Mutiny of the Mounty; When Canadian travel guide writer Will Ferguson

HIS name is Will Ferguson and he used to be a fish slut. Which isn't obvious straightaway, but he assures me it's true. "It was one of those things," he explains, quite serious for a split second. "It was like being a seal - you do a trick and they give you a fish, you do a better trick, they give you a fish again, and before you know it, you're a fish slut, you're just barking for fish."

Some writers just hate to perform, even though their public and their publishers increasingly demand it. For a writer like Ferguson though, author of hilarious comic takes on his native Canada with sensitively titled books like Why I Hate Canadians and Canadian History for Dummies (as well as a couple of pretty serious travel guides), public performances shouldn't be too much of a problem. He's funny, for goodness sake; his debut novel, HappinessTM is a wicked, witty satire on the self-help industry, his brother even runs a comedy club in Toronto and he could talk for his country if required. So what's with the fish analogy?

"I wrote How To Be a Canadian with my brother and it sold a lot," he stresses a lot before continuing, "and publishers just wanted more of the same - you know, How To Be An American and so on? I just wasn't interested - I'm at a stage right now where I can afford to take a risk."

Ah - so the problem wasn't really performing, it was just having to repeat the joke?

"I don't think of myself as a humour writer at all," he says, confounding that little theory too. "I really don't. For me, humour is gags and jokes. I just think life is inherently funny - just absurd and kind of sad."

We meet in Edinburgh on the kind of dull, freezing day that Scotland does so well, where Ferguson is staying briefly before travelling on to York and then London to promote HappinessTM. He has left his wife and young son behind in Calgary while he backs up his "risk", this new novel, with a British book tour. Why would he leave them behind, I ask? He would happily have brought his family with him if it had been May, he says. Scotland's beautiful in May but March? Not in March, no thank you. Before I start to defend the beautiful land of my birth from this transatlantic attack, in spite of the sodden month, I remember that Ferguson is in fact a Scottish name.

"Yeah, I don't know if this is true, but apparently we can trace ourselves back to the Fergusons of St Kilda, although I've never been able to track that down," he tells me, before establishing that his grandfather was a Scot who settled in Saskatchewan. "He cleared this huge estate there, dug the foundations and just talked and talked about stuff that wasn't there - what room he was going to build here, how he'd put that up there. I remember going to see him as a kid and being absolutely depressed by it - I think he'd been saying it all so long that by the end he didn't even realise he'd never done any of it."

He never built anything there?

"No, no, none of it. It never happened."

Okay, so Grandpa Ferguson might not have been too successful, but what about ...

"Dad? He lived in a trailer in a town called Rapid City which is out in the middle of nowhere. And he was this cranky old guy who wrote crank letters to everyone. He was actually a philosophy professor, he had books everywhere and just walked around in T- shirts and his underwear. He was just a big, grumpy, miserable guy."

Did Ferguson grow up in the trailer with him?

"God, no. He had four wives - so I'm from the second wife, my mum was his second wife. My dad was completely Canadian but he did like to say 'shite' a lot - that was the one thing he kept from Scotland."

Unable to tear himself away from the glory of heritage, Ferguson has immortalised his father in his first novel with a character called Jack, who, he says, "is dad word for word." With this kind of colourful legacy, it is perhaps not too surprising that Ferguson built his career and reputation as a purveyor of non-fiction, specialising in amateur historian guides like Canadian History For Dummies as well as his satirical critiques, Why I Hate Canadians and Bastards and Boneheads.

The last two titles came in for a bit of stick back home, but it was a true representation of Ferguson's view of his native country. He had decided to leave Canada just over ten years ago, simply "burnt out" after research on the history book and fed up with its political problems. He headed for Japan, where he stayed for five years, teaching English and travelling. His experiences there produced The Hitchhiker's Guide to Japan and Hokkaido Highway Blues - they also introduced him to his wife. When they returned to Canada in 1995, he was disappointed to find that "not much had changed. You know, you start to romanticise your country when you're away from it - the snow and the Mounties and the mighty moose - but I came back and it was just the same old stuff."

After his work castigating his fellow Canadians - "interviewers would actually ask me if I was Canadian after I wrote Why I Hate Canadians" - it's perhaps not surprising either that identity and what shapes it underlie both his non-fiction as well as this fictional debut. The novel, however, is more an exploration of personal identity rather than a national one - Ferguson expresses incredulity that his readers might actually think the central character in HappinessTM, Edwin Vincent de Valu, is him (even though Jack is his Dad), and that his friends got upset with what he did with the characters. "I'd say - they're not real people," he laughs. "They're just words on paper. A book is just a construct - don't put your faith in it!"

But it is the simplistic kind of faith that people place in books - and how they use them to construct their own identities - that forms the basis of HappinessTM. Edwin is a self-help editor for Panderic Press, the man in charge of the "slush pile", who one day receives a manuscript from a certain Tupak Soiree called What I Did on the Mountain. Covered in daisies and appallingly badly written, it promises to solve people's problems and by a series of accidents, gets published and does exactly what it says on the tin. As a result 97 per cent of the population become happy (a tiny number, such as Edwin, are sadly immune). Wars stop, crime fizzles out and misery is banished for ever.

The idea for the book came from a publicist Ferguson met while promoting a previous title. On his own tour, he kept bumping into a famous self-help author who was visiting the same spots he was, promoting her own work.

"I met her four times in two days and had to introduce myself to her every time," Ferguson still chuckles at the memory. "She was completely loopy. It's kind of a given in the publishing industry that the most screwed-up people are self-help authors and the last person you'd ever take advice from is someone who'd write a self- help book."

He decided he would write his own self-help book, once he saw how much money they made - "it was called Be Who You're Not," he says. But he couldn't do it. "You have to believe in it. People who write self-help really do believe in it." So, a fictionalised treatment was called for and when one publicist remarked by chance that if someone wrote a self-help book that actually worked "we'd all be in trouble", HappinessTM was born.

"When I went into it, I didn't try to write what I thought a novel should be, or what fiction should be," he says. "My editor was a bit worried, he thought I should have been more restrained, but I thought that's the point of it - it's fiction, I want to just run with it, push it as far as I can. And I liked this idea of the Invasion of the Body Snatchers kind of thing, where there's this one guy in the middle and no one will listen to him.

"It's so different from writing a guidebook. If you put in the wrong directions, people get quite mad at you. With fiction, you're not really held accountable because it's about made-up characters."

Until people get too fond of your characters, that is. There's a delicious kind of learning process going on here - you suspect Ferguson is thoroughly enjoying his new role as fiction-writer ingenue. Even his own failed attempts at novel-writing are relished in HappinessTM, when Edwin describes the kind of appalling manuscripts he reads and rejects.

"I have a friend who worked as a slush pile reader at the Harlequin romance publishers," Ferguson says as he starts to laugh again. People think the beginning of the book in the publishers' office is such a farce but the satire hasn't even started yet. He really would open letters that said 'I have written a fictional novel' or 'a three-part trilogy' and the example I used in the book of the line that says, 'She said nothing. She just bit her lower lip and licked her upper lip' That's a real example, and it's one they actually published. Can you imagine what they're turning down?"

But for all his pot-shots at the publishing world, it's really the self-help industry Ferguson is targeting and the country which produced it - America.

"I really wanted to look at the US in this book," he says, serious once again for a moment. "Canadians never say it out loud, but inside we're like, 'Oh cry me a river', when Europeans complain that American culture is swamping them. Try living in Canada. We're just washed over by it, but we're not part of it so we're like the overwhelmed observer. We know them better than they know themselves and I think something has happened to America in the last two generations. It used to be this really abrasive, unapologetic country and now it's just really sad. The whole idea behind the foundation of this nation was about the individual and what the individual could achieve. And where did that lead? To self-help, to this narcissistic, self-indulgent state and that's really tragic."

He sees the character of Jack in his book as a representative of a dying generation, "a generation that came over, the pioneer, rough- knuckled America. That's where I would want to take my country back to if I was American."

It's a contradictory position, Ferguson acknowledges. He has written before that Canadians have tended to define themselves in negative terms - they are what America is not. "We're always comparing ourselves to America," he says, "although after September 11, there's been this huge gap between us. Not just politically but also in perception. From our perspective, it really was something that happened to someone else. And we see their anger and their pain, but we never felt it was an attack on us. We feel quite distanced from the US now, because it wasn't a shared experience."

If the US hadn't had a burgeoning self-help industry before September 11, it certainly would have it now. Ferguson's feeling about his country's neighbour is an affectionate, but clear one. No rose-coloured glasses here. "I've always said," he starts to laugh again, "that if you ever did an experiment and gave the Scots a country, you'd end up with Canada, a country run by bankers. And if you gave the Irish a country, you'd end up with America, the wild west, the kind of place where they put someone on the moon, just because it's there."

Ferguson may not regard himself as a humourist, but his comedic view of his own world, and the world at large, has probably never been more timely, or more necessary. Caught between despair at unimaginable acts and the homespun platitudes of the self-help industry, laughter has never been in such short supply. We need more of itu HappinessTM is published by Canongate, (pounds) 9.99

Copyright 2002
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