reviewed by the Judge
Not about Batman at all
This book saved my life. Well, maybe not my life, but it did save one insomniac hour which I would otherwise (probably) have spent on my laptop watching How I Met Your Mother, and which I ended up consuming in the grips of a rather unusual thriller narrative.
That this should be a genre story, and one written in a format that is not its own (poetry, not the novel) is pretty much the pitch of Charles Ardai’s book, The Good Neighbor Policy. It is subtitled ‘A Double-Cross in Double Dactyls’, and at this stage all I could think of was Two-Face from the Batman reciting Tennyson (I digress).
It’s a comedic mystery story in verse, and pretty rigorous formal verse, so it certainly has a voice of its own.
So what’s the book like? Well, it’s a comedic mystery story in verse, and pretty rigorous formal verse at that, so it certainly has a voice of its own. The plot concerns the investigations of a Deputy Coroner into a shooting after it has been reported to him by the octogenarian Perseus Algernon (a duplicitous name in and of itself, seen how it invokes Classical mythology and science-fiction… the Two-Face scenario seems more and more realistic). The tone is light and the verse sets a humorous tone from the outset:
Captain Mahoney investigates homicide, covers a county in Eastern P.A. Murders are rarer than births in the Vatican – captain goes fly fishing many a day.
I’m not going to spoil the ending of course (though I can tell you that Algernon doesn’t get killed by Batman in an attempt to save Commissioner Gordon’s kid… have you ever wondered why he doesn’t use the Batarang at that point? Ok, I digress again), but on the whole the story flows quite nicely and it can be read in one pleasant hour, if that. It’s both funny and musical, and from this point of view the chapbook is clearly a success. My favourite thing about Ardai is his plastic use of adjectives:
Melanie wanted his cooperation so aphrodisiacally gained his support; Ungeriatrically they became lovers, and he became Melanie’s witness in court.
Possibly the only thing that occasionally breaks the rhythm are a couple of clunks in the dactylic metre, kind of like when you read Shakespeare and you’ve got to imagine there’s a stress on a syllable that you normally wouldn’t stress for your life (‘Father, I have been receiVEDDD at court’). I can’t blame Ardai for this – dactyls are extremely challenging to sustain for an extended poem and barring miracles (yes yes I know, THE RAVEN!!!) they are best suited to lyric than narrative verse.
I think this points to the major issue – or at least incongruity – within this chapbook. The form just doesn’t seem to fit the story. In spite of Ardai’s talent for musical humour, the mystery tale seems too conventional not to work better in the traditional form of the novel. Likewise the language and themes don’t have the kind of density and depth that calls for the use of verse, though I’m still a bit puzzled by this little reference:
Adrian hands her the flowers for Algernon. She takes them graciously, as if by rote.
For anyone who doesn’t know, Flowers for Algernon is a pretty famous sci-fi novel by Daniel Keyes. The sudden wink by the author left me wondering whether the rest of the poem might not be sprent with intertextual objects along the same lines. I spent ages, at least ten minutes, trying to figure out why the character’s first name is ‘Perseus’ (he doesn’t cut off the heads of monsters, doesn’t ride a winged horse, doesn’t fight giant scorpions, so what’s the deal with him?). If there are any more clever references, however, they were lost on this critic. I’m open to the possibility of there being allusions to works in the crime genre, which I would have missed as I don’t read them (it’s only the Iliad for me, *humph*… and How I Met Your Mother when I have the time), but in general I think Ardai’s language looks simple because it is simple.
Ultimately The Good Neighbor Policy does not make for good poetry policy, despite being a good book in and of itself. Writing the whole thing in dactyls must have cost Ardai a great deal of work (and it’s still not perfect), one that is not commensurate to the simple story that he is trying to tell. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, at least not as long as the results are funny and readable. I guess there’s nothing wrong with making things difficult for yourself. Batman does it all the time (why didn’t he use that Batarang?).
