Lisa Robertson’s erects ideas, while J. Edward Chamberlin never leaves the stables

I love idea books, and so my delight at seeing these two Canadian works land on an XPress desk was palpable. Idea books follow a particular thread from inception to conclusion, and try to trace the ripples it creates. I love to wade through rivers of detailed, delightful prose and think, Wow, so the Roman Empire actually crumbled because of poor celery harvests!

Lisa Robertson’s Occasional Work and Seven Walks From the Office of Soft Architecture is a compilation of themed essays and works probing the effects of architecture, surfaces and civic space. The most important thing to say about this work is simply how sensational it is. Robertson is a veteran poet whose writing displays a lifetime’s aggregate attention to craftsmanship and detail in language. Blessed also with the penetrating intelligence of a genuine philosophical thinker, she sublimates everyday things into ideas of beautiful complexity. But her language retains the powerful simplicity of poetry – not explaining but rather showing us the shapes of ideas and allowing us to grasp them independently. For example, a reflection on public space gives us: “Surfaces inflect our gestures. And vice versa. Each belief is an extension of a rhetorical space. Piety now tends towards a webbed abstraction of vastness.” It is a statement you can roll around for hours, like a jawbreaker. Fantastic.

Ironically, this strength is also the work’s only weakness. As with many that spend a lifetime thinking about poetry, Robertson, occasionally seduced by the romance of language, sacrifices the precision of ideas for explosive power. But this is a fault that one finds only in excellent writing and is forgiven when compared to the immense joy that happens when a real artist pays homage to art.

It was somewhat the opposite with J. Edward Chamberlin’s Horse: How the Horse Has Shaped Civilizations. Where Robertson’s essays are penetrating writing dressed as poetry, Horse is an idea book that often wants for insight. I was hoping for a powerful analysis about how the first proliferation of real energy (horse power, natch!) changed societies. But this book is written for a casual reader, not for a reader looking for the true penetration of ideas.

Horse: How the Horse Has Shaped Civilizations by J. Edward Chamberlin (Knopf Canada, 2006), 271 pp.

Horse purports to trace the effect of the domestication and breeding of horses in the spheres of war, economy and global culture. It does achieve this goal, but in a limited sense that feels haphazard and incomplete. His research and analysis doesn’t seem to go far enough to satisfy the curiosity his subject evokes, leaving the reader with the frustration that a much more interesting layer of analysis lies just beyond.

It is easy to see that Chamberlin has a genuine love of horses, and for anyone who shares in that affection this book will likely become infectious. Even a layperson like myself was affected by his obvious reverence for these noble beasts. But coupled with his lack of real intellection, this affection leads him to make abruptly grandiose statements, with little proof.

In describing how horses enabled societies to become migratory or exploratory, Chamberlin concludes that “more than paper and printing, more than the telephone and the television, more than radio and recording, and more than the Internet, the horse brought people together.” Whaaaa? That’s quite a statement (also, unless I’m mistaken, how I used to end essays in first-year university).

Though the author is a professor of literature at the University of Toronto, the book is written in a simple, surprisingly clumsy prose style that begins with a conspicuously bad piece of fiction. In trying to strike a balance between warm folksiness and the necessity of making academic statements, the interesting aspects of both are largely lost.

As appeared in the Ottawa XPress – Aug. 26, 2006
http://www.ottawaxpress.ca/books/books.aspx?iIDArticle=10118