Verbatim: A Novel [Paperback]

Jeff Bursey is a rebel for having written a novel with so much conflict. In Verbatim: A Novel, Bursey uses many types of conflict to provide social commentary on governance and to illustrate the failure of politics via politicians.

This debut novel, set in an unnamed province, is not easy to read. It is presented in two ways, through Hansard (the official transcripts of debates in parliament in Canada) and emails.

This book is a post modern novel and a political satire. There is no narrator, but dozens of characters- dozens of politicians talking, back-biting, fighting and relentlessly battling with one another over a variety of prescient issues. It is through these garrulous sections where the satire darkly gleams. Bursey, who has worked for Atlantic Hansards for years, use of the word 'inaudible' in the transcripts to mark the absence of information is a brilliantly comic imagination-creating exercise. Though humorous, this novel will also evoke emotions in any reader ever faced with the odiousness of office politics. In the emails, where Bursey examines the abuse of power and human rights in an office, readers will cringe with empathy and rally for SV, the character who most closely resembles a narrator. Bursey excels at creating politicians and bureaucrats so realistic and intelligently tackles so many issues any person interested in politics, especially politicians and students of political science, will be not only be entertained by reading this novel, but educated as well.

Fans of Christopher Wunderlee or William Gaddis will enjoy Bursey's fictionalized account of a House of Commons governing an unnamed Atlantic province. Like Gaddis' technique in "A Frolic of His Own", the novel is the official record of legislative proceedings by a group called Hansard, which, as with Gaddis' using legal briefs and pronouncements, allows Bursey to satirize parliamentary politics with sharp wit and clever juxtaposition. Here, a rightwing party merges with/squares off with a leftwing party, but not for lofty social issues or even a political agenda that reflects their constituents' objectives, but for grossly human personal gain and power. Amid a backdrop of serious problems that include poverty, environmental catastrophes, a recession, failing healthcare, and earmarked projects causing more harm than good, we have financial corruption, sex scandals, fraud, even violence - none of which seems to affect the self-involved politicians out for personal gain and pet grudges.
Well worth the dense prose, intricate minutiae and the very well-crafted bureaucratic memoranda and correspondence, "Verbatim' layers on details as the employees from Hansard begin to act more like the politicians they are recording (picking fights, personal attacks, becoming more involved with personal success than their project, etc.), slowly succumbing to the very same pettiness that they witness from the politicians - revealing just how power corrupts.