POTTED TOIL

Rootbound

By Grant Buday

ECW, 232 pages, $26.95

What with depressed prices, U.S. drug cops operating freely in Canada
and a zero-tolerance regime in Ottawa, Canadian marijuana growers have
fallen on hard times. But hard times for pot planters are good times
for authors who write about them.

It's the criminality of cannabis, of course, that lends it literary
promise: the hidden grow rooms, clandestine dealing, wads of cash and,
not least, the bikers and bad guys who would rather steal dope than
cultivate their own.

Had the Liberals remained in office and made good on their
oft-repeated promise to decriminalize marijuana, perhaps one day even
legalize it, writers of pot thrillers might have found themselves
looking for a new subject. But this literary patch blooms eternal,
reworked so often over the past two decades as to make pot books
formulaic, almost a genre of their own. Vancouver writer Grant Buday's
Rootbound, however, combines the old elements with originality and a
refreshingly light touch.

Willie, a bankrupt Vancouver building contractor with a bad back,
returns from his 50th birthday dinner party to find that thieves have
made off with $60,000 worth of marijuana from his basement grow room.
It is -- or was -- his first crop, meant to recoup his fortunes and
set him on the path to owning a commercial apple orchard, a life-long
ambition. Carmen, Willie's artist girlfriend, is hysterical. What if
we'd been home, she wails? We could have been beaten to a pulp. How
did they know about the crop?

Damping down Carmen's fears and hiding his own, Willie raises a second
crop. Three months pass, and as the harvest draws near, the tension
rises. She's terrified the thieves will return, and he's having
nightmares. Then the worst of the worst happens: Willie falls into the
hands of the bad guys -- actually two bad guys and one bad gal. But
before the gang, led by a sadistic gorilla named Steve, can get to
Willie's crop, he makes good his escape and gets the stash out of the
house. More by accident than design, he blunders into Washington State
and hides his pot in some bee hives until he can make contact with a
buyer.

But the fun is not over. Back in Vancouver, he runs into Steve and
friends. They have some serious questions for him, and the going gets
rough. More adventures follow, as Willie recovers his marijuana, has
another brush or two with Steve, and eventually brings it all to a
satisfactory conclusion, albeit one that gets him no closer to his
orchard.

Grant Buday has spun an engaging tale and created a cast of quirky
characters. Carmen is the ultimate narcissist, an artist who paints
nothing but self-portraits, 63 of which grace the walls of their
house. Willie's daughter, Angela, comes home from Asia pregnant by a
monk name U, miscarries, and takes up with a professor nearly three
times her age. She's jealous of her grandmother, Juliet, a fading
beauty whom Angela fears will poach her prof.

Buday has a gift for deft sketches of people, and for description, for
which he has a feel, particularly of buildings and interiors. But
taken as a whole, this novel is flawed at the centre. It's said that
every novel needs a spine, some core idea or theme that holds it all
together. If there is a spine in Rootbound, it is meant to be Willie,
in particular his angst as a man of low self-esteem who tries to buy
the affection and respect of his family. The problem is that Willie
himself has no spine. He is a wuss, a wimp, a sniveler. This is
clearly the author's design, but to what end? Willie elicits neither
sympathy nor interest. His dialogue is flat, his appearance is
unprepossessing (short, grey teeth and "eyes like gallstones"), and
his character is so self-effacing that he virtually disappears from
the page.

Buday also has a habit of telling us what his characters are thinking
or feeling, rather than allowing them to do the job themselves. He's
given occasionally to convoluted sentences and wordiness, especially
in simple logistical things. There is imagination here and a nice
touch for metaphor. And there are bright flashes of humour in what is
meant, after all, to be a comedic novel. But there is also much that
could have been improved by an editor with a sharper pencil.

In his pot-growing days, Michael Poole met his own "Steve," an
experience recounted in his memoir, Romancing Mary Jane. His novel,
Rain Before Morning, will be published this month.