The Motorcyclist

by George Elliott Clarke

Just start your engine. Go. Carl Black is an intellectual and artist, a traveller, a reader and an unapologetic womanizer. A motorcyclist. He burns for the bohemian life, but is trapped in a railway porter’s prosaic—at times humiliating—existence. Taking place over one dramatic year in Halifax, Nova Scotia, The Motorcyclist vividly recounts Carl’s travels and romantic exploits as he tours the backroads of the east coast and the bedrooms of a series of beautiful women. Inspired by the life of George Elliott Clarke’s father, the novel tells the story of a black working-class man caught between the expectations of his times and gleaming possibilities of the open road. In vibrant, energetic, sensual prose, George Elliott Clarke brilliantly illuminates the life of a young black man striving for pleasure, success and, most of all, respect.

Genres: Canada, Fiction

288 pages, Hardcover

First published February 2, 2016

About the author

A seventh-generation Nova Scotian, George Elliott Clarke was born in 1960 in Windsor Plans, Nova Scotia. He is known as a poet, as well as for his two-volume anthology of Black Writing from Nova Scotia, Fire in the Water. Volume One contains spirituals, poety sermons, and accounts from 1789 to the mid-twentieth century; Volume Two collects the work of the Black Cultural Renaissance in Nova Scotia, which, in Clarke's words, "speaks to people everywhere about overcoming hardships and liberating the spirit." Currently on faculty at Duke University, he is now writing both a play and an opera on slavery in Nova Scotia, a reformulation of Shelley's The Cenci. He has won many awards including the 1981 Prize for Adult Poetry from the Writers Federation of Nova Scotia, he was the 1983 first runner-up for the Bliss Carman Award for Poetry at the Banff Centre School of Arts and 1991 winner of the Archibald Lampman Award for Poetry from the Ottawa Independent Writers.

Books: Saltwater Spirituals and Deeper Blues (Pottersfield, 1983); Whylah Falls (Polestar, 1990, 2000); Provencal Songs (Magnum Book Store, 1993); Lush Dreams, Blue Exile: Fugitive Poems, 1978-1993 (Pottersfield, 1994); Provencal Songs II (Above/ground, 1997); Whylah Falls: The Play (Playwrights Canada, 1999, 2000); Beatrice Chancy (Polstar Books, 1999); Gold Indigoes (Carolina Wren, 2000); Execution Poems (Gaspereau, 2001); Blue (Raincoat, 2001); Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature (UofT Press, 2002)

Reviews

[karen]

dammit - i need to put this on hold for a bit - i couldn't finish it before shark week and then i said "yes" to too many books that i now have to read because deadlines and i don't get to read for MEEE for a little bit. oops! but so far, it's great!



hey, canada - remember when you tried to keep me from the new book by one of my favorite authors by not making it available south of the border where i live? well, guess what??? you have a traitor in your midst, who sent it to me and got it signed for me to boot! thank you, stu, for risking the frowns of your countrymen to get me my george elliott clarke fix!

[Carolyn Walsh · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars
A novel unlike anything I had ever read. The author is s much honoured poet. He teaches literature at the University of Toronto and is a member of the Order of Canada. He is designated Parliamentary Poet Laureate of Canada and was Poet Laureate of Toronto.

The book is written in a dense, vivid, visceral poetic language. The prose is often pungent and florid. There is a deluge of words, allusions, metaphors and wordplay.

The story is based on a year (1959) in the life of his father as a 24 year old black man living in Halifax, Nova Scotia. His father left a diary to the author when he died. Carl Black is a complicated and conflicted young man. A grade 10 dropout, he is a womanizer with a ravenous sexual appetite. His interests are his gleaming BMW motorcycle and his 5 girlfriends, two of which are white. He is much aware of the social standing of each. His Baptist morality and tenderness keeps him in conflict with his amoral pursuit of women for sex, which he tries to rationalize. But beyond the surface impressions this high school dropout is an intellectual who knows and enjoys good literature, art and classical music. He has learned a wide vocabulary of the upper middle class whites, and is often considered pretentious in his speech.

Carl feels confined in his job as a railway porter, although it is one thing of the best paying jobs a young man could hope for at the time. His beloved motorcycle is an escape from the drudgery and the need to hide his ambitions and dreams. On the job he displays a servile attitude and takes on the language and colloquialisms of his community.

As he rides his motorcycle the open roads of Eastern Canada and into the States, he dreams of a bohemian lifestyle in NYC. He has read Kerouac and Alan Ginsberg and envies the beatnik life in Greenwich Village and admires Andy Warhol and other New York artists.

When he is laid off as a porter, he makes a good living as a mostly self taught artist. He receives an offer from his aunt, a famous operatic contralto ,to come to New York and paint theatre backdrops, with an enviable salary. He learns that one of his girlfriends has had his baby and the book ends with him considering the right thing to do.

The picture of the black community, and the racial and class prejudices of the time and place are well described, as well as the places of business, events, names of prominent Nova Scotians, neighbourhoods in Halifax are as someone my age remembers. I was uncomfortable reading some of the sex scenes, tenement odours, and a couple of motorcycle accidents but in Carl the author has created an unforgettable character.

[Jackie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is really different than other books. It is a window into a time and place about racism in Halifax and the north end in the sixties. It's told through the eyes of a man who loves motorcycles, sex, classical music, porn and art. It feels real. It doesn't read like a diary. His escapades are exciting. Albeit for ninety percent of the book he is obsessed with getting laid. He also has no friends. Which can be tiresome. But there's a real person underneath it all, and I like him. I can't wait to read more from this author.

[Ian McKinley]

This book, as befits one written by the poet laureate of Canada's parliament, has a music and rhythm that runs through it. I got the book after hearing George Elliott Clarke do three readings from the book, and he really brings that music to life. I found it read best when I read it aloud, often needing to repeat passages so as to get the rhythm right. That said, however interesting the setting, offering me the opportunity to learn more about the discrimination and racism faced by black Nova Scotians in the middle of the last century, I would have preferred subject matter less obsessed with bedding women.

[Marc · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first 3 pages were positively, ... motorcyclist inspired prose. Brilliant. Probably written by someone who does ride. Sadly, the publishers are clueless. The image on the cover correctly shows an image that could be the main character, Carlyle, but the key secondary character "Liz II" is not. I am not a BMW fan, but my son is so I'm not a moto-racist in saying that bike looks more like a similar vintage British iron and aluminium; Norton. That is more than a racial slur since the Norton is a single vertical cylinder bike, chain drive and British, posing as a German horizontal twin with shaft drive. Yowsa! Bad editorial judgement. :-)

The book blurb says it's about "a young black man striving for pleasure, success, and most of all respect. The author creates some incredible, creative metaphors for all three, but especially the first. In my read of this tale, our main character liberally uses his sidekick character (pun intended), Liz II to con all of his other female subplots (I think about 5 at least) into satisfying his undying urge to "get warmth by joinin amiable organs together."

To be fair, there are plenty of musings and/or ponderings of the other two. Our main character eventually becomes an adult, instead of a selfish jack-ass. But I think a follow-up book would tell a story of how long that actually lasts. I'm sure there would be lots of pleasure, success and respect, not sure.

It is a very well-crafted novel that reads easily and colourfully.

[Pamela · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is much more telling than showing, but this book is pure poetry. It reads better out loud, but it is grit and guts and pain and revelation. Carl has a brief moment in the sun, and then reality hits. But well done indeed. And so it ENDS in story when he decides to accept his responsibility, and then in a final quote.
"A few hours later, Carl picks his way down potholed Green Street toward relatively smooth Highway 1. He's grateful for the effortless, no-shift, speedy ride that Liz II allows as he races to Halifax. He thinks about the motorcycle to keep from fixating on difficult choices. But his actual thinking now, subconsciously, is nostalgic. Maybe the Triumph Bonneville motorcycle is the fastest production machine of 1960, but my Liz II still yells into the wind. Her engine is frothy, twittering.
Carl negotiates the good road, the dark road, the Nova Scotia road. Carl makes for the third floor of house on Buckingham Street. He has to decide things. A reckoning. A rectified account. But where is his—their—pavement leading him now? Might he have Freedom and a family? What kind of Freedom? Which family?
The future? It possesses the serene silence of clouds—untouchable, unbreakable—a fragility secure in its distance. Wounds—and blessings—remain clandestine."
TERMINATION
You owe me nothing but the truth of your journey.
—CHARLES MINGUS, BENEATH THE UNDERDOG

Great images, great metaphors.
"...No, Avril was no longer April and spring and blossoms, but October and Halloween and dead leaves."

I can totally see Erv, a player, trying to attract (and succeeds) Avril's attention. Amazing visual writing: let's dance!
"...His head tilts back, striking a limbo pose. Erv chortles Glee. His feet glide far, farther apart, then snap back—a paramount, James Brown move. With every syllable he utters, his feet and hands see to cha-cha-cha in lyrical, eye-catchin rhythm."

Nice...
"...But she retains sobriety to grab his hand and hold it; to tell him, 'Not so fast...Enjoy the kiss. Imagine the rest.'"

No matter who says it: Isn't this the truth.
"'People, good people, pay attention! Satan is a chameleonic zebra: black with blacks, white with whites, a Tory with Tories, and a Grit with Grits. He tries to hide and dissemble—just like a rat or a roach. ..."

Carl asks the hard questions. What works for him? What works against him? Racism obviously, but more than that. Good tough important questions all.
"...He's a Coloured man trying to negotiate a white world that wants him to be a safe, smiling servant, and black women who want him to be a respectable husband and a responsible father, raising clean children in a paid-off house. But what if he wants to be an artist? To escape the railway? To live more like Picasso and less like a preacher? What if he doesn't want to be merely middle class, married, monogamous, and mortgaged?"

Ah, yes, good teeth as a sign of attractiveness.
"She tells me my teeth are 'lovely.' She says she'll think of me (or, really, my teeth) often."

Beautiful juxtaposition of scents.
"Carl and Avril exit onto the street. As Carl inhales her perfume, he also sniffs chocolate whiffs from the Moirs factory just blocks away. The chocolate is disorienting; the perfume is persuasive."

Here Clarke classifies race and gender issues at the time, misogyny and racism all around.
"Thus, Clark credits that, yep, the most desirable women are white and are the once satisfying once subjugated. It's an imperious attitude, imbibed from History and from his home, and he spied its workaday reality in the North End of Halifax. Coloured women were for work, white women were for 'sleeping with,' all women can be beaten, and none can be trusted. Thus did Carl chew up the boiled-down misogyny of hard-boiled crime comics and Tijuana bibles. His dark-complected (and complex) sexism became his answer to redneck racism and blueblood classism."

More great workings of words for effect.
"...Stout, portly, and the colour of stout or port, Beardsley needs only a derby hat ..."

Except for the sexism (sprinkled throughout) which is part of the time (but no less difficult to read), it is great prose.
"...Until today, for the last six months, his best adventures (save for a few wham-bam-ma-am trysts) have been siphoned from cinema or imagined from books. Life as a pedestrian is, well, damnably pedestrian. ..."

Great rhythm and rhyme all the time. It's sublime.
"...Lola holds a diploma in all branches of Beauty culture, including hair design. She's chunky, funky, and spunky. Her red dress twirled and swirled..."

Lots of great juxtaposing of images, phrases, experiences, history.
"...Passing Fairview Lawn Cemetery (graced with corpses from two disasters, the Titanic sinking of 1912 and the even-more-titanic Halifax Explosion of 1917)..."

Clarke describes well the colliding scents on the pier at Halifax. It brings back memories.
"Sensual scents inundate downtown. Streets reek of mussels and lobster; smells of salt water, tobacco, beer fish—mackerel, trout, perch, cod, and eel—and break abound; and then whiffs of sidewalk-side perfume. A brick smells like apple blossoms; a leather coat decants burgundy."

Clarke's poetic prose weaves through this story. A description of the road...
"It's not pavement that throws you for a curve, a loop, but the cemetery at the end of it all, all that racing and passing. Or it's the traffic jam that troubles; it's always as long and as hard to sit through as a pregnancy."

Thus it BEGINS.
"A most honest thing is pavement. It doesn't go wrong, even when it curves. It's always taking you somewhere, even if you are clueless about a destination or just insouciant, letting miles lap and lapse, lap and lapse, so long as the road is always more highway and freeway than it's ever a strict street or—worse—a blankety-blank dead end.
And pavement is hard, serious; it doesn't let you down. If you spill, then rub and smear your face against it, scraping even your teeth. You know the incident is fact; there is no fakery. It slaps your awake brutally. You can't daydream when it comes to navigating a motorcycle over the potholes and the busted bits of truck tires and even broken parts of cars or dead creatures, their bodies pierced and exploded by tons of chrome simultaneously battering and skewering, or simply smashing and splattering such unlucky critters."

[CarolynAnn · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a bookclub selection and one I was not excited about since it didn't sound like it would hold my interest. Thus, I was really surprised in the beginning at how much I did enjoy reading it. Certainly, his descriptions as he drove around Halifax and the Maritimes were fun to read as I grew up in the same area... I, also, could smell the Moir's chocolate factory and the salt & seaweed at the harbour front. I was also very pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed his writing style... it was very lyrical and poetic which appealed to me, much to my surprise... I normally do not enjoy reading poetry. I loved a lot of his phraseology as well - "Got-a-gun" Street was so appropriate and hilarious.
So, in fact, much to my great surprise, I was enjoying this book until I was more than half-way through. And then it completely dissolved for me. In my opinion, the book became more of a weak pornographic novel... and while I understand that the topic of sexual conquest was 'for the times', it became too repetitive and graphic in my opinion... it seemed necessary to set the stage in the first half of the book but then just went over the top and detracted from the story. So, by the end, I really wasn't impressed.
Two things that also didn't make sense... I could find no mention anywhere about a horse being shot during a Royal Visit and what was the thing with all the italicized words?

[Enid Wray · Rating 3 out of 5]

Call it 3.5. As a road novel it's quite interesting, and as a reminder - record - of what it was like to be black in Nova Scotia - indeed, Canada and/or the US - at that moment in time then this is a work of some importance.
Sadly though I found the writing style and lack of anything resembling a plot - it reads as a series of relatively discreet vignettes - to be disconcerting.
How much of this is due to the disappointment of my own expectations is hard to say... George and Rue, the author's first novel, remains to this day one of my favourite pieces of CanLit... and this is nothing like the previous.

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

First off, G.E.C. is an amazing writer. I was drawn immediately by his prose. His descriptions of motorcycling around Halifax and the surrounding areas are colourfully vivid. As a resident of the city this book is based in, it’s interesting to see this historical perspective on the streets and neighborhoods I know well. Does he spend too much time (both the author and Carl) focused on womanizing? Probably. But nevertheless, it was an enjoyable read, however I could see how the main character’s idea of relationships and romance would be off putting to many. Chalk it up to generational ways of thinking and this can be a good, borderline great read.

[Mitchell Brinton · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love when I read a book and I know the setting intimately, and I'm glad to read this book while living in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

[Lucas · Rating 2 out of 5]

Gorgeous poetry, in service of way. too. much. sex.

[Terri Durling · Rating 1 out of 5]

I did not like this book at all. I dreaded picking it up every time and sped read my way through it for my book club meeting. It's set in Halifax, Nova Scotia and that is about the only thing I could relate to in its entirety since that is where I live. Basically, it's a book that author, George Elliott Clarke wrote upon reading his father's diary. It details his sexual escapades with a bevy of women and how he feels about them in terms of their looks, education, marriage worthiness, sexual experience and willingness to go to bed with him. I'm no prude but this book got tired after the first chapter. His style of writing isn't bad so, maybe given a different topic, he would be interesting to read but a constant diet of "boinking" in every chapter was not for me. His use of italics, capital lettered words spattered randomly here and there are unique but only served to confuse me rather than draw me in. It felt sad to me depicting women as nothing more than sexual conquests and the protagonist as a womanizer - if that was his goal in writing this memoir, he definitely achieved it but if it was to give us a glimpse into black culture, it was very disappointing.

[Fran · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderfully enjoyable and poetic read about a young black man Carlyle Black, a lover of many things including his BMW motorcycle dubbed Liz II. Based on Clarke's fathers unpublished diary, it is set in Halifax, with a few excursions to New Brunswick in 1959 – 60. I appreciated being privy to Carl’s inner life as he negotiates work, art and women with varying degrees of success and satisfaction. He is a mix of vulnerability and pride. The reader is immersed in the community of African Canadians and of the mores of the period. Anecdotes about the visit of the actual Elizabeth II on her visit to the city make me reminisce about my "royal" scrapbook of her visit to Canada. And, as the Beatniks begin to emerge, I am on Carl's side that he may become part of the promise it holds for him.

[Steven Buechler · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a unique novel for sure. Clarke has taken his father’s (William Lloyd Clarke) diary and used it to ‘inform’ this book. And it is the descriptions that builds the empathy with the readers. Set in 1959-60 Halifax, we get to understand what it was like for the senior Clarke to live in that time and era. We feel the racism he endures because of the colour of his skin. We feel the prejudices he endures because of his parentage. And we feel the slights he endures because of his occupation. But most of all, we feel the enjoyment he gets when he straddles his beloved BMW motorcycle and drives out onto the open road.

http://tinyurl.com/jgtv7nx

[Gillian Sullivan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unusual writing style, more poetry then prose. Found it distracting at first, then quite enjoyed the wordplay. Love the setting of Halifax and other parts of N.S.... eye-opening view of the "Negro" side of life there in the late 50s (and maybe there are still two solitudes there today). Motorcycle a great "vehicle" (see how I bought into the book's style) for Carl's escapes and freedom and coolness.

[Corinne Wasilewski · Rating 2 out of 5]

Although there's no denyin' Carl do have a way with the ladies, his cavalier ways and flair for sweet talk done grow tiresome to me mighty quick. Still, the writing is Superb (italics). Electric! (italics). And Carl done had my sympathy in his struggle against barriers of race, class and schoolin' -- Ball Breaking! (italics)

[Carrie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've always loved GEC's Whylah Falls and so was happy to see a novel published. His prose is like poetry which is a stark contrast to the content, which was sections of fornication crossed with motocycle trips and racial issues of 1950s Canada. A really enjoyable read overall, even if I did have some trouble keeping engaged about halfway through.

[ejs · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a eloquent journey! The enjoyed the choice of language and skill with words - almost poetic! His father was quite the "ladies' man", but the journey of his life was quite the adventure. Beautifully written!

[Marc · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is not surprising that a novel based on a man's journal would reduce characters to nothing more than the sum of their actions

[Janice]

Great look into the past!

[Rosalie Thomson cheriton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Took a while to get into this book but eventually loved it. The writing style is very complex and sometimes is more like poetry than prose. Clarke is an award winning poet and a prof at U of T. Set in 1959 in Halifax , NS it follows a year in the life of a young black man whose prize possession is a motorcycle named Liz II. Highly recommend this book.