2007 Scotiabank Giller Prize Shortlist, Part 3

Posted 3 November, 2007 in Literary Criticism, Scotiabank Giller Prize |

Late Nights on Air, by Elizabeth Hay. McClelland & Stewart, $32.99 cloth, 368 pp., ISBN: 978-0-7710-3811-2.

Previous Scotiabank Giller Prize nominations/wins: 2000, A Student of Weather (nominee)

Other awards: 2004, Ottawa Book Award (Garbo Laughs)

2001, Marian Engle Award

From the publisher: “Hay has a skewering intelligence about the frailties of the human heart. Weaving stories from the past into the present, she builds a fresh, erotic, darkly witty and moving tale, replete with sentences that stop you dead because of their unexpected wisdoms and startling beauty.”

From reviews: “In the course of her story, Hay swoops down like a raven on odd, shiny bits of information about the North. The tufts of soft muskox hair that snag on branches in the bush are called qivuit; the violet shades of the northern lights are due to nitrogen; the sound of someone crawling into a tent pitched on dry lichen in the tundra is a dry crackling, like wrapping paper. Nothing escapes her.” — The Walrus

“Hay seems to have fallen too much in love with her own words, too much in love with the North (where she once lived), too much in love with real-life explorer John Hornby (what is it with novelists’ need to jam a square peg of historical context into every round-holed narrative?) and too much in love with her characters, whom she gives too much rein to meander about the tundra as they see fit.” — NOW Magazine

“Late Nights on Air isn’t a page-turner in the sense of having an action-packed plot; it’s gripping in the more satisfying sense that it’s psychologically astute, richly rendered and deftly paced. It’s a pleasure from start to finish.” — Toronto Star

Representative passage: “This was the night, July 17, Eleanor elected not to go to bed at all in order to experience the brief middle-of-the-night twilight with its profusion of violet clouds directly overhead and its yellow gleam in the northern sky. Dressed in wool pants, wool jacket, gloves, with bug repellent smeared on her face and neck, she lay on her back on the warm, mattressy tundra whose thick growth held on to the day’s heat. Tweedy smells rose from the soft tangle straight into her nostrils. The colours and textures at eye level, the russets, browns, blacks, reds, formed an embrace so gently erotic she dozed off with a smile on her lips, only to come awake when a ptarmigan whirred by, or a snowy owl flew down and sat on a big stone twenty feet away, or loons cried in the distance. The loon’s long call seemed to her like a statement of the hour, a horizontal sound that tapered off into the horizon, while its laughter was vertical, high, flashy, rippling. The Barrens themselves were horizontal, but vertical, too, she thought. A vertical world of air: a country of clouds, and abundance of wind.”

My assessment: With its Yellowknife setting, and a final third that features a lengthy canoe trip through the Barrens in the Arctic wilderness, place is a dominant feature of Late Nights on Air. Hay’s descriptions of the northern landscape are extensive, and contain the kind of supple, sensuous detail that might appeal to fans of the two American Annies: Proulx and Dillard.

Those who are not fans of either writer, however, and those who prefer novels that privilege story over place, are likely to find much of this book plodding in the extreme. What story there is on offer involves a group of people who work at CFYK, the local Yellowknife radio station. Much of the first half of the book — before that extended canoe trip — is taken up with characters chattering away to each other in dialogue that is baldly expository and not terribly engaging:

The smile widened on Dido’s lips. She shifted and looked at her watch. Then she looked at Gwen. “Why are you sitting on a chair? All the rest of us are on the floor.”

“I’m comfortable on the chair.” But she didn’t feel comfortable. And didn’t look it either, she knew that.

“You don’t look comfortable.”

“I’m as comfortable as I ever am.”

“But you’re apart from us, sitting up there. You’ve set yourself apart.”

“I know. I know I’m sitting on a chair and everyone else is on the floor.”

Hay’s tendency to take the reader by the hand and explain everything in explicit detail derails much of her narrative’s potency: “Ralph was saying, ‘A day like today makes me appreciate a day like yesterday.’ He meant coming to a standstill made him appreciate a day of hard slogging.” And her incessant, heavy-handed use of foreshadowing does the novel a disservice: when the much-anticipated tragedy finally occurs, it has the effect of being palely anticlimactic.

Like the canoe trip that the characters embark on, the act of reading this book feels like a tough slog over unforgiving terrain.

Next: A Secret Between Us

1 comment to “2007 Scotiabank Giller Prize Shortlist, Part 3”

Kerry, November 4th, 2007 at 10:01 pm:

• I really enjoyed this one. It wasn’t perfect, but the book cast such a spell I didn’t even notice until I read your review, and the article in The Glove Review yesterday. I suppose… The foreshadowing was hard to miss, but I understood it as a narrative heavily bathed in nostalgia, trying to make sense of itself in retrospect. And so details would be much more closely examined, explained. Light shone brightly where it only might have sparkled otherwise. The book written not so much for the reader’s point of view, but for the characters’ (Gwen’s?) Which was why the climax wasn’t so much so for us, but would have been of course for the characters. Which was why the foreshadowing was so underlined, in the same way after anything one might look back, trying to see if there’d been any sign. “Of course, we should have known” it often seems. There was a certain distance between reader and story here, but for that price I felt as though I were right in the characters’ heads. Which, for me, was tremendously exciting. I do like the consideration you’ve given this book though, even if you didn’t feel the same.

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