A royal farce: a satire envisions Canada with a native son as King.

King John of Canada Scott Gardiner Douglas Gibson Books 322 pages, hardcover ISBN 9780771033094

Let's face it. It would be almost impossible for any credible author to train his or her eye on the current Canadian political landscape and not write satire. Our regionalism, federalism, provincialism and pretty much every other "ism" one can name provide ample ammunition with which to assail the ticks and foibles of the true north strong and free. One glance at Stephen Harper or St,phane Dion should get the invective flowing. Not that this country's previous decades have been any less ridiculous or frustrating. In fact, there is a lineage of Canadian satire, which ranges from Stephen Leacock's pastoral but deceptively amiable musings to Mordecai Richler's epic take on Canadian identity in Solomon Gursky Was Here to Thomas King's Green Grass, Running Water. Canucks, it seems, like to take their outrage sitting down, preferably with a book in hand.

Scott Gardiner's King John of Canada is intended to follow in such illustrious footsteps. His debut novel, The Dominion of Wyley McFadden, was a finalist for the 2000 Books in Canada First Novel Award and, as in his first offering, King John of Canada's narrator is a garrulous and digressive personality with an axe to grind. His nickname is "Blue" and the reader first meets him holed up during winter in a ramshackle Muskoka cabin, burning its library and furniture for warmth while frantically writing down a secret history of Canada's first monarch. King John, we learn, was a man who ascended to power on the strength of a lottery win and who saved the country from itself using a combination of down-home cunning and bold-faced bluffing.

As far as satiric premises go, it's a promising one, and in keeping with the dramatic technique known as the "Happy Idea" perfected by ancient Greek playwrights such as Aristophanes, who, writing during the world's first democracy, created political satire for an audience that was involved in the political process. Put simply: the Happy Idea is a fantastic exaggeration, a giddy bit of wish fulfillment, a loony "what if?" that reveals the absurdity of its real-life counterpart. Witness Aristophanes's Lysistrata, the Happy Idea being, "What if women held a sex strike to end the Peloponnesian war?" The Happy Idea in King John of Canada is "What if Canada got itself a real home-grown monarch?" The answer? Toronto separatism, Quebec turfed, American decay and a blizzard of Byzantine political fallout. This potential, however, is not realized, despite the fact that Gardiner can turn a phrase (for example, his reference to "the pheromonal pull of tax reduction") and he has a sharp, skewed imagination. King John of Canada's clever inventions, such as the "Osprey Guard," a naval vessel dubbed the Hazel McCallion (after the Mississauga mayor) and the "Law of Perpetual Error," get lost in an infuriatingly meandering narrative that is woefully lacking in what folks used to call a "plot."

Blue, the narrator-observer, moves the action back and forth between his time at the cabin--going for walks, falling through ice--and recollections about the reign and meaning of King John. The King is dead, poisoned, and Canada in a confused state, and so Blue spins it out with little attention paid to the flow of events. "History, in my line of work, is a bank of arguments retained against the future," Blue tells us early on in King John. "A reservoir to draw from if you prefer, not to add to. As to this strange new fascination with the present, this brazen obsession to inflict you with my day-to-day irrelevance, think of it along the lines of Julie Andrews's spoonful of sugar."

The trouble is there is very little sweet or engaging about Blue. His tone is confessional, casual and littered with grinding platitudes and maxims such as "People think in patterns" and "We men so often presume allegiance of the women under us, don't we?" Blue is a windy, self-satisfied fellow, and this makes him more suited to be a peripheral character than the narrator. It's likely that Gardiner was well aware of Blue's flaws while writing King John. One gets the sense of an author intentionally pushing the conventional narrative limits. The attempt, however, fails. While there are many examples of flawed narrator-observers who successfully drive their novels forward, Gatsby's Nick Carraway and Marlow from Conrad's Heart of Darkness being two of the best, they tend to be fully realized people with whom readers can sympathize. The strength of the narrator-observer is that he is there, our proxy, objectively showing us the facts as they unfold.

Blue, however, is not a fully crafted being. Like many of the characters in King John of Canada, he is a mile wide and two inches deep. As the book progresses, we are slowly, in dribs and drabs, introduced to King John, his wife, Gwen, his lover, Hester Vale (mayor of Toronto), and his arch-enemy, the mercurial, right-wing publishing magnate Theodore Sapper. We hear about them but we learn little.

The result of King John's digressive narrative is a reader who feels as though he is sitting in class listening to Blue deliver a rather thin history lesson that zigs and zags at random. There is a lack of any kind of suspense or anticipation. In stand-up comedy vernacular, it's all punch line and no setup. Characters are recounted and there is little description of place, with the exception of the Muskoka cabin. It is tell, tell, tell and precious little show.

At one point, Blue, while bemoaning the "total absence of political fiction," alludes to the work of American writer Robert Penn Warren (author of All the King's Men) and British icon Graham Greene (The Heart of the Matter, The Quiet American). It is perhaps the most unintentionally ironic moment in the book, as both these writers were masters of intricate populist plots that hooked the reader. Their greatest skill, Greene's in particular, lay in their ability to weave their political jabs into narratives that were quintessentially 19th century in their structure and chronology.

Unfortunately, King John of Canada's pointed satire, Gardiner's take on Toronto alienation, the Quebec question, the machinations of our bizarre political system, his eye for detail (a writer is described as "one of those mid-list, middlebrow, sari-clad women from the period when Mistry and Rushdie had made Indian writing hot") is derailed by the book's fatal narrative weakness. "Every telling twists the tale, it's said; an observation especially true for those of us employed in doing the twisting," Blue maintains. True enough, but first and foremost there has to be a tale, complete with beginning, middle and end. Otherwise, as another would-be king says, it's all sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Andrew Clark is a contributing editor for The Walrus. His last book, A Keen Soldier: The Execution of Second World War Private Harold Pringle (Knopf, 2002), was nominated for the 2003 Governor General's Award for Non-Fiction.