September 29, 2009 Literary Arts

Lalumière shines light on false idols

Objects of Worship evades masturbatory super hero fantasy schmaltz

by R. Brian Hastie

Claude Lalumière poses in the shadow of a false idol. PHOTO NATALIE GITT

Objects of Worship Claude Lalumière ChiZine Publications 280 pp $18.95

Objects of Worship, author Claude Lalumière’s first collection of short stories featuring elements of the fantastic, is an odd duckling.

As much as one may argue that the bulk of these stories are merely genre-driven, the nuanced mood and sparse word choice the author uses suggest way more than just monsters in the night or spaceship battles that take place on far-away planets.

Lalumière’s trick is to make the fantastic appear mundane (such as the gay zombie couple who adopt a wayward living boy in “The Ethical Treatment of Meat”) and then to amplify what one may consider mundane to fantastical proportions. The author manages to push away some of the more classical, space opera elements of science fiction in order to focus on the issue at hand, be it adoption or the intensely private nature of relationships.

“The best science fiction, I think, is about transgression,” explained Lalumière. “And for me, that’s what all art should be like. There’s a status quo and it needs to be questioned. Good or bad, that’s not the issue. The issue is that we keep having to ask ourselves questions.

“To me, what science fiction and fantasy can do way better than any other kind of fiction is push those boundaries,” said Lalumière. “You can postulate some scenarios that will extrapolate upon one aspect of what’s happening in society and just really push that to its logical extreme and see what the consequences are.”

The characters Lalumière creates run the gamut from ultra-conservative Orthodox Jews to a “black, omni-sexual mom.” A major aspect of the collection is the variety of sexual orientations and interests of its characters.

“[A lot of people think that] automatically, if the story has queer characters, then the story has to be about queer identity and I steer away from that,” he said.

Lalumière talks about using science fiction to create empathetic figures instead of merely shaping characters based upon our own super-inflated egos.

“One of the things I abhor the most about writing is writers who use transparent
doppelgangers of themselves as protagonists,” he said.

“I think that’s lazy writing and I think that, when I write, what really drives me is what I call a leap of empathy. It’s important for me to be able to picture the world from someone else’s point of view, and if I don’t do that, then what’s the point? And then it’s just masturbation, and that should stay private.”

Lalumière’s prose, in certain instances, owes much to the vivid art of 1960s comic book pioneers Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, a fact that he readily acknowledges.

“People like Kirby and Ditko, what I find appealing about them is the fact that they can tell stories in a way that no one else can,” he said. “They try to create a world, a mood. I try to create an atmosphere that, in every story, will be unique and create an atmosphere [where] you feel you are being told a story that no one else could have told you.”

The collection is certainly an inventive take on an often tired genre, which raises and leaves open many questions about the issues we as a society need to collectively discuss.

Claude Lalumière will deliver a reading on Oct. 2 at Montreal’s annual science fiction and fantasy convention, CON*CEPT, at the Days Hotel (1005 Guy St.).
For more info about CON*CEPT, visit conceptsff.ca.