"I've come down with Faulkner's Disease," says John Moore, one of the West Coast's foremost book reviewers. "Margaret Laurence Fever, Hugh Hood's Herpes--call it what you will."

Although Moore is joking, he has nonetheless produced a trilogy of novels about West Coast life that carves out a fictional landscape of his own. As in its predecessors, The Blue Parrot and Three of a Kind, an unintentionally prophetic title that referred to card playing, Moore's third novel The Flea Market arises from rough North Vancouver haunts. Unlike the first two, however, it's narrated by a woman, Eve, and ex-model, pushing forty, who escapes her marriage to a successful Canadian sci-fi writer, sublets a heritage apartment in Kits, but can't bring herself to furnish it. When her high-end friend Laine takes her slumming at the flea markets to get some ideas, they get a lot more than they bargained for. Laine, who runs a talent agency, first appeared as the ex-wife of the "Bogardesque" narrator/bartender in Moore's second novel, The Blue Parrot. "Laine is a character we all love to hate--one of those Vancouver movers and shakers who go around chanting 'We're a world-class city' as if it was a mantra," Moore says. Eve gets involved with Laine's ex-husband, Buzz, and entangled with Laine's deaf 'n' dumb daughter, Lisa--who is now 14, beautiful and wants to be a writer. Several of Lisa's stories get worked into The Flea Market. Eve gets drawn further into the urban gypsy world of second-hand dealers. Try to imagine Balzac writing for The Beachcombers and you get some notion of Moore's mordant wit and his highly fallible characters.

Favourably reviewing the novel in Event Vol. 32, #2, fellow novelist Bill Schermbrucker concludes, "Using his Casablanca personas and themes as an entertaining device, Moore is addressing important moral issues: Eve's rejection of Laine's world is a revolutionary act. In both The Blue Parrot and The Flea Market, Moore is attacking image-making and other forms of materialistic deception and exploitation and asserting the solid human factors of caring and true craftsmanship."

CITY: Squamish, B.C.

DATE OF BIRTH: April 4, 1950

PLACE OF BIRTH: Vancouver, B.C.

EMPLOYMENT OTHER THAN WRITING: bartender, bar manager, deckhand, taxi driver, truck driver

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Rain City: Vancouver Essays (Anvil, 2019) $20 978-1-77214-139-9
The Flea Market (novel) Ekstasis Editions, 2003. 1-894800-28-1
Three of a Kind (novel) Ekstasis Editions, 2001
The Blue Parrot (novel) Ekstasis Editions, 1999
New Moon and Money (poems) Harbour Publishing, 1983

BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS: Full name, John William Moore. Freelance book reviewing for The Vancouver Sun for 15 yrs as well as long general interest features for the Sun's Mix section. Book columnist, wine reviewer, general features, (mostly male fashion & outdoors,) occasional news reportage for the North Shore News during the 1990s. Various magazine features. Educated erratically at Capilano College and U.B.C. Married (Mary), three children: Will, Joe and Patricia.

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Raincity: Vancouver Essays by John Moore
(Anvil Press $20)

Many students entering university these days have difficulty writing their own names. Penmanship, once taught in schools as a mandatory subject, is going the way of the dodo bird. The advent of computers has also wrought standardization of composition. Fewer authors have a distinct style.

All of which serves as an introduction to Squamish’s John Moore, an iconoclastic social critic whose meticulously contrived sentences and balloon-popping humour can make you laugh out loud and wonder why he’s not famous. Moore’s non-fiction articles wend their way unpredictably, more like stories. Always clever and frequently wise, he is an original stylist.
Or as he more deftly puts it: “Since I may be among the last generation of freelance journalists to enter the job like a rat coming up the toilet drain, instead of via college courses in media writing, they may have a small claim on history.”

A few other original stylists who immediately spring to mind in B.C. literature—if we discount Malcolm Lowry—are William Gibson, D.M. Fraser, Andrew Struthers and Ivan Coyote.

The subject matters in john moore’s long-in-fermentation anthology of non-fiction articles, Raincity: Vancouver Essays, include backyard bomb shelters (Cuban Missile Crisis), marbles (childhood variety), cribbage and crib boards, umbrellas, sports cars, backyard traplines (a satire on foodies called “Roadkill”), Whistler, tattoos, depression, a novelty pop song (“Sukiyaki”) and eco-tourism.

After the opener about childhood memories of post-WW II paranoia, the reader soon realizes that Moore is the sort of talent who could be given almost any topic and make a meal of it.
The best pieces are his most personal. Possibly editors dissuaded him from intimate disclosures over the decades; or else Moore simply viewed such candour as being not commercially viable. Either way, three accounts of Moore’s upbringing in the wilds of North Vancouver, back in the bad ol’ days when it was still the déclassé, poor cousin of West Vancouver, brilliantly evoke his anti-gentrification perspective.

“In West Vancouver in the 1960s, all teenage boys from North Vancouver were presumed to be ‘hoods’ unworthy of the affections of daughters educated at downtown private schools like York House and Crofton House—girls whose virtue, by reputation at least, was an item of parental barter as the recently affluent sought to marry into bigger or older money. Those social-climbing West Van parents were wise to be leery of us….”

The storyteller in Moore can’t resist veering into an imaginative description of a hoodlum’s exultant deflowering of a West Van debutante; having to dive out the window, leg it around the pool lights and into the shrubbery when the Caddy or Mercedes unexpectedly pulls into the garage, “savouring the thrill of a double violation.”

While Moore relishes his remembrances of Tom Sawyer-ish hijinks along his beloved Mosquito Creek (searching for and finding its headwaters) and he likes to hint at being the tough guy—posing a bit like an old school gumshoe for an author photo—he grew up on the safe edge of hooliganism rather than as a public nuisance. A tough guy would not write a paean to cribbage:

“It was an empowering rite of passage that earned you a seat at the big table with the adults, where there was no set bedtime and bowls of salty snacks. Peanuts and pretzels were not rationed as they were to kids watching cartoons on TV… I still love crib but it’s getting hard to find players among generations of people who grew up with Game Boys, Nintendo, X Boxes and Net-linked personal computers.”

His father was a firefighter; his mother was a housewife. They bought a house near the Capilano Suspension Bridge for $30,000. “We went feral faster than escaped ferrets,” he writes. Moore’s reverie for Mosquito Creek cuts the deepest, showing Moore is as much a fabulist storyteller as he is a trenchant essayist.

Then came Paradise Lost. “The abrupt escalation of property values snapped the saliva thread of oral transmission by which the bedrock values of a real neighborhood are conveyed,” Moore writes.

“By the mid-1980s, working class families could no longer afford to live where I grew up. Those who could were the kind of dual-income professional partnerships that surrender their children to nannies at birth, then to private schools and extracurricular regimes that take them out of the neighborhood; couples whose demanding careers let them spend very little time in their extensively renovated designer-decorated homes, yet who bitch that they don’t know their neighbours as an indictment of contemporary society over crème brûlée in some downtown bistro.”

Moore’s shrewd, often hilarious and sometimes mocking book reviews are excluded from Raincity. Perhaps if we lived in less-polite New York or more erudite London, someone would admire his wicked wit, sprinkled with deft crudities, and collect those reviews, too.
Meanwhile, Moore’s articles—including a brilliant takedown of Whistler—don’t really reflect Vancouver; instead they mostly reflect North Vancouver. Arguably the moniker Raincity doesn’t really fit and the term didn’t exist back in the rougher era that Moore mainly describes. Mosquito Creek and other Distractions?

Well, no matter. Even if nobody in the rest of Canada has noticed, there’s gotta be a few fervent and discriminating John Moore fans out there, people capable of delighting in Moore’s maverick intelligence and his sly, Mark Twain-like wit. 978-1-77214-139-9

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[BCBW 2019] "Fiction"