King “lost himself in the occult” he
“used to say ‘if you’ve really done absolutely everything you can and you still come up short, fate will smile on good people.’ He called it King’s axiom. That’s what accounted for his serenity in the face of such daunting challenges.”
That sense of fate, of the best laid plans of mice and men, returns when Daniel recruits the unwilling and unconventional Angus to accept the Liberal nomination in the federal riding of Cumberland-Prescott. His main opponent is the wildly popular Conservative candidate who is also the finance minister. The Scottish physics professor and curmudgeon, reminiscent of Robertson Davies, agrees to run in exchange for Daniel taking on his English for Engineers course at the university, a thankless task which the latter compares to “force-feeding ballroom dancing to sumo wrestlers.” Daniel also stipulates Angus’s other demands, a decidedly unconventional laundry list in politics even in these days of Donald Trump:
“He would make no campaign appearances.
“He would do no media interviews.
“He would do no door-to-door canvassing.
“He would attend no all-candidates meetings, debates, information sessions, coffee parties, or individual voter meetings.
“He would take no phone calls from anyone other than me.
“There would be no Angus McLintock lawn signs.
“There would be no Angus McLintock campaign Web site, blog, or podcasts.
“There would be no Angus McLintock campaign song (I just threw this in as a freebie to soften him up. I had no plans for a campaign song, anyway — just good, old-fashioned shrewd bargaining).
“He would have no contact with the campaign workers (either of them).
“Finally, he would not even be required to be in the country, let alone in the riding, throughout the campaign.”
Angus does relent on one point: “We could produce one inane pamphlet for soft-drops.”
Well, fate plays out its fickle hand as the tale unfolds and we are treated to some strange happenings: sex in the halls of Parliament, a melon-throwing melee, a hovercraft, chessboard matches, political shenanigans and some S&M that gets played out on live TV.
It’s a tale well-told, although I found the many sarcastic observations of Daniel wearing as I neared the end.
Fallis is adept at introducing another major thematic element in The Best Laid Plans: the Ottawa River.
We’re first introduced to this waterscape when we join Daniel and Muriel in her home, Riverfront Seniors’ Residence. It’s a constant presence in the book and we realize its importance in the climax of the novel.
There’s one particular fine description of the river late in the book as Daniel sits in Angus’s living room
“enjoying the morning and the shards of sunlight scattered across the Ottawa River. The view from the front window peaked twice each clear day — once in the morning as the sun levitated over the eastern horizon, and again at dusk when it sunk beyond the shoreline to the west. It was not the actual sunrise or sunset that struck me but, rather, the very incandescence of the light playing on the water. Just as no two snowflakes were identical, the sun’s river dance was never the same. Each wave, among millions, was unique.”
Fallis also does a good job of showing the personal, softer side of Angus as revealed in letters he writes to his recently departed wife. The letters end most of the chapters and portray the formidable old Scot in romantic, vulnerable tones although its first entry 29 pages into the book is presented without explanation; it takes a few chapters before the reader catches on.
The Best Laid Plans, despite its popularity and success on the awards circuit in Canada, is not quite as polished a work as the other Canada Reads winners. It may not go down in history as a Canadian classic, comic or otherwise. It may even be literary proof of King’s axiom, although I know nothing of the author other than what his bio tell me: Fallis studied engineering, got involved in politics in university, worked for the Liberals in both Ottawa and at the provincial level in Toronto, and ran a public relations firm for more than 25 years.
But The Best Laid Plans is a fine romp of a debut novel and in Angus McLintock Fallis has given Canadians — especially political junkies — someone to remember. He tells it like it is and the results are sometimes quite funny.
Near the end of the book, Daniel advises Angus that he “must rise above the juvenile tactics of protestors and stay on the high road.” Angus responds:
“Dinnae be givin’ me any bollocks about the high road! That’s my song. Yer in my glen now. It’s not whether you take the high road or the low road that counts. It’s how you conduct yourself, whichever road you’re runnin’, that’ll dictate who reaches Scotland first.”
There’s nothing funny about that simple truism.
