What do Internet gambling servers in Antigua warehoused cans of Pepsi A.M. and windmill farms have in common with The Simpsons the Great Bear Rainforest and The Legend of Zelda? Absolutely fuck all unless you’re Chris Turner. Remarkably How to Breathe Underwater — a recently released compilation of the essayist’s best work over the years — is as coherent as it is interesting. Which is really quite the feat.
“It was an uncomplicated book to put together” says Turner from the nation’s capital drawn there for a presentation at the Ottawa International Writers Festival. “A lot of the pieces were already written so it was just a matter of typesetting them and giving them a read-through again.”
Sure that might’ve been the case but the amount of work that Turner’s put in over the years has earned him at least one smooth ride. How to Breathe Underwater does indeed exclusively feature pre-published material save for a stellar introduction citing influences and lamenting the state of the magazine industry as well as preambles for each individual essay.
But the book reads in a remarkably lucid fashion considering the time span of the project; the first piece (the one on blackjack and the West Indies) dates back to 1999 with his widely celebrated “Calgary Reconsidered” piece for the June 2012 iteration of The Walrus serving as the chronological finale. A real assortment of material is contained within the bookends with topics ranging from early viral marketing to groundbreaking Nintendo adventures.
“You cringe a little bit at the overenthusiastic younger self that you were” says Turner. “The video games stuff certainly not only because that technology has accelerated and transformed so much but because I don’t even know it that well anymore. Other than playing the Wii with my daughter I don’t spend a lot of time with video games.”
What Turner has been spending time with in the interim concerns significantly heftier matters as indicated by the last slice of the book’s triptych. It’s a heavy run. The first third and fifth essays in the section — titled all too appropriately “Anthropocene Landscapes” — tackle in turn the complicity of westerners in ocean acidification neo-colonial exploitation and petroleum transportation.
“Ultimately the thing we’re talking about is an entire shift in the basis of the global energy economy” says Turner. “Protest is extraordinarily effective if what you’re trying to do is save the old-growth forests. But to solve the climate change problem there are going to be significant changes in the lives of every single person on the planet.”
It’s that subtlety and reflexivity that could place Turner in a similar camp to his idol David Foster Wallace. The now-deceased author — who created the enormous novel Infinite Jest in addition to stellar non-fiction collections such as Consider the Lobster — infamously used hyper-specific essays as springboards into much more philosophical topics. Turner pulls the same sorts of tricks just with far fewer footnotes.
While the purpose of such writing is bent towards ornate wording it exudes journalistic astuteness. That merging is an awfully important one for both literary and informative reasons. Unfortunately as Turner notes in the introduction avenues for publishing that type of work in Canada are becoming frighteningly scarce. But recent events — namely the hotheaded responses to the Ottawa shooter and the Jian Ghomeshi debacle — might finally change people’s minds.
“You saw the same thing with the Rob Ford scandal” Turner says. “It was Toronto Star reporters working on ongoing assignments who managed to put that story together. Sometimes you do want a deeper perspective than a tweet or a short news story can give you. I hope that readers who like the book will realize that like any somewhat under-celebrated art form it’s a thing that could really use some support particularly in Canada.”
Chris Turner will speak at How to be a Social Innovator with Druh Farrell and Gerald Wheatley on Wednesday November 19 at Bow Valley College.
