Hudson’s Lorne Elliott has toiled most of his adult life trying to make people laugh – and succeeding splendidly. Stand-up comic, writer/performer of satiric and impious songs, creator of landmark Quebec plays such as Culture Shock, producer of TV variety shows, and long-time host of CBC radio’s sadly missed Madly Off In All Directions, Elliott has decided to try his hand at the serious stuff of novella writing.
So why would the iconic and instantly recognizable comic musician who once spoofed Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” with “tea and oranges that come all the way from Steinberg’s” want to dip his comedic pen in such untested waters? Why would the consummate joker who produced an Elvis persona, lacking a nose from coke use, nasally mouthing “Love Me Tender,” not be content to sit on his laurels rather than take a chance on The Fixer-Upper?
“The publisher asked me if I had something for them,” Elliott says with a self-deprecating laugh. “I had the play (Tourist Trap) … and I thought it was going to be fairly easy. I thought: ‘Okay, I can do that.’ Changing a play I’d already written into a novel seemed to me possible to do. You’ve got the form, the plot, the characters. You’ve got lots already done for you.”
The genesis for Tourist Trap originally and The Fixer-Upper novella adaptation springs from Elliott’s passion for Canada’s East Coast. Not only did he attend Memorial University in Newfoundland (where he met his wife/agent/manager/driver/general factotum Françoise) but he also performs annually in Charlottetown, P.E.I., and maintains a home there.
The Fixer-Upper tells the tale of one Bruno MacIntyre, who decides to take advantage of P.E.I.’s new “in” place cachet and metamorphose his dilapidated cottage into a money-making rental-with-a-view-of-the-bay for tourists. When he turns to his caustic and acerbic Aunt Tillie for help in securing tenants, things don’t quite turn out the way Bruno intended.
While Elliott has headed into new territory, genre-wise, with the publication of this novella, he doesn’t feel that what he was trying to achieve is all that much different than what he has been doing all along in his plays.
“My type of reader is like the guy who comes to my shows,” he says. “Somebody who doesn’t usually come to theatre because it just doesn’t speak to them. A bunch of actors on stage doing something academic. If I can sell it to my brother, if I can give it to him and he can pass it on, then I’ll have something with legs.
“Chesterton said of Dickens: ‘He didn’t write what the public wanted – he wanted what the public wanted.’ My art, for want of a better word, is more informed by the public than maybe I’d like to admit. I’m always reading stuff for an audience, for a real bunch of people who paid to see me that night. That’s got to affect how I see things and what I allow myself.”
Elliott isn’t making any promises but the idea of turning plays into novels or novellas is something that he would definitely consider doing again.
“To make a seamless story like that with no feeling that anything is being crow-barred into place,” he says, “and that would stand up on its own – on the stage and on the page … yeah, there’s a little corner there that hasn’t been fully explored yet.”
Join Lorne Elliott for the Quebec launch of his book The Fixer-Upper Saturday, Dec. 12, between 3 and 5 pm at the A temps perdu bookstore in Hudson, 76 Cameron. Tel: 450-458-1458 c/o Camille. Or check their site. There will a reading and some time to socialize with the guests. For further info, contact: Françoise Doliveux at 450-458-2480. Or e-mail: fran@lorne-elliott.com.
For a taste of Elliott’s stand up, check out this YouTube appearance.
