Trafford Publishing: Ayesha, My Queendom Come

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Ayesha, My Queendom Come

by John Brinckman

315 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #04-1564; ISBN 1-4120-3776-X; US$21.97, C$25.26, EUR18.04, £12.63

A young Ottawa girl finds a copy of H. Rider Haggard's 1888 bestseller She in the old Carnegie library and finds a strategy for life.

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About the Book About the Author Reviews Excerpts Catalogue Information

About the Book

A police officer falls in love with a beautiful and courageous young woman without realizing that she is a killer. Hattie considers murder to be good for the planet Earth, for the goddess Gaia, whom she calls Ayesha, and to be consistent with Kant's Metaphysicis of Ethics when limited to one's enemies, and those who are in her way.
Here are a couple of quotes that give her point of view:
From page 45:
She took another glass from the bottle of white wine Song had ordered. "We changed, we naked apes, with the domestication of animals. We forgot we were one of them; we invented religions, Hebrew, Christian, and Moslem, which placed us at the centre of things; we invented a god who gave us a license to see animals as things to be used. We became alienated from nature...now the world is in crisis and the Earth Goddess, known by the ancient Greeks as Gaia, and by the Semitic peoples as Asheera, or as I know her, Ayesha, is troubled." She was silent for a moment, pensive.
Page 80:
"I don't think much of human beings," Alice told Narcisse, switching to English. "They have this quaint idea that they are the centre of the universe. Science and religion encourage this bizarre notion. I would sooner kill a human than a pig. And eat one, too. Animals have dignity and should be allowed to keep it; human beings have very little. Apres moi. And there are too many of them, humans, I mean. The population grows like a tumour and is choking the life out of the planet Earth." "Killing Gaia, you mean. Are you familiar with James Lovelock's theory that all life on earth is symbiotic?" "Yes," she said, and thought to herself, but it is more than that, the rocks, the sea, and the air are part of it, and I know her by another name, Ayesha, and it is not just a theory. She is divine but I am not going to discuss that with a scientist.
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Reviews

As a young man I remember thrilling to the phantasmagorical novels of A. Merritt, like Ship of Ishtar, and the novel She by H. Rider Haggard, the fantastical story of an immortal white Queen. Brinckman, owes a huge debt to H. Rider Haggard, as he tells the tale of a modern woman from Ottawa who, as a neglected and abused child discovers the novel She, and interprets and adopts a passage from the novel, which she takes to mean that it's alright to kill anyone who stands between her and what she desires. At twelve she kills her drunken mother's abusive boyfriend, and lets her mother take the rap and go to prison. At fourteen she kills two girls, a former close friend and the girl who broke up their relationship. Her father is a member of motorcycle gang, and she quickly learns about keeping books for the club as well as the intricacies of money laundering. She eventually steals half her father's assets and rips off the Hells Angels for some twenty million dollars. Faking her own death, she heads for a Caribbean Island where she discovers an isolated tribe that immediately worship her as the reincarnation of their long dead leader. As with Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, absolute power corrupts and the girl, now known as Ayesha, becomes involved in voodoo and her subjects in cannibalism. The melodramatic happenings are told in a calm narrative voice and the pace is excellent. The downside is that Brinckman tells a little too much about a multitude of subjects, ranging from voodoo rituals, to turning cocoa leaves into cocaine, to money laundering. Still, this is an entertaining novel.
-W.P. Kinsella (Books in Canada)

The story begins in Ottawa where a troubled young girl named Hattie discovers a copy of ''She'' in her local library. One passage gives her a strategy for escaping the economic and social confines of her life. In it, Ayesha decides that a rival must die, even if her only sin was to stand between the queen and her desire.
''That made good sense to the young girl and she adopted it as a moral maxim,'' Brinckman writes. ''She made changes to the Lord's Payer, including the words, 'O Ayesha, my queendom come.' She said this prayer at night before going to sleep and it was a comfort to her.''
It also sets her on a path that inevitably leads to her undoing. Along the way - through numerous changes of identity and location - she manages to accrue a small fortune, always at someone else's expense. Eventually, she arrives on a Caribbean island in search of new prey. She finds much more, including a tribe that sees her as the reincarnate of a beloved former leader -- her queendom has come, or so she believes.
Threading through the novel is the story of Theodore, a former police inspector who falls in love with Hattie - oblivious to her true character and crimes, past and future. Their fateful reunion much later leaves him no wiser. ''I have never run into an evil woman,'' he tells a Caribbean waiter years earlier. ''But Theodore, the mystery of evil is that what you calls evil, maybe is not evil to some, but good? Who knows for sure what is the difference.''
Although this is the first novel by Toronto-based Brinckman - the founder and publisher of ''Old Fart'' magazine - he maintains the flow of plot and character development with few stylistic diversions, while drawing readers into a world of bikers and money launders, cocaine dealers and cannibals. There's also a generous offering of sex, voodoo practices and (Brinckman being Canadian) ice hockey.
Such as wide swath requires a lot of infilling, and it's here that the book benefits from Brinckman*s extensive research. While too much information can mask a weak narrative, this isn't the case with ''Ayesha.'' In fact, the rich descriptions are a welcome respite that allows to the story line to settle in the readers' mind and build anticipation for the events ahead - of which there are many.
- Gordon Isfeld, Midwest Review

Haggar's Ayesha is Gaia?
This is the story of a woman who commits a number of murders, steals $20,000,000 from the Hells Angels, and ends up queen of a forgotten tribe on a tropical island. As a young girl she reads H.Rider Haggard's She in a dusty library and begins to worship the immortal queen, Ayesha, She who must be obeyed.
The protagonist is a woman who lives by ethical principles, induced from Ayesha's vegetarianism and penchant for removing people who are in the way. These ethics she believes to be essential for all mankind if current life forms on the planet are to survive human population explosion. She believes Ayesha could be a manifestation of Gaia.
However her ethics, thousands of years older than contemporary ethics, religious or secular, conflict with them, and with today's principles of justice, so she is doomed. (English philosopher, John Gray's book Straw Dogs, is quoted in the frontispiece: ''Ideas of justice are as timeless as fashion in hats''). Her life might be considered a tragedy in the classic sense. The psychiatrist at the conclusion of the book considers her a psychopath, a condition he describes definitively in the Prologue. I don't agree: she lives by a set of ethics that could save the planet if adopted by all mankind. In her inevitable doom, she could be compared to Jesus, who today would probably be diagnosed schizophrenic.
A philosophical novel inside a fascinating adventure story.
-Review Posted on Amazon.com and Amazon.ca

''Not surprisingly with such a title there is a strong use of the personality and generous references to Haggard's book. Brinckman has moved the Ayesha character into a modern cold-blooded woman who kills to get what she wants. Mix in gangsters and drugs, an exotic Caribbean island and some likeable characters and you have a very modern story. Told in an easy going style which reminds us of Haggard, the reader can quickly become immersed in the plot: at least I did!''
Roger Allen The Rider Haggard Society Journal

About the Author

Photo by Sir Christian Grotrian, Bart
John Brinckman is a graduate of McGill University, where he was a contemporary and classmate of Leonard Cohen, who kind of left him behind as a United States destroyer might pass a flotsam of sea garbage. He has worked variously (in alphabetical order) as an actor, antique salesman, art dealer, beekeeper, coffee house proprietor/folksinger impresario, construction worker, importer, interior decorator, investment analyst, investment portfolio manager, lumber-piler, line-cutter, magazine editor, parking lot attendant, publisher, writer, mail order operator, manufacturer, movie producer, newspaper reporter, orchard grower, 'parent' in a home for exceptional children, parking lot attendant, real estate salesman, screenwriter, security guard, spring water salesman, teacher, and tree-planter. A bum basically. His book, Down North on the Mackenzie with John Buchan and Margaret Bourke-White will be published next year. He is trying to interest publishers in an abridged three volume illustrated edition of Egertoan Ryerson's The Loyalists of America and their Times.

In 1992, with Terry Mosher, better known as Aislin, he founded The Old Fart, a magazine for and about curmudgeons. Terry wisely got out early. Inspired by contempt for Moses Znaimer's Zoomer magazine he recently went on line with the www.oldfartwebpage.com. His dreamy fantastical film script, Arnold, Dog of the North, was ripped off and plagiarized by the Hollywood producer, Ivan Reitman, in his banal Beethoven series.

Excerpts

from Chapter 2

Hattie turned fifteen in May and they moved to a larger house in Rothwell Heights with a view of the Ottawa River. Henry gave her an aluminum canoe for her birthday. That spring and the following summer, Hattie spent most of her time on the river. She loved it. 'The Ottawa is a dark stream, the Ottawa is deep, great hills along the Ottawa, are wrapped in endless sleep,' she would chant to herself as she paddled.
Like most great rivers, and it is a great river - the Ottawa pours a greater volume of water into the St. Lawrence River every year than all the rivers of western Europe combined pour into the Atlantic - wide and slow in places and narrow and rapid in others. The source of the Ottawa in western Quebec has never been found; people have perished trying to find it. There is an endless maze of streams, ponds, swamps, and lakes, that change the direction of their flow from time to time, rendering the source as unknowable as the human heart.
The river narrows into rapids a mile west of the cliff on which the Parliament Buildings stand and tumbles furiously over a short wild waterfall known as the Chaudiere, after chaudière, the French word for copper boiler. Above these rapids the river is so wide and slow it forms a lake, Lake Deschenes. Here and in Brittania Bay people sail their boats. Below the Chaudiere the water widens again; it is muddy and there is a current. It is downstream of the Ottawa sewage plant and not much used for boating. Then it is joined by the Gatineau, a mighty river in its own right, near where Hattie paddled her canoe, about five miles downstream from the Parliament buildings.
There was a little cove with unpainted rickety boathouses, on whose wharves men would sit and drink beer. No one really fished anymore: there were only pike and carp to be caught by trolling and they had an unpleasant flavor. Henry rented one of these boathouses for a fast outboard he used from time to time for trips to the Gatineau, Lachute, and other places on the north or Quebec side of the river. This was where Hattie kept her canoe.
The river was nearly a mile wide at the boathouse and on hot summer days she would bicycle down there, take her canoe out to the middle of the river, strip, and sunbathe out of sight, lying down on the bottom of the canoe. After about half an hour or so she would rouse herself, get back in her jeans and top, and paddle hard against the current to get back. Not many people swam here, but Hattie kept a bathing suit in the boathouse, and would dive in for a quick dip to cool off. She would shower when she got home.
Margot was still smarting from the incident in the rink. She had to have expensive and painful dental work. She and Phyllis conspired to do Hattie a mischief; they were not sure quite what. That summer they found out where she lived and would hide in the woods and spy on her. They made a game of following her, which they did with stealth; Hattie never noticed them. They knew about the canoe and, with the aid of binoculars, established that Hattie sunbathed naked. What a neat trick it would be, they decided, to sneak up on her in an outboard, when she was probably asleep, tip her out of the canoe, and then make off with it, leaving her to swim back to the boathouse naked and pull herself out of the river in front of all the beer-drinking old men.
For this caper they borrowed an outboard that they found pulled up on shore upriver. They did not know who owned it and did not bother to ask. They dawdled for about half a mile upstream, until they saw Hattie paddle out and strip in a channel between two long, thin, deserted islands. They approached and about a hundred yards away cut the engine. Hattie had good ears and she had heard the boat approaching. When the engine was cut, she was tempted to take a look, but she was suddenly convinced that someone was sneaking up on her. She lay absolutely still on the bottom of the canoe, listening. My queendom come, she prayed.
She was just able to hear someone slipping into the water, and heard Phyllis whisper, "Margot, don't forget to grab the painter."
What a couple of oafs, she thought, and waited. When the moment was ripe, she rolled out of the canoe, firmly planted her right hand on Margot's head, and held her underwater. Phyllis dove in to the rescue and seized Hattie by the throat. There was a terrible underwater catfight. Hattie was bitten, scratched, and half drowned. She drew the knife from its sheath on her calf and stabbed both girls, one in the back, the other in the chest.
When she realized that they were dead, she hauled the bodies to the shore of the island feet first, one by one, letting the river carry away their blood. Both had been stabbed in the heart and she watched as the river stained incarnadine, first three, then six, then twelve, then twenty feet downstream. Hattie was not the first murderess to marvel at how much blood the human body held. As she stood there watching the gentle Ottawa take care of it for her, she thought of Lady Macbeth: "Who would have thought the old man to have so much blood in him?"
She swam back for the canoe, letting the outboard drift away on the current. She cut the two painters from each end of the canoe, found two suitable large rocks on the shore of the island and tied them to the girls' feet. Using the canoe with one hand to give her buoyancy, she swam out with the bodies, one by one, to the deep water between the islands, and sank them. She had read somewhere that bodies can fill with gas and become buoyant; they might break free, she thought, so she gave each a few stabs in the belly before letting go. She imagined their bones, stripped of flesh, gut, and cartilage by the sharp teeth of the pike and the soft mouths of the carp, collapsing over time on the river bottom.
She got dressed and paddled the canoe back to the boathouse. No one had seen what had happened. In fact no one knew that Phyllis and Margot had been on the river that day. Their bicycles were found in the woods near the place where they had borrowed the outboard, but no one made a connection. A serial rapist was active in the Ottawa valley that summer and the girls' disappearance was attributed to him.
from Chapter 10

Alice also had a visitor at her table. In another part of the tent René Lachapelle was sitting quietly by himself. Unlike Theodore he identified her positively. He had planned to get in touch with her the next morning, but as she had appeared at the hounfour, he went over to her table. He stood above her for a moment, looking down, a cigarette dangling from a corner of his mouth. She looked back up at him, did not like what she saw, and looked around for Narcisse.
"You don't remember me, Hattie, do you? May I sit down?"
She shrugged indifference. He stubbed his cigarette out on the ground, sat down, and lit another. "I brought two puppies for you, both salt-and-pepper with white throats. Ears and tail were not clipped. You bought Manson from my kennel? You don't remember me then. I didn't breed them myself; I got them from California. They're in a kennel outside Le Havre. Don't worry, they have each other, I would not leave a dog alone. They are social creatures, like us." He had the effrontery to put his hand on her knee.
"Have a drink," said Alice, removing the hand and digging her fingernails into his flesh. "And pour me one. Straight up."
René poured the drinks. "You know, Hattie, I have a day job. I learned to train dogs while working full time for the SQ. I'm an inspector. Rather bad luck for you." He produced his card and passed it over. Hattie glanced at it. The background was blood red. His name and the words Surêté du Quebec were printed in black. "The job took me to North Hatley last September. To a cottage on the east side of Lake Massawippi. Above it, where the old farmhouse stood, there's an abandoned well. I dropped a pebble in it. Long drop." He raised his eyebrows. "Then a funny sort of clunk. Like when you drop something on concrete. No odor that way. I can understand why you shot the dog. Manson would have missed you and you could hardly take him with you on a motorbike."
René knocked back his rum in one shot, and pushed back his chair. He could see Narcisse making his way back to the table. "But, of course, that is only conjecture on my part. I told no one. Still, one call from me and the well would be dug up."
The cata started its strident staccato. René got up, leaned over, and spoke quietly into her ear. "The dogs will be expensive: two hundred thousand dollars each. American dollars. I am staying at the Miramar. Call me tonight or early in the morning."
"I'm sure they're worth it," said Alice evenly, her face white and taut. "I'll call on you tonight late and we'll get the business done. I want to see my dogs. Au revoir."
"Bon. Cette nuit. Au revoir," René nodded to her and then to Narcisse, but didn't wait to be introduced.
"Who was that?" asked Narcisse sitting down, looking at her curiously. "He seems to have made you angry."
"That is the man who has brought me two giant schnauzers from Canada. He didn't breed them himself. He got them from California and I am angry because he is asking too much money for them. Shhh. The ceremony is starting."

Catalogue Information