Five Stars
An exceptional storyteller, TJ Dawe scores with another well-rounded tale full of comic simplicity in A Canadian Bartender at Butlin’s. In the first scene I worried, as Dawe’s character is falling while reeling off what seemed to be a bunch of nonsense. But once he woke from the dream, the story immediately pulled me in. No detail was too small, and as it turned out, none were irrelevant.
Likening the appearance of the Heimlich manoevre to buggery and “hard-wired
Canadian politeness” enabling the unwitting to literally die from embarrassment,
Dawe is a genius for taking obvious everyday comparisons and displaying their
humour. This is particularly apparent in the different use of words between
the United Kingdom and North America – amazing how important the surrounding
society’s definition of “fanny” can be to a traveling stranger.
Ingrid Paulsen
Victoria News
August 29 2003
