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The Watch
by Dennis Danvers
(HarperCollins Eos, $15.95, 368 pages, paperback, 1 March 2003; ISBN:
0380806452.)
I wanted to like Dennis Danvers's The Watch. In this  novel,
Danvers attacks the greed, bigotry, and short-sightedness of colonialist
capitalism and does so with intelligence, compassion, and mischievous
wit. Danvers's take on our self-destructive ills is so incisive and
well-informed that I wanted nothing to stand in the way of his timely
message. Alas, polemical novels are notoriously hard to pull off, and
The Watch is a dreadful mess.
A mysterious traveller from the future reincarnates Peter Kropotkin
in 1999. Kropotkin -- the Russian anarchist who lived from 1842 to 1921
and whose writings include Memoirs of a Revolutionist -- is shuttled
off to Richmond, Virginia, where the reborn anarchist confronts consumer
culture, remnants of the Confederacy, and a manipulative time-traveller.
He befriends a time-lost African slave and a commune of vegan performance
artists. And his very presence threatens to bring about revolution.
All this could have added up to a fun romp, a sharp satire peppered
with hard-hitting polemics. There are many reasons why The Watch
falls flat.
Much of the novel is consumed by an unconvincing love affair between
Kropotkin and a Richmond social worker. Kropotkin himself is too good,
too perfect, to be believable or taken seriously. In addition, all of
the characters lack depth and texture, making Danvers's attempts to
inject melodrama into his satire awkward. The time-travel/resurrection
plot is left with so many loose ends and unanswered questions that it
only ends up being an irritating distraction. And the final chapter,
involving deus ex machina superheroics by a group of cats, reads like
willful sabotage.
The Watch is an earnest effort sadly undermined by an overabundance
of bad judgment calls.
Originally published, in slightly different form,
in The Montreal Gazette, Saturday, 1 June 2002.
Claude Lalumière's Fantastic Fiction
is a series of
capsule reviews first published in the Saturday Books
section of The Montreal Gazette.
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