Vancouver Special

By Charles Demers, with photographs by Emmanuel Buenviaje. Arsenal Pulp, 280 pp, $24.95, softcover

Describing Vancouver often reduces the city to a cliché.

Labels like “Lotusland”, “up-and-coming metropolis”, or, most recently, “host of the 2010 Olympic Games” fail to convey the complexity of a place that more than half a million people simply call “home”. To avoid depicting the city as a stereotype perched between sea and sky, it takes idiosyncratic observation and an intelligent use of irony.

A pair of recently released books by local activist and comedian Charles Demers mark the literary debut of a sly commentator who has succeeded in portraying the city with grin-inducing accuracy.

His novel The Prescription Errors revolves around censorship, community identity, mental illness, political ideologies, and the precarious longevity of fame. It is a story about Vancouver in which the city is not only a setting but a presence that seeps into the lives of the characters, shaping their exchanges and fuelling the narrative.

Vancouver Special, Demers’s volume of nonfiction, unfurls Vancouver as well. Here, the author, who was born and raised in the Lower Mainland, writes a kind of love letter to the city in a collection of cordial essays, accented by Emmanuel Buenviaje’s black-and-white photographs. Ranging from neighbourhoods like Kitsilano, once a “hippie beacon” and “today home to spas, upscale baby supply stores, and doggie bakeries, as well as Vancouver’s indigenous, ubiquitous line of yoga clothing, lululemon” to Vancouver’s anarchist history and the thought-provoking suggestion that the abundance of “buck-a-slice” joints is directly linked to the prevalent civic consumption of marijuana, the author guides an engaging, often humorous anthropological survey.

Reading Vancouver Special is like catching up with a smart, witty friend who’s proud and aware of the place he calls home. What Demers has accomplished with this book is admirable: it’s an authentic version of Vancouver, a recognizable yet illuminating view of here, from here.