The Princess And The Whiskeads [Hardcover]

Russell Smith's The Princess and the Whiskheads is a fable, not a novel, but don't let that fool you: this is not a whimsical tale like those collected in Sheila Heti's The Middle Stories. The Princess and the Whiskhead is a deadly serious little book, and for all its fairy-tale royalty and faraway lands, it is a pointed piece of social commentary.

Princess Juliana is the young, beautiful, and neglectful ruler of Liralove, a tiny kingdom caught between its quaint, folksy past and the utilitarian pressures of modernity. Juliana spends her days in her palace, leaving only to attend the occasional public function, delegating all of her duties to an eccentric government of administrators and flunkies. One day, her would-be lover, Bostock, informs her of a counterculture that is thriving within her capital--the Whiskheads, a part-punk, part-hippie band of bohemian aesthetes who live illegally inside the Architectons (Liralove's useless, art-for-art's-sake public monuments). Shocked by the prospect of unrest within her own state, Juliana slips out of her palace and covertly befriends a few Whiskheads, inadvertently becoming the catalyst for a wave of social upheaval.

Smith's take on art, countercultures, elitism, and politics is refreshing and amazingly in touch with the current strains of activist youth. The Princess and the Whiskheads is both an entertaining narrative and an interesting social critique. One can only hope that it will gain more than a few sympathetic readers. --Jack Illingworth

If you happened to stumble across a defaced copy of the endearingly eroticized fable, The Princess and the Whiskheads, from which the name of the author and the place and date of publication had been removed, you could easily think that you'd found something written more than half a century ago, say, about the time George Orwell published 1984. You might also think that Princess Juliana and her land of Liralove had been exquisitely devised among the bombed wreckage of Coventry or Oxford by a young man whose mental life was inflamed by the writings of Oscar Wilde and whose private parts were thoroughly excited and fully engorged only by beautiful, wealthy, and socially prominent young women who could and would shamelessly end his sexual uncertainties, elevate his social status, and support his artistic endeavours by taking hold of him firmly and boldly deciding to love him sensuously, house and dress him gloriously, and free him completely from the necessity of earning a humdrum living. It's a lovely, charming, naive but not innocent, fantastic invention that assists inexperienced seducers of young women who are sexually seasoned but romantically unversed. Well, that's perhaps one of the better ways of reading it and might still prove serviceable if there are any such aesthetic seducers and idealistic temptresses left in this era of "hooking up" among the decorously urban. But The Princess and the Whiskheads is as new as this millennium and does come with an author's name attached. The author is Russell Smith and, unsurprisingly, that's not the way his boyish tale is being read by reviewers.
Russell Smith is the unabashedly self-as-fine-art-object, Globe &Mail columnist and CBC commentator who is less frequently read than he ought to be for his shrewdly observed Kingsley Amisesque satirical views of green and fidgety, never quite young enough, never quite hip enough Torontonians-How Insensitive, Noise, Young Men. Because Smith is more often read about (he is a favourite whipping boy of Frank magazine and variously aggrieved mainstream columnists) than read, his fantasy princess and her disaffected citizens and their doings have been taken at less than face value and altogether too easily dismissed as an unconvincing allegorical critique of the conflict between art and industry. Yes, art in the form of whimsical towers and industry in the form of sewer construction does get prominent mention as the state of Liralove moves to the brink of revolution but the fundamental polarity is the deeper one of beauty and necessity and how a powerful woman must shape her sexual desires to both. Smith writes symbolically but what distinguishes his tale is its forthright atheism. Not even Orwell entirely escaped the Christian underpinnings and trappings of allegory to the degree that Smith does, and consequently, no one, to my knowledge, has ever written so erotically in this manner. It's often casually said (especially by the out-of-shape) that the brain is the primary sex organ, but Smith writes his Princess and his Whiskheads into being with absolute conviction that art that is unsexed is worse than trivial. That's why this is worth reading and reading as deeply as the epic of Gilgamesh which also deals with a ruler whose subjects are dissatisfied with their monarch's sexual practices. And it is endearing-at least to the good socialist in me who doesn't think that any great harm befalls those children of the ruling class who are deflected from the paths of industry and progress by artists as crafty as Smith who knows how to turn a screw or a screw-up into works of art. T.F. Rigelhof (Books in Canada)