I only just recently tracked this novel down, an old professor of mine having recommended to me two or three years ago. I had been sitting on a comfortable but somewhat worn green recliner in his office, discussing my disappointment with how parochial and predictable and just plain bloodless the CanLit scene had become, when he pulled this book from his shelf and had me read a section near the beginning in which Russ Littlebury, the protagonist, assaults a funeral director. He challenged me: how often do you come across something like this in a Canadian novel? The answer was almost never. Canadian novels, with a few notable exceptions (Robertson Davies and Russell Smith both come to mind) are seldom boisterous and even more seldom dangerous. We seem to excel at expressing quiet dignity, quiet pain, quiet lives. If we tackle large themes at all, or the messiness and violence of the life that most of us (I remind you that we are a sprawling urban nation, and that our last few rural bastions are far less picturesque than the fairy-tale land of cottage country would have us believe) deal with daily, it’s only to reduce those elements to subtle gestures in carefully isolated domestic settings, as though all of human drama can be played out effectively in some farm house kitchen. We put no edge in our voice.
Michael Helm has one in his. In the Place of Last Things carries with it many of the tropes that CanLit junkies—sitting, no doubt, in a favourite comfortable chair or on a couch with their legs covered by some not-very-soft decorative blanket and drinking from a cup of herbal tea—would find familiar and comforting. Mike Littlebury, Russ’ father, succumbs after a slow battle with cancer. Russ must come to terms with the loose ends of a broken romance as he assumes his filial responsibilities in the rural community that is no longer entirely his home. But there are things in this novel that should shake CanLit junkies from their collective stupor. (Lest you think my judgements too harsh, know that not five minutes before beginning this entry, I too was laid out on a couch with a blanket over my legs and a cup of herbal tea on the table next to me. Note, however, that my blanket was torn from my bed, and my tea was spiked.) Helm’s diction, his syntax, his work on a sentence by sentence level, is elegant, highly individualized and more than a little poetic, although I am reluctant to use that word. Often when one thinks of the poetic in Canadian novels one thinks immediately of Ondaatje and his opium-dream novels, and that’s a comparison I don’t want to make. Unlike Ondaatje, Helm actually seems to understand how prose functions, and doesn’t simply use his pretty phrases to mask the weakness of the underlying structure. Helm uses his gift with metaphor to bolster an already solid foundation of strong characters and sophisticated moral and intellectual inquiry. The edge in Helm’s voice comes when he uses his unique voice to intertwine the traditional CanLit “issues” with drug deals, the violence of revenge, stolen cars and private detectives. It was an exciting novel to read, as much because of the way Helm confounded and played with what we think of as a Canadian novel as because of the fast-moving plot, which was often full of tremendous tension and suspense.
Ultimately, however, I have to say that this novel is about memory; how we confront and shape it, and how it shapes us. Russ approaches his life through the appeal to authority, constantly referencing what others have thought and said, our collective cultural memory, to map out and make sense of his own life, down even to the smallest of moments. Tara, the only woman with whom Russ is romantically involved during the course of the novel, sees the world through a series of statistics and personal histories, sees the map of social injustice throughout time drawn on the lives and bodies of the poor and uneducated, on those lacking either the gift or desire for introspection. Russ constructs himself from what is itself a construct, the idea of Western cultural continuity, by pulling into himself the thoughts and words of a thousands others and taking them on as his own. Tara finds the shape of her life by transplanting her need to redress injustices she has neither felt nor inflicted on the lives of those who have done both, co-opting their suffering so that she might define herself. Skidder, Russ’ best friend, is constantly driven to find a place for himself by connectiong with an almost-famous ancestor; Mike, Russ’ father, by disconnecting himself from the memory of his own sordid past, and creating himself anew with the received (and yet hard-won) wisdom of the Lord.
That this novel balances so finely all the elements that it does is testament to Helm’s skill as a writer, and I found reading In the Place of Last Things to be revelatory, both in terms of how I thought of what a Canadian novel can be, and how one can approach the writing of fiction in general. I have already purchased his other book, The Projectionist, and have set it aside for some time later this year.
In the Place of Last Things was my tenth selection for The Canadian Book Challenge. Next up is Ray Robertson’s Home Movies.
