The Perfect Order of Things [Hardcover]

Reading David Gilmour's new novel, "The Perfect Order of Things", I was reminded of Mark Twain's take on the well-known Socrates quote about a life that is not "examined". "The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the life too closely examined may not be lived at all." Canadian fiction author and film critic Gilmour, probably best for his internationally most popular book, "The Film Club", and his award-winning novel "A Perfect Night to go to China", may have found the middle ground between Socrates and Twain with this recent light-hearted and tongue-in-cheek "fictional autobiography". The author or his alter-ego, reincarnating the sum-total of narrators of previous novels, revisits and relives pertinent personal moments of his past and ponders their meaning with the hindsight of decades. What has changed in his perspective, his feelings? Why was he hurt, angry or resentful and what, if anything, has he learned from these intimate experiences? How important were all or some of them in molding his character and views on life today? While categorized as a novel - it says so under on the title page- and easily recognized as having autobiographical aspects, "The Perfect Order of Things" is the kind of book that glides comfortably between fact and fiction and in that is attractive beyond the author's personal life.

Approaching his subject matter in a collection of ten semi-autonomous stories his first person narrator touches on everything from first love and loss, friends, wives and lovers, personal and professional highs and lows as journalist, writer, traveler, reader and music lover... Seen together, we come away with a portrait of a peripatetic and somewhat self-indulgent, yet vulnerable and sensitive human being, who has the ability mock and laugh at his emotional hang-ups, his insecurities and irrationalities and, at the same time, has the ability to get absorbed with the places where his life has taken him. The line between fiction and personal reality appears to be fluid and, usually very thin.

Several "stories" stand out for me, partly because they move beyond the intimate personal, in part because they strike a special cord with me. His sensitive reflection on his last visit with his father and on the events shortly thereafter are vivid and their impact profound - on him and the reader. Gilmour intriguingly introduces linkages between his reading and events in his life. For example, when he revisits his childhood home and, suddenly, feels intimately connected with the past, that "you're neither here (in the present of my old country home) nor there (myself as a child lifting a window) but instead in some delicious limbo *in between*." Finally, he continues, after many years, he understood Proust and his concept of being "beyond time". The chapter on his reading and "living" with Tolstoy's War and Peace is a strong encouragement to pick up the novel (again) and delve into it with open eyes. His depiction of his long-term love affair with the Beatles made me dig up my CDs and play them along while reading. Gilmour's emotional reaction and long lasting resentment to a particularly unfavorable book review should give any book reviewer food for thought...

Those of us who are familiar with David Gilmour's work will read and enjoy "The Perfect Order of Things" first of all on a personal - Gilmour "unplugged" - level. Beyond that level of appreciation, however, whether we are familiar with the author or not, most chapters invite, or can trigger, our own personal musings on memories - and can motivate us to "revisit" our own past life and "examine it", to re-live certain moments in certain places and/or draw lessons from those for our lives today. [Friederike Knabe]

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