Remy Rougeau

When I read The Award Winner Pornographer's Review of The Heart Is Decietful Above All Things, I knew I'd been reading the wrong sorts of books. I was all into the subtle, quiet stuff. Novels that began and ended on someone's back porch, or took place entirely in small, foliageated rural New England cranberry counties. Fuck that, I thought. I needed some fucking hardcore. I needed books with pre-teen whores, asses being ripped apart like a junkie's soul and meth doctors with chemically melted faces. Plots like razor cocks; that's the stuff.

So what do I do?

I go and find the most intestine stretching, tongue gagging visceral land mine of a book the Wolf Road Borders carries. A book so seamily powerful, you can smell it's characters' collective stank as you pick it off the shelf. A book with monks on the cover - and nothing but monks on the inside.

All We Know Of Heaven, Remy Rougeau's first solo novel (I think), is all about Canadian monks; one Canadian monk in particular - Paul Sanschel (referred to mostly as Brother Antoine). Any speedballing or butt rape is pretty well concealed in the imagery of chanting, chores and forest lined meadows. If it is in there though, it's possible it's hidden by the episodic nature of the action. All We Know opens with 19 year old Paul being vaguely but powerfully dissatisfied with the world; then he's taking initial vows at St.Norbert's; then he's dealing with another monk's death; then he's attracted to another monk (not the monk that died, another one); then the cops come to the monastery - and on and on for two hundred pages. All in all, All We Know is a stitching together of half a dozen incidents that lead to something more or less resembling a final spiritual thesis.

That thesis is pretty obvious, and pretty self-helpy sounding. Essentially, Rougeau says that spirituality's a confusing, slippery thing and that as spiritual beings, we've got to be content with imperfection and irresolution and find holiness in one another. So Rogeau's not an above average theologian, but his eye for character, especially subtly odd and desperate character, is great.

As the main character, Paul keeps the reader strapped into the narrative and moving through it, but what the reader is gawking at is the supporting cast. The lineup of odd hermit types - so thoroughly maladjusted to the outside world, and even more so to their cloistered corner of it - is the loudest part of a book where monastic silence is the rule. The bitter monk, the pyromaniac monk, the grouchy monk and the angry monk - all betray a kind of common, warped development that confuses piety and immaturity, silence and stupidity. Ultimately, and most skillfully, the captivating side-monks aren't just gimmicks - Rougeau integrates them as anchors the book's final construction.

The final episode, in which the monks of St.Norbert's are forced to abandon their monastery for a more modern one, is decent but for Rougeau's introduction of a totally uncalled for subplot involving art treasures and a mysterious French priest in the last six pages. Luckily, this isn't a novel you read so you can get to the last six pages.