The Strange Truth About Us

By M.A.C. Farrant

“Anthropologist of the absurd” and “brave iconoclast,” M.A.C. Farrant positively bristles in this three-part novel-length work of prose fragments, snippets, questions, speculations, and meditations, by turns philosophical, dark, comedic, and lyrical in its attempts to imagine a multitude of possible futures for our accelerated age. It offers her readers nothing less than The Strange Truth About Us.

M.A.C. Farrant is the acclaimed author of nine previous collections of satirical and humourous short fiction, and two works of non-fiction. Her work is infused with acerbic wit and innovation, and her surrealistic visions of everyday life are startlingly precise.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Talonbooks
• Release date: Oct 11, 2011
• ISBN: 9780889227347

M.A.C. Farrant

M.A.C. Farrant is the author of seventeen works of fiction, prose poems, non-fiction, memoir, two plays, and over one hundred book reviews and essays for the Vancouver Sun and the Toronto Globe & Mail. Her memoir, My Turquoise Years, which she adapted for the stage, premiered in 2013 at the Arts Club Theatre in Vancouver. Her novel, The Strange Truth About Us – A Novel of Absence,” (Talon) was cited as a Best Fiction Book of 2012 by the Globe and Mail. The World Afloat (2014, Talon), the first in a trilogy of collections of miniature fiction and prose poems, won the Victoria Book Prize. One Good Thing—a living memoir, published by Talon Books in 2021, was a BC Bestseller. Forthcoming from Talon Books: Jigsaw—a puzzle in ninety-three-and-a-half pieces, (2023, NF); My Turquoise Years 20th Anniversary Edition (2024). Archived material is in the “Special Collections Branch” at the University of Victoria.

Book preview

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The Strange Truth About Us

Strange_Truth_FINAL.pdf

Contents

Part One.

Annotations about an Absence: Going Forward

Part Two.

Woman Records Brief Notes Regarding Absence: Benchmarking:

Part Three.

Other Prose Surrounding Absence

a.

Our Secret

Movie Emotions

Highway 17 Revisited

Marriage with Dogs

The Outlook for Quirky

His Signs

Waiting

When the Time Comes

b.

January 24

Q & A

The Age

Trajectory

Shift

What Is Shown

c.

A Serious Story

What Mattered

Along the Way

Finally

There Must Be a Reason

The Unaccountable

They Built a Wall

Rush Job

The Play Was Going to Be Huge

The North Pole

Hereditary Job

Journey to the Unknown Regions of the Extreme Outside

d.

Woman Interviews Self with Reference to Stories

Acknowledgments

About the Author

The flies will die like flies.

Life will be complex like life.

The universe will be infinite like the universe.

Ultimate things will remain unutterable like ultimate things.

—Prophecy, Peter Handke

Part One.

Annotations about an Absence:

Going Forward

1.

Here we are—you and me—sitting in our back garden amusing ourselves with our minds. We are using our minds—our imaginations—to picture the future. We are taking what we imagine and forming it into a make-believe novel that we are calling The Strange Truth About Us.

Like the future, the novel doesn’t actually exist. It’s an idea, an entertainment, a fanciful diversion in which we punch in the numbers, call the future up. Ring; ring; ring; ring ... So far, the future hasn’t answered. But we know it’s there.

2.

We know it’s there because its shadow moves behind the upstairs window of an old frame house. The thin curtain undulates. Someone or something is watching us. A madman with a knife?

3.

We imagine we are trailing the future like bloodhounds; we’ve got the scent but not the quarry. But the future, like a terrified fox, keeps eluding us. We imagine its outline, though dimly.

4.

And we devour the published consciousness of others. The stories about a future in which all roads are dangerous and lead to death: where because of rising ocean levels, we drown; where because of global heating, we die of thirst; where because of the overuse of antibiotics, we succumb by the millions to a gruesome new plague; where we are captured as slaves or eaten by lampreys; where we become eyeless, blob-like creatures who live in underground caverns and are excavated for our tender meat; where we become oppressed by a conspiracy of robots; where we become terrorized by psychopathic motorcycle gangs; where the oceans have become dead zones due to a sudden population explosion of poisonous jellyfish; where beyond all expectations, we discover a habitable planet, a blue planet like our own before we ruined it, but we don’t have the technology to get there; where because we have embraced Jehovah, we are picnicking in Eden—on a green hillside with our loved ones and the risen dead who are all smiling, plump, and happy, while the sun shines and fruit trees offer up apples, peaches, plums, as nearby a lion lies down with a lamb ...

5.

So we concoct a make-believe novel and a set of annotations in which ...

We attempt to express the universal confusion of mind that is the main feature of contemporary life:

We are afraid.

6.

We weren’t prepared for this kind of fear. We were only prepared for the fear of losing money or love, or the fear associated with threats to our safety—travelling in planes, getting lost in unlit places.

We were only prepared to have more of what we had; expected the future to be a smart fit with our shiny new things; with our present well-being, our fun. Like the advertising circular promoting cellphones announced: Meet the future. It’s friendly.

The future wants to be your friend.

That’s what we had banked on.

But that’s no longer what we believe.

7.

We have conceived The Strange Truth About Us as a series of tactful exchanges. Within these exchanges we do not exclaim, retort, say, ask, declare, hiss, snort, grin, or shout, except by implication. Neither do we rake fingers through our hair, comment upon the scenery, make love, or engage in any other movement.

8.

What is it that we do in this imaginary novel?

We talk.

We talk like this:

— What do you mean things are crumbling?

— Look at the evidence. The climate. The generalized threat. The terror—from outside; from within our borders. All manner of social chaos—drugs, gangs, homelessness, foreclosures, poor health, arrogant politicians, pedophile priests. Everything is breaking down; all the old values, all the institutions are falling into fragments. That’s what crumbling means.

— I don’t really mind that word. It’s organic, somehow. Slow. It sounds natural. Manageable. As opposed to catastrophic.

9.

Strange—truth no longer has a roof over its head.

Truth—the oblique familiar.

10.

The novel is written around catastrophic weather events such as drought, floods, and hurricanes. And though the average temperature of the world’s ride may have risen nearly one degree over the past fifty years, some of us on the planet still experience calm, though humid weather, and generally ironic conditions.

11.

Only meteorologists using climate modelling seem proficient at predicting the future, albeit a somewhat limited, short-term future.

Yet because of them and their TV broadcasts we’ve become well-informed about tsunami waves, rogue waves, flash floods, seismic indicators of earthquakes, drought and the attendant crop damage, and the entire range of catastrophic wind events, particularly hurricanes and tornados. We can now converse with some intelligence about these occurrences in much the same way as we converse about the cure rates of many cancers, and of pandemics in general.

12.

About—all around from outside; all around from a centre.

13.

Regarding hurricanes, these are personalized with English or Latino names as if they were avenging deities, which is a nice mythological touch, we think, and serves to ameliorate the tragic destruction they cause. It’s a relief to shake our fists at something we can name but isn’t a real person. Thus Claudette and Danny batter the Philippines, Juan hurls wind over the coast of Florida, Katrina shames a wrathful nation through the destruction of New Orleans.

14.

We try to keep our mindsets in good working order. These are the emotional and intellectual wrappings through which we experience the world and which allow us to abide in a state of relative non-contamination.

Belief in the ideas of civil behaviour, earned wealth, right to privilege, the duty of