by Wendy Hawkin | Dec 3, 2018 | Book Review, Canadian writers
Vicious bikers. The Irish mob. A family of squatters. A clever police detective. Death Count 26.
Some landscapes summon evil and once there, it lingers. Ragged Lake was a German POW camp during World War II, and then a mill town owned by O’Hearn Forest Products. Now, in its death throws, it’s transformed into something you don’t ever want to encounter, except perhaps in fiction.
Ron Corbett is a rare breed: journalist and poet. His detailed knowledge of war, of crime, of people and their nightmarish capabilities, fuses with a talent for sensory language and visceral description to lift the story off the page. Like a shotgun blast. This is a crime novel and something else—a genre called “rural noir”—a black day in the country and no picnic. Corbett writes in omniscient third-person mixing viewpoints to create a fast-paced, plot-driven, page-turner. The characters don’t change—there’s no time for that.
It begins with a triple murder. Special Forces soldier Guillaume Roy, his woman, Lucy Whiteduck, and their little girl, Cassandra, are murdered in the ramshackle cabin they built on the shore of Ragged Lake. They are squatters on O’Hearn land and keep to themselves as much as possible. Much of the backstory is revealed through the journal Lucy leaves with an old Cree woman three days before her murder: her not-so-idyllic childhood living in the Five Mile lumber camp run by O’Hearn, where her Cree father was foreman; her intimate connections with the Irish mob from Corktown; her therapy sessions; her relationship with Roy, and their escape into the wilderness. There, by the shore of Ragged Lake, for a moment, Lucy experiences peace: “Love. Work. Family. The fine high rise of that. Those were our days.”
Burley police detective, Frank Yakabuski comes to investigate the murders with two young Ident officers. Yakabuski discovers that the Popeyes are operating a giant methamphetamine lab in the defunct survival school. He figures the squatters found the lab and were executed by the bikers. Perhaps. But that, as the cliché goes, is only the tip of the exploding iceberg.
Ottawa author, Ron Corbett says: “If you’re a writer, whether fiction or non-fiction, unless you’re writing about a place that you’re familiar with and that’s important to you, I don’t know why you’re doing it.” Corbett has spent his life travelling and writing about the Ottawa Valley and Algonquin Highlands. Because he’s created a “fictionalized Northern Divide” all the time I was reading, I kept wondering where I was. Now I know. Ragged Lake lies on the southern border of Algonquin Park—one of my favourite places in the world. In 2000, Corbett camped there and wrote a newspaper feature based on his experiences. The author is most known for The Last Guide, his autobiography of Frank Kuiack, Algonquin Park’s last remaining fishing guide. In Ragged Lake, Corbett takes his experiences as a journalist and spins them into fiction.
photo from http://algonquinadventures.com
Corbett is also well acquainted with war stories, having written First Soldiers Downabout Canada’s deployment to Afghanistan. Both Detective Yakabuski and Special Ops Guillaume Roy bear the grisly scars of war and military training. Sometimes it’s hard to read. Roy’s experience in Bosnia, for example, is almost too real.
Toronto publisher, ECW, uses the acronym “Extreme Cutting-Edge Writing” and that’s what you’ll find here. Grisly, raw, evocative fiction based on experience and a sense of place…and what a place.
As reviewed in the Ottawa Review of Books, December 2018
by Wendy Hawkin | Nov 10, 2018 | Book Review
Seventeen-year-old Skye Thorne plays with paranormal. Though she pretends to be a psychic—like Sherlock Holmes, Skye uses her observation skills to wangle her way through tarot card readings. Legally named Candi, by her strange, single mom, Skye needs the cash to escape to New York after graduation. She’s made plans with her wealthy best friend, Drew. Skye and her mom live on the poor side of this small Midwestern town, and though she works shifts at Burger Barn, and earns lunch tickets by helping in the milk and cookies counsellor’s office, Skye hasn’t saved a cent. Though, she has accrued a fair amount of information about her peers, since she has access to their files.
A strong female protagonist, with questionable moral values, Skye Thorne has a barbed sense of right and wrong. A part of me wants her to be a “good girl” and do the right thing; instead, Cook has given us a real girl with flaws and real-world problems.
Money is what motivates Skye to participate in the kidnapping of Paige Bonnet, whose rich father is a judge and Senate-hopeful. Newsflash: Paige is no “good girl” either. Skye’s task is to lie and manipulate her way into working with the police as a psychic, to drop just the right hints at just the right time to ensure Paige’s plans succeed. With her experience, it should have been easy. Unfortunately, Judge Bonnet refuses to pay his daughter’s ransom, and then, a body turns up. When Skye’s annoying mother weasels her way into the case, the whole thing turns upside down…like “the hanging girl”.
Skye must solve the crime before her deception is revealed and fingers start pointing in her direction; otherwise, the hanging girl could easily become the hanged girl.
A dark murder mystery, The Hanging Girl is also an American teen novel, with all its angst, tragic twists, and social stigma. Eileen Cook, known for her YA thrillers, grew up in Michigan (like Skye Thorne) but now calls Vancouver home. She teaches writing at Simon Fraser University Writer’s Studio Program and works as an editor—facts that are illustrated in her prose. Written in first person and peppered with references to teen life, the reader becomes immersed in Skye’s contemporary world of Amazon, Pop-Tarts, and Diet Coke. But, beneath the mundane allusions lies something sinister. Cook once worked counselling people with “catastrophic injuries and illness” which might account for some of the psychological Girl on a Train vibe in this novel.
In the end, this book left me mulling over tragic Shakespearian heroines and wondering: what’s a girl willing to do to survive?
Eileen Cook won the John Spray Mystery Award in 2018 for The Hanging Girl. Congratulations, Eileen Cook!
As posted in The Ottawa Review of Books December 2017 edition
by Wendy Hawkin | Nov 9, 2018 | Book Review
Two best friends with differing social backgrounds. A senior year trip to Italy. A charming Italian tour guide. And a fatal accident.
Or was it an accident?
One minute, Jill Charron is anticipating the trip of her dreams, and the next, she awakens in a hospital bed in her hometown. Except six weeks have passed and she has no memory of her romantic Italian adventure. No memory at all. Her lifelong best friend, Simone, is dead—killed when the car Jill was driving careened off a walled road in Tuscany. And then the bomb drops. The Italian police want to extradite Jill Charron and charge her with murder.
Just as an aside, in Greek mythology Charon is the ferryman of Hades who takes the souls of the deceased across the River Styx into the land of the dead. Charon exacted a coin for passage and those who did not pay the fee might be left wandering for a century. Is Jill this Charon? Did she ferry Simone into the land of the dead or leave her wandering on the shore?
The mind is a complex creature. It can protect us by hiding what we can’t accept or bear to know. It can distort things. What really happened on that mountain road in Tuscany? “The truth,” Eileen Cook warns us on the front cover, “is how you tell it.” This need to know “the truth” is what propels the story and keeps the reader turning pages.
Cook leads us through a maze of viewpoints in an attempt to unravel this truth. What I find most interesting about this book is how she accomplishes that. Obviously, Jill lends her first-person perspective to the story—but it is limited by amnesia. She is an unreliable narrator. All Jill can really cling to is the notion that she would never kill her best friend, not “with malice.” It’s just not possible. Others think differently.
The Italian police believe Jill is guilty. She had motive, means, and opportunity. There was nothing wrong with the car, no bad brakes, no steering problem. Jill’s father, a rich businessman, hired a private plane to whisk her away from the hospital in Italy and bring her back to American soil where he could protect her. And, in their mind, this is an admission of guilt. Then, he also hired a hotshot lawyer to defend her and create a public profile. The public are easily swayed and there’s been a media frenzy for weeks.
This psychological mystery is as twisted as the Tuscan streets. We read police interviews with various friends and Simone’s grieving parents, the eulogy for Simone, a forensic psychology report that assesses the girls’ friendship, texts, emails, Facebook posts, media reports, and the extremely damaging Justice for Simone blog. The clever interspersing of these various bursts paints a picture of the relationship between Jill and Simone and fills in some of what occurred during the six weeks leading up to Jill’s awakening. Everyone reveals something—an opinion, a stray fact, an eye-witness report. And we are left wondering if it is possible that Jill IS guilty.
The novel’s unsettling ending bookends the troubling beginning and we are left wringing our hands over this tragedy and wondering what is the truth?
Eileen Cook teaches writing at Simon Fraser University Writer’s Studio Program and works as an editor. Her prose is flawless. In her last life, she counselled people with “catastrophic injuries and illness” something that gives her credibility and insight into Jill’s injuries and recovery process.
As posted in the Ottawa Review of Books November edition.
by Wendy Hawkin | Sep 19, 2018 | Book Review
This little treasure I read in two sittings. How could I not? When I saw it on the library shelf, I was instantly drawn to it. I picked it up and grinned inside and then felt a twinge of fear. It is, after all, a Stephen King story.
I heard the master’s voice lilting in the background as I read—a little Gunslinger drawl—though he had help with this one. Fantasy and horror writer, Richard Chizmar, co-wrote this novella. And it’s illustrated by Ben Baldwin and Keith Minnion. Just look at that cover!
So. Gwendy.
I couldn’t resist the title being that my name is Wendy and I’ve had my own button box forever. Every once in a while I take it out and run my fingers through the buttons. All shapes and colours, some black, some bling. I like the little clattering sound the buttons make as they fall through my fingers. My mother had one before me, and I’ll pass mine on to my daughter. It’s not the same as Gwendy’s though. Mine does not give perfectly detailed and delicious chocolate animals the size of a jelly bean. Or Morgan silver dollars minted in 1851. It doesn’t threaten to blow up continents. Or people. Or places I hate. Or make my life better. Or worse. And mine was not a gift from Mr. Richard Farris in his black suit and black hat with his blue-eyed charm, and gift of palaver. (Gosh, I love that word, palaver. You’ll find it in my own books.)
He points a finger-gun at her: pow. “That’s a good one. You’re a good one, Gwendy. And while we’re at it, what kind of name is that, anyway?”
“A combination. My father wanted a Gwendolyn—that was his granny’s name—and my mom wanted a Wendy, like in Peter Pan. So they compromised.”
I am also the Wendy of Peter Pan. And though my grandmother’s name was Gertrude, I had a great aunt Gwendolyn who my father loved very much. So who knows? I may have narrowly escaped being named Gwendy myself. I have always wanted to fly and jumped off my dad’s armchair once believing I could. “I do believe in faeries. I do. I do. I do.” A friend to faeries, I thought that was all it took. Alas, with no sprinkle of pixie dust, I fell and injured my ankle. Later, I did take flight. As a hawk.
But back to Gwendy and her button box. Read this book. You will like it. It reminds me a little of Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane, which is on my list of all-time favourite books. And the horror I feared would jump out at me every time I turned a page, never did. So, it’s safe enough—though it might make you think. And that can be dangerous for some people. And, there may be a drop or two of blood spilled before the last page. It did, after all, originate in the mind of the master and his friend. Know what I mean?
by Wendy Hawkin | Sep 8, 2018 | Book Review
Pro-wrestlers, scuzzy bikers, a yellow pet python, and a private detective—how does Devlin hold it all together in this gritty page-turning debut novel? With a whole lot of style and a splattering of tongue-in-cheek humour. The characters are highly stylized; their dialogue dazzling. From the first scene, when pro-wrestler Johnny Mamba appeals to his ex-tag-team partner “Hammerhead” Jed Ounstead to find the man who kidnapped his python, right through to the Rocky Balboa ending, Devlin takes us on a rollicking ride through the crazy XCCW world. A parody of EWWC, the acronym stands for X-Treme Canadian Championship Wrestling. You will read this book with your eyes wide open and your lips turned up.
Jed Ounstead (pronounced OW-n-STED) has left wrestling to work as a bar bouncer at Tonix nightclub and run errands for his father’s detective agency and pub, The Emerald Shillelagh. Jed’s Irish cousin and sidekick, Declan St. James, with his campy, no-holds-barred backtalk will steal your heart. “Jaysus, what is it with you Canucks and your need to share your feelings all the time? Back home, if you want to say thanks to a bloke, you just buy his arse a pint.” A feisty ex-IRA gunman, Declan is barman at the Shillelagh and “renowned for his ability to pour the perfect pint of Guinness.”
Jed doesn’t take Johnny Mamba’s predicament too seriously until the snake man receives a $10,000 ransom request via email for his python, Ginger. Then at the drop (near the Vancouver Flea Market), Ginger turns up dead, and Jed finds his old pal Johnny in an outhouse with his throat slit. After that, there’s no time to breathe.
We spend a fair amount of time touring Vancouver with Jed in his Ford F-150, ducking into Dairy Queens for a banana milkshake. (Warning: I had to go and buy bananas while reading this book. I’m dairy-free. But you may find yourself cueing at the DQ.) Vancouver landmarks abound. As Jed cruises Hastings Street and passes Playland Amusement Park, the “archaic wooden roller coaster” catches his eye. “The out of commission rickety green and yellow cars were still slick from the last rainfall, shimmering in the sunlight as they sat perched on an incline of the track, patiently waiting to start their slow mechanized climb to the top.”
Written in first person and peppered with contemporary references, Devlin’s exacting prose is tight and colourful. With an MFA in Screenwriting from The American Film Institute, we expect cinematic brilliance, but it’s his cleverly original similes that could become his trademark. “Melvin grinned so wide he looked like a saber-toothed squirrel” for example. Still, it’s not all belly laughs. In the beginning a “cobra clutch” is defined as a professional wrestling move, but in the end, the title has a much more sentimental meaning—one that gave me pause. There is no laughter without tears, and Jed Ounstead almost loses it all, as any real hero should.
If you’ve never seen a real Cobra Clutch, Sgt. Slaughter demonstrates it here on pro wrestler Randy Orton.
Cobra Clutch is A.J. Devlin’s debut detective novel but he promises us that he has “many more Jed stories” so rest assured, this is only the beginning.
by Wendy Hawkin | Jul 3, 2018 | Book Review, literature
Every few years, I re-read Annie Proulx’s classic novel, The Shipping News. It happens when I miss the East—family and friends. When I need to submerge myself in great writing and crave a dose of mellifluent literature. When I need to feel immersed in the sea and small town camaraderie.
But, just what makes this book so endearing? What thrills and feeds me?
Characters
If you’ve never heard of it, The Shipping News chronicles, not only the various ships, yachts, and boats that put into the small harbour of Killick-Claw on the barren Newfoundland shore, but also the story of Quoyle. A quoyle is a coil of rope, and here Proulx unravels the terrifyingly beautiful tale of Quoyle’s family: ancestors who were incestuous pirates, who dragged a house to a point on the mainland when they were driven off an island for their barbary. That Quoyle determination lives on in the gentle hero of this story, in the jutting chin, in an underdog who must find his way home.
Like Proulx, Quoyle is also a writer. An American, born in Brooklyn, he stumbles into a job at The Mockingburg Record. He has no idea how to write but wants to learn. It’s that or starve, and he has a friend who gets him an interview. But constant layoffs leave Quoyle hungry. And then he meets Petal Bear: “a month of fiery happiness. Then six kinked years of suffering” (13). Petal is more monster than woman.
“By day she sold burglar alarms at Northern Security, at night, became a woman who could not be held back from strangers’ rooms, who would have sexual conjunction whether in stinking rest rooms or mop cupboards. She went anywhere with unknown men. Flew to nightclubs in distant cities. Made a pornographic video while wearing a mask cut from a potato chip bag. Sharpened her eyeliner pencil with the paring knife, let Quoyle wonder why his sandwich cheese was streaking with green” (14).
Oh Petal. When she vanishes with a new stranger and takes along their two little girls, Bunny aged six and Sunshine aged four and half, Quoyle goes berserk. Naturally. He loves his children, has raised them, cared for them, and now they’re gone. He calls the state police and his newfound aunt, Agnis Hamm. And then they get the news. Car wreck. Petal and the stranger are dead. But where are the kids? It turns out that Petal sold them for seven grand to a pedophile who produces homemade porn. Got a receipt from the pedo. Thank god. “Personal services.”
It’s the aunt that decides it’s time to go home—her hated brother and his wife have just died in a joint suicide pact. She’s lost the love of her life and Quoyle needs a family. So, at age thirty-six, unravelled by Petal’s brutal betrayal, Quoyle packs up his girls and heads to Newfoundland with the aunt. There, he gets a job working atThe Gammy Bird. He’s to cover car wrecks and the shipping news.
Real and honest, eccentric and larger-than-life, the crew atThe Gammy Bird are classic. Jack Buggit, British Nutbeam, Billy Pretty, even the crotch-scratching menace, Tert Card, is endearing in his own awful way. (“Face like cottage cheese clawed with a fork” (57).
photo by D. Mark Laing, 2001, Flickr https://www.flickr.com/photos/dmarklaing/8260930933
Setting
The landscape is a character. If you’ve ever wanted to explore Newfoundland, this book will have you packing your bags. (But only in summer, mind.) Eleven foot snowdrifts rival my capacity to love all seasons. The green house on the point is a character too. It sits empty for forty-four years until Quoyle and the aunt decide to fix it up and move in. The aunt’s first act is to dump her brother’s ashes in the outhouse and piss on them. Enough said.
Cheering for the Underdog
How can you not cheer for Quoyle, bursting with love for his daughters? Learning that he’s so much more than a third-rate newspaper reporter? Building a new family on the rock?
Issues
Proulx manages to highlight several issues without sounding preachy or forced. She does this with impeccable style through Jack Buggit’s diatribes, conversations, and Quoyle’s inner musings, and his columns.
The economic situation in Newfoundland. Good friend, Dennis Buggitt, talks of going down the road to find work in Toronto. There’s no work for carpenters in Newfoundland and his dad doesn’t want him to fish. Fishing killed his brother. Quoyle fears that if Dennis takes his family to the city they’ll be lost forever. He should know.
The sad story of incest and sexual assault. The Gammy Bird publishes the names of sexual offenders. Thousands of them.
“Nutbeem, I got your S.A. stories running down my computer screen. You writing it by the yard, now? Seven, eight, nine—you got eleven sexual abuse stories here. We put all this in there won’t be room for the other news.”
“You ought to see my notebook. It’s an epidemic.”
Wouldn’t that be worth a read? Nutbeem strings the stories together with precision and flourish. Some names never make the paper. Ask the aunt.
Children with unique abilities. Wavey’s son Herry was born with Down’s Syndrome and there’s no support for him in the local school. So, she and Beety Buggit approach the government for funding to create a special class and provide support. Quoyle’s children, Bunny and Sunshine, are also unique. Both are expelled from nursery school in the states, yet thrive when embraced by family and community.
Fishing woes. There are so many foreign trawlers fishing in the outer reaches, there are no fish left for the locals. Then, there’s the danger of riding out a storm out on the sea. Ask Jack Buggit what happened to his son, Jessen.
Weather. Another character in this story, one who is most often the antagonist.
Oil tankers. We’ve been fighting oil pipelines in B.C. This column by Quoyle says it all:
Nobody Hangs a Picture of an Oil Tanker
Another common sight is black oil scum along miles of landwash, like the shoreline along Cape Despond this week. Hundreds of people watched Monday morning as 14,000 metric tons of crude washed onshore from a ruptured tank of the Golden Goose. Thousands of seabirds and fish struggled in the oil, fishing boats and nets were fouled. “This is the end of this place,” said Jack Eye, 87, of Little Despond, who, as a young man, was a dory fisherman with the schooner fleet (201).
Language
Annie Proulx is a master of the craft and the writing is stunning. Proulx won a Pulitzer for this novel in 1994. I’ve really never seen anything like it: fragments of tight clipped poetic phrases, hard honest dialogue, sea-speak, words I’ve never seen, and dialect that makes us feel like we’re from the rock even if we’re not.
“The auditorium was jammed. A sweep of best clothes, old men in camphor-stinking black jackets that gnawed their underarms, women in silk and fine wools in the colors of camel, cinnabar, cayenne, bronze, persimmon, periwinkle, Aztec red. Imported Italian pumps. Hair crimped and curled, lacquered into stiff clouds. Lipstick. Red circles of rouge. The men with shaved jowls. Neckties like wrapping paper, child in sugar pink and cream. The puff of scented bodies, a murmur like bees over a red field” (276).
Myth & Metaphor
Each chapter is headed by a blurb and image from The Ashley Book of Knots. This 1944 work by Clifford W. Ashley inspired Proulx’s tale. The mix of folk tale and metaphor strengthens the story. Quoyle’s old, demented cousin ties knots to curse them and the house. Mixed with that are blurbs from The Gammy Bird, the local Killick-Claw paper where Quoyle discovers his talent for storytelling as he chronicles “The Shipping News”. This is why you can’t just watch the movie.
In 2001, Miramax released the film. Directed by Lasse Hallström (Chocolat, The Cider House Rules) it has all-star cast: Kevin Spacey as Quoyle, Judi Dench as the aunt, Kate Blanchett as Petal Bear, and Julianne Moore as Wavey (the tall silent woman who captures Quoyle’s heart in Killick-Claw.) As brilliant as the movie is—Annie Proulx and Robert Nelson Jacobs wrote the screenplay—it can’t replace the book.
When I was a kid, one of our family friends was Clyde Quinton, a man from Newfoundland who’d gone down the road. I remember that Clyde was a big gentle man who brought me a doll one year when I was sick. He was known for eating anything and saying simply: “food is food.” I often wonder what happened to Clyde. Over the past couple of weeks I’ve resurrected him in Quoyle.
