The Telegraph-Journal Review of Spanish Fly

Will Ferguson’s newest novel is satisfying and self-assured and ulimately, rather fun.

John Mazerolle

Like a good magic trick, most con jobs are surprisingly simple when you see how they are done.

In Will Ferguson's latest novel Spanish Fly, the cons come as quickly and as often as dark clouds during the 1930s Dust Bowl, the setting for this satisfying, self-assured story from one of Canada's most successful authors.

For instance, narrator Jack McGreary learns early on from his new friends - lifelong grifters Virgil and Miss Rose - that writing a receipt is often the perfect swindle.

Say you are posing as a federal officer investigating a rash of counterfeit bills and you have to take a cash register to "check for fingerprints." If the dupe behind the counter hesitates, write him up a receipt. Problem solved.

Ferguson, author of such popular non-fiction books as Why I Hate Canadians and How To Be a Canadian (Even if You Already Are One), focuses this time on the American dream. Is it a fraud? What makes religion, politics, and love anything but an elaborate carnival game where nothing is necessarily true? Is everything a scam?

McGreary, a 19-year-old who is plucked from the salty mines of his go-nowhere Texas town, contemplates those questions as he travels throughout the Southwest with the two con artists, who show him a life of hot jazz, cold-hearted scams, and sums of money he had only dreamed about. Soon he is a con artist, too, and a damned good one at that.

In the past Ferguson has been at his best when he is at his most irreverent, and the publicity for the book describes it as "rollicking" and "hilarious." But that's almost a disservice to the story.

Ferguson has written history and humour side by side many times, and this is the first time he has fused them together so successfully.

Spanish Fly is amusing without trying too hard and historically detailed without going stale. (No doubt the book is historically accurate in its non-fictional details; the author of Canadian History for Dummies deserves some street cred, no?) And there are layers he never showed in his first novel, Happiness.

Based on Ferguson's previous work, which has been awarded the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour twice, one might expect a wacky caper with Keystone Cops music jangling in your head.

But by the time a man who has lost everything to the Great Depression jumps from a bridge into a dry river bed, you know you are in different territory. Darker still is the rise of the Nazis, a crescendo Ferguson returns to throughout the story.

Ferguson, who counts St. Andrews among the many Canadian homes he has had, has always been brash and confident, and here it's a quiet confidence, unburdened by the need for a joke. It's a pleasure to ride with our sort-of-heroes in their 1939 Nash Ambassador.

The book, broken into four sections, is strongest in its opening and closing pages. Early on we learn about McGreary's upbringing at the hands of his increasingly eccentric father, who blows his meagre pay on the 1930s version of the Nigerian e-mail scam.

We learn that Jack is a genius at math. Combined with a large, awkward build that leads people to assume he is an athletic know-nothing, he has the perfect makings of a confidence man - quick-thinking and able to disappear in plain sight.

In the middle sections, we learn along with McGreary about numerous swindles and some of the legends who have mastered them over the years. This does not work as well as the rest of the book - there is much chit-chat and never much at stake - but learning the con games is always a treat. Spanish Fly is the name of a supposed aphrodisiac, and Jack finds a loophole in the law when he advertises sugar pills as "Guaranteed 100% placebo!"

Like Spanish Fly, most of the swindles are simple and charming, and many of them would never work today given security cameras and cellphone records.

Yet others have carried into the modern world - one scam mentioned in passing is essentially Enron, and Virgil dreams of a city based on cons, where sin and sizzle are so prevalent nobody notices they are giving their money away. He never says, "And what happens there stays there," but he might as well.

An ending that centres on an elaborate "long con" is almost obligatory but it works, in large part because we have grown to like Jack, who maintains just enough morality throughout - he mails cash to his father, he recognizes the danger of the Nazis while America sleeps - that it is hard to see him as a villain.

Have we been duped? Perhaps. But, like a good magic trick, sometimes it's fun to be conned.

Telegraph-Journal
September 15, 2007