Tuesday, October 9, 2007

Late Nights on Air

Late Nights on Air revolves around four main characters – Dido Paris, Harry Boyd, Gwen Symon, and Eleanor Dew. They all work at the CBC radio station, and have come North to leave something behind.

Dido and Eleanor are escaping unworkable marriages. Dido married a man younger than herself, only to fall in love with someone much older – her father-in-law. Eleanor had the misfortune to love a man who did not want to consummate their union. Harry returns North, disgraced after an unsuccessful jump to TV. Gwen, younger than the rest, is the only one who has not married. She arrives with a bruised throat. Yellowknife, she thinks, is “a place where anyone could make a fresh start.”

But it’s also a place that can get to you after a while, as it did to Eleanor’s former roommate, “who’d decided suddenly she couldn’t face one more day in Yellowknife.” Another says, “Winter here does terrible things to people. You’ll find out.” People depart as suddenly as they arrive. More than one character disappears in the blink of an eye.

Overlaid against all this local colour are a couple of fantastic themes. One is the story of John Hornby, whose death in the Thelon in 1927 has reached an almost mythical status. Gwen, who has read The Legend of John Hornby several times, reminds Harry of Edgar Christian, who died with Hornby. There is so much musing about that fateful event that a canoe trip to the Thelon is inevitable. Naturally we expect the worst.

The other fantastic theme is pure myth, the story of Queen Dido of Carthage. Our present-day Dido is the olive-skinned daughter of a Latin teacher, raised in Europe and come to Canada to cause confusion in the hearts of men and women, perhaps because she herself is romantically (and possibly sexually) ambivalent. While she waits in Yellowknife, hoping for the arrival of her father-in-law, she becomes involved with two men. One of them is Eddy, a technician at the station and former Viet Nam vet, who arrived in Yellowknife one day on a whim. He is, of course, the story’s Aeneas.

The portrayal of Yellowknife was excellent. I also liked learning about the workings of a radio station – the pots and carts and stings, and editing tape the old-fashioned way, with a razor, and how to create different sound effects, like using corn starch to simulate walking across snow. I liked the way the author investigated the intimacy and isolation of radio broadcasting, announcers alone in a darkened room speaking to an invisible audience. "Extroverted introverts," one character calls them.

More Yellowknife

Late Nights on Air came out around the same time as my own novel, Yellowknife. They share some interesting similarities:

  • Both take place at pivotal periods in the history of resource extraction in the North. In Late Nights on Air it's oil, in Yellowknife it's diamonds.
  • A Japanese adventurer pops up in both books, and John Hornby, who is frequently mentioned in Late Nights on Air, makes an actual appearance in Yellowknife.
  • Both novels culminate in a trip that heads off in the same direction -- the Thelon in Hay's book, the East Arm of Great Slave Lake in mine. Both trips end in a similar fashion.

Other books of interest, in no particular order:

Yellowknife by Ray Price. An entertaining history of Yellowknife.

Solomon Gursky Was Here by Mordecai Richler. A visit to Yellowknife and a survivor of the lost Franklin expedition are just two elements of this many-faceted novel.

A Discovery of Strangers by Rudy Wiebe. An historical novel about Franklin's disastrous journey through the area in 1820.

Snow Man by Malcolm Waldron. A classic account account of John Hornby in the Arctic.

The Third Suspect by Staples & Owens, and Dying for Gold by Selleck & Thompson. Two differing views of the underground murders at Giant Mine in 1992.

Denison's Ice Road by Edith Iglauer. A classic account of one of the pioneers of ice-road construction.

Rogue Diamonds by Ellen Bielawski. Excellent portrayal of the Dene point of view during the diamond negotiations in the 1990s.

Sunday, October 7, 2007

The Terror

The title does admirable double duty, bearing the name of one of Franklin's lost ships and alerting readers they are venturing into the world of horror. At 769 pages it's a typical Simmons offering -- a big smooth page-turner.

The disappearance of Franklin and his 1845 expedition is one of the most enduring mysteries of the North. The two ships have never been found, and the only written communication from the expedition is a single sheet of paper that does little to shed light on what went wrong. In other words, the expedition is a perfect candidate for a fictional re-working. Mordecai Richler briefly exploited it in Solomon Gurski Was Here, but but only in passing. The Terror is the first, I believe, to focus exclusively on the expedition itself.

The book is extensively researched and accounts for all the known facts of the expedition. The endpapers consist of maps showing its route and final movements, and each of the 67 chapters begins with a date and is precisely located by longitude and latitude. Simmons recreates the sights, sounds, and smells of shipboard life, and does a fine job of portraying many of the crew members, especially Captain Francis Crozier -- who, according to Inuit oral history, may have survived many years after the ships were lost.

Almost every character in the book is an actual historical person. Two major exceptions are an Inuk named Lady Silence, and a supernatural creature from Inuit legend, a sort of giant polar bear that dispatches most of the crew members (including Franklin himself) by ripping them apart.

Ken McGoogan (a Franklin scholar and author of Fatal Passage and Lady Franklin's Revenge) noted in the Globe and Mail that the monster could be seen as allegorical -- that is, as an embodiment of all the things that contributed to the expedition's demise, from scurvy to cultural hubris. Since everyone died, the monster must be omnipotent and invincible.

The book has garnered nothing but laudatory reviews since it appeared. Certainly, introducing a monster to a story that is already monstrous is a wonderful conceit. Yet I found myself wishing Simmons had tapped another literary source and recruited a different monster. Frankenstein, if you remember, ends in the Arctic with the monster leaping from a ship and fleeing over the ice -- a monster with vulnerabilities, a monster who (I think) offers far better allegorical possibilities. Even the dates match, the first “popular” edition of Frankenstein coming out in 1831, only 14 years before Franklin set sail. The monster that Simmons created is so over the top (especially the tongue-ripping ceremony) that I found it difficult to suspend my disbelief.

There are other aspects of the novel that are similarly too extreme. Temperatures that plunge to minus 100 degrees, 80-foot pressure ridges, lightning storms as fierce as artillery barrages, hailstones as big as cannonballs, a surreal costume party out on the ice.

And one final gripe. When Franklin sees Lady Silence, his face turns white. He thinks she is Greenstockings, the beautiful Dene woman whom he encountered on his first expedition, and whom two of his officers were prepared to fight a duel over. I was delighted by this development, but (unless I missed it, which is certainly possible), Simmons does not provide an explanation, leaving us to assume that Franklin was mistaken.

The endpapers provide a useful map of the area.