News from the North

It's when you fight your way through the hordes and out of Moscow's metro and walk into Yaroslavsky Station that the sheer scale of the journey starts to really hit you, when you look at the time-zone markers under the diagram of the rail network, and the way those numbers mount up as the track sweeps eastwards: +6, +7, +8. Eight time zones. A third of the world. On the platform, in the night, the #2 "Rossiya" running from Moscow to Vladivostok seems to run on forever, although it's actually only a train of some 20 cars - "wagons" in Russian. Your first-class wagon is near the middle of the train, and your two-bed compartment boasts saffron drapes and mirrors, a selection of Cyrillic-language newspapers, a radio and even a television - although the only channel it gets is CCCCC, the Closed Circuit Corridor Camera Channel, to save you from sticking your neck outside your door. Mikhail and Natalya, your provodnitsas , or car attendants, introduce thems...

So this is Moscow. Eh. You can keep it. Mostly it's a sprawling labyrinth of concrete towers, shopping complexes, BMWs and construction cranes. My timing probably has something to do with my reaction - the Kremlin is closed to the public this week, the Bolshoi is entirely wrapped in scaffolding and canvas - but I'm confident I'd take St. Petersburg over this town any day of any week. There are some cool bits. The metro is indeed magnificent (but its grandeur is threadbare, and it's full of barricades that herd people into seething bottlenecks.) GUM, on Red Square, is surely the world's most beautiful shopping mall (but it's still a shopping mall.) The sculpture garden across from Gorky Park is quite cool (but Gorky Park itself is disappointing; most of it is occupied by a tacky amusement park.) The Kremlin, St. Basil's, and the Alexanderovsky Gardens are a bit like having a colossal fantasyland castle in the heart of the city (but sort of throw the gloomy...

I am posting from an Internet cafe inside St. Petersburg's rather staggering Hermitage Museum. I know, I should probably be looking at art. But one can only walk down so many colossal galleries, passages and corridors, beneath fifty-foot-high ceilings carved and gilded and filigreed and hung with chandeliers the size of Volkswagens, past what seems like half of all the world's classical (ie pre-1920) art, before one needs another breather. To paraphrase my travelling companion M., one gets the sense that Peter the Great took his chief architect to Versailles and the Louvre, then turned to him and said, "You see? Like that. Only much bigger ." I'll probably upload pictures and expand this into a real post tonight. eta: OK, pictures tomorrow. Most Russian internet cafes aren't so good at the extra services. So I could totally live here. I mean, if I spoke Russian. And if it was always summer. It's all monuments and palaces and gardens (not parks) and orna...

Dump any notion you ever had of Russia as a drab and dowdy place. St. Petersburg is swimming in colour, seething with life. I've only been here a day now, but it's already staking a genuine claim to becoming my favourite European city. That despite the fact I got pickpocketed in the metro this morning - for the first time ever anywhere - amidst the press of the shoulder-to-sholder crowd. Fear not, all I lost was a day's spending money (R800/US$30); my ID, credit cards, and US$ stash are tucked away rather more securely. And a good thing too. The puppet theatre where I am staying is, alas, closed for renovations. (Had I known this, I would have stayed elsewhere, but it's comfortable enough in a Stalinist-hostel kind of way. I have my own room; I'm kinda too old for dorm beds nowadays.) Arrival Mild culture shock hit before I ever got out of the airport: I ordered a Pepsi to change money, and got a Pepsi Cappucino, coffee flavour cola, which tastes pretty much like...

No matter how often I travel, the day before I'm always hit with a sudden panicky bolt of holy crap I'm going to _____ tomorrow! And today is such a day. In this case the blank is filled in by "Los Angeles." No, that wouldn't normally cause such panic, or indeed count as travel at all - but this time I'm taking the Long Way Round. In particular, I'll be going entirely overland from St. Petersburg to Shanghai, primarily via the Trans-Mongolian branch of the Trans-Siberian Railway. I'm reasonably prepared. I have acquired visas, and booked flights, and accommodations for the first few nights, and even train tickets for the first few and last few legs. But, er, I haven't actually packed yet. Hey, there's always tomorrow morning, and it's not like I carry much with me. I'll be blogging and hopefully flickring from along the way, as time and availability of Latin-alphabet keyboards permit.

Today I am a man podcaster .

Believe it or not, there's a (slightly mixed but mostly positive) review of IA in the mighty Economist this week. They dissed (and if you ask me, kind of missed the point of) the second half, but I am still exceedingly pleased: Danielle Leaf, Mr Evans's protagonist, is not a professional spy, but an everywoman. An anti-globalisation activist, she is suddenly thrown into a violent and dangerous world where she must draw on every reserve of skill and courage to stay alive. Mr Evans is a vivid guide to the shrill, self-righteous universe of the anti-globalisation movement. He is strong on street-fighting tactics, how to deploy the violent anarchist avant-garde against the police, and on the intricacies of computer hacking. Yet curiously, a promising plot about a cynical mining corporation falters about halfway through the book, giving it a sense of peaking too early. The second part, in which Danielle and her hacker friend Keiran are tortured and held prisoner on a boat controlle...

Not that HarperCollins told me about any of these - don't they have a clipping service? - fortunately, I have a friend who works for the CanWest empire. Calgary Herald: If you're the sort to get easily paranoid, you may want to approach Jon Evans' latest book with caution. [...] Evans has created a new genre, the travelogue as fast-paced action thriller. Invisible Armies is certainly fun, with its quirky characters and lively plot, but it is also a smart and thoughtful look at the politics of activism, the pervasive power of big business and the global street war that is being waged between the two. Vancouver Province: Montreal-based Jon Evans weaves the unlikely components of globalization and corporate exploitation of the Third World into an unpredictable, frightening thriller. [...] There's a kind of appealing chaos theory to Evans' books, which tend to unfold in ways surprising to veteran thriller readers who think they can figure out where things are going. G...

I've gone and added a links page to my site, full of the smiling faces of various colourful friends of mine. Haven't updated the site menus yet, so for now you can only get there from here.

Am back from a whirlwind month (Muskoka, London, Paris, Cape Cod) and expecting another in September (London, Sweden, the Trans-Siberian) but August will be quiet. Which is good, 'cause I got a whole lotta Book Four work to do. While I was away, Quill & Quire (sort of Canada's answer to Publisher's Weekly) ran a very nice review of Invisible Armies . Meanwhile, in Australia, my publisher Hachette (motto: 'We Also Make Cruise Missiles') has issued a Publisher's Promise for Invisible Armies , which, is, basically, a money-back guarantee; if you buy it and don't like it, they'll refund the purchase price. This special label will only ever appear on a select few titles that we are confident readers will enjoy, they say. I am pleased. And my hometown newspaper ran a (front-page!) feature on me. A fair-use sample: To Evans, truth isn't necessarily stranger than fiction. But it certainly does make for great fiction material. The 33-year-old Waterloo ...

Attention Canadians: Chapters/Indigo have decided in their infinite wisdom that Invisible Armies is a "Great Summer Read", meaning you get 20% off if you buy it now. Also, Blood Price has just come out in mass-market (pocket-book) paperback, with a really cool cover that alas is not yet online. Now back to the World Cup semifinals. Let's just not talk about the accuracy of my quarterfinal picks.

I just sent the first (OK, third, but first for public consumption) draft of my fourth novel, set in Africa and very tentatively titled Absolute Darkness , off to my UK agent and publisher. Sure hope they like it. As always at this stage I have lost all perspective and have no idea whether they will or not. But enough about work. Let's talk about the important stuff: the World Cup quarterfinals. Argentina-Germany : This should be a good game - the hosts, who have rampaged over all opposition, against a team so classy and dangerous it leaves Carlos Tevez and Lionel Messi on the bench. The teams have similar records here, having both scored ten goals and conceded four. But don't let that fool you into thinking they're evenly matched. Germany did this against Costa Rica, Poland, Ecuador, and a Swedish team that failed to score against Trinidad and Tobago; Argentina has played Holland, Mexico, and a bloody good Cote d'Ivoire team. Despite Germany's home advantage I'...

Just a quick and cheerful note: I've accepted an offer from St. Martin's Press , one of the largest publishers in America, for the US rights to Invisible Armies . They will probably publish it in hardcover in spring 2007.

The 535 up Avenue du Parc is jammed full of people in winter; in spring, though, with so many Montrealers on foot or bicycle, it's usually easy to get a seat. It's only a ten-minute ride from my 'hood to Van Horne. The gym itself is in the building right on the corner, but it's virtually impossible to find. You go through a back entrance, down a graffiti-covered alley which sets off all your "you are about to be mugged" street-smarts alarms the first time you follow it, to the unmarked door with no handle. Once inside the semi-abandoned building - once a factory? a warehouse? - the air is musty. Debris and abandoned furniture litter the stairwell. From above you hear violent rhythmic thumps, and the first time you probably presume it's the sound of gloves hitting bags in the boxing gym that is your destination ... so you're a little surprised when you ascend to the second-story stairs and see a crowd of slender young women furiously flamenco-dancing aw...

My article on the city of Goma in has been published in The Walrus .

That monstrous machine called the publishing industry is about to extrude another book of mine. Advance reading copies of Invisible Armies have been released into the wild, and the book will officially be on sale in Canada at the end of this month, which in practice probably means you can expect it in bookstores in early May. Or, of course, you can buy it from Amazon.ca or Indigo.ca . If you're on the wrong side of the Atlantic, you'll have to wait a couple months yet . Meanwhile, I also have an article appearing in the May issue of The Walrus , and I've just finished the first draft of my next book, tentatively titled Absolute Darkness , and set in Africa.

When I left the continent in 1998, I told people "I love Africa, but it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better." Score one for me. I didn't really understand why , though. Now I think I do. (Long, political, may piss you off.) Go for a long walk through rural Kenya, or a town in Rwanda, or downtown Lusaka, or just about anywhere in poor Africa, and at some point one or more of a group of children will approach you to say "Give me money," "Donnes-moi d'argent." Not beggars, I hasten to add; they're not there on the street looking for rich people; they're just hanging out, playing, and when they see you, they rush to make their appeal. It's easy, and wrong, to generalize from that to Africa-looking-for-a-handout. The famous "culture of dependency," the notion that white people screwed up the place, so white people should throw money around to fix it. That culture of dependency certainly does exist; and Western gove...

In case you were collectively curious, I survived the Dark Continent, yet again, and am back in Canada, grinding away on Book Four.

Before dinner last night I built an appetite by climbing Table Mountain, which is both the symbol of Cape Town and its literal heart: the city encircles the mountain, which rises 1000 steep metres from the sea to an almost perfectly flat top. From the lower cable car station, it's theoretically a 2.5-hour hike: I'm pleased to report that I ascended in just under half that time. There's life in the ol' leg muscles yet, even though they were already battered from cycling 50 hilly, rainy K from Simon's Town to Cape Point and back, a few days ago. The mountain claims several lives every year, and you're not really supposed to climb alone, but I took a straightforward route up, figuring that if Reinhold Messner could summit Everest solo without oxygen during monsoon season, I could conquer Table Mountain singlehanded. As I reached the tabletop, the clouds that often line it - the mountain's famous tablecloth - were just beginning to arrive, so I only got twenty m...

I swear, I could look at the sea all day. They say most accidents occur within a mile of home. Following that rule, the closest I came to smashing up my hire 1 car was within about 100 metres of AroundAboutCars, the company that foolishly gave me one. As I very gingerly tried to conduct a wrong-side-of-the-road stick-shift for the second time ever, and the first time in 2.5 years, through busy Cape Town traffic, I turned into a side street and found myself on a one-way street, with a minivan barreling towards me. It screeched to a stop maybe six inches away from my front bumper. I froze a moment, then looked up at the driver with apologetic, pleading eyes, sure that I was the one at fault. Then I looked more closely at the street signs and parked cars. He had been going the wrong way. I opened my mouth to shout something - I'm not sure what exactly, but it was going to begin with "Hey, asshole!" - but my near-collidant was already reversing away at high speed. He near...