I find myself slightly annoyed after reading Late Nights on Air. I've never been up to the Territories but have long been slightly fascinated by the North: I would love to go on one of those Polar Bear tours up in Churchill, or see the Northern Lights in Whitehorse, or witness the Caribou migration (as described here) outside of Yellowknife. I also know that I am too intimidated by the wilderness, and the wildlife in it, to ever attempt the epic canoe trip described in this book; in fact I'm too lazy to take out a canoe on the glassy lake my parents live on, too nervous to let my dog off leash in the city in case of coyotes. But going into this book, I was really hoping for a Northern experience, and I don't know if I got it.
I was trying to find some old quote I thought I knew that says that all Canadian literature is really about geography-- a quote that I have found curious because, as a Canadian who has always lived in cities, the geography of my life isn't terribly different from people who live in cities anywhere in the world. What I found, repeatedly, were references to Margaret Atwood's Survival A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, wherein she argues that all Canadian literature is about is the notion of survival and its central character the victim. As this book is set in the timeframe that Atwood wrote her book, I don't think it's a coincidence that all of the characters in Late Nights on Air come off as victims (every female character is obsessed with her relationship with her own father, some are the uncomplaining victims of physical violence from their partners, the Natives are victims of Colonialism, the landscape is the victim of the white settlers, men are the victims of drink or their own passions, etc.) As it is probably also not a coincidence that this is really a book about survival, I take this as an homage to Atwood and her themes, but I have to believe that in the 40+ years since her critical study was published, Canadian literature has moved on from this narrow perspective. Something about this book, therefore, felt diminishing to me.
I was also annoyed at the politics of this book-- from the boosterism of the CBC (whose funding today are tax dollars I resent paying) to the notion that all of the Natives who opposed the Mackenzie Pipeline project were doing so out of a selfless regard for the purity of the ancestral grounds it would defile. The last is particularly timely as right now we debate the similar project, the Keystone Pipeline. I have often thought that if the main argument against the pipeline is environmental, then surely pumping fossil fuels south, through two countries that already have strong environmental regulations, must be safer for the Earth than extracting oil in countries without such strict rules and then shipping it across the ocean in tankers. In this book, however, a small scene that describes the skittishness of migrating Caribou goes a long way towards influencing my ideas about the harm of running a pipeline through their calving grounds. Finding the people in this book sketchy and not all likeable, I would have liked more scenes with the animals, more scenes with the wilderness, more of a Northern experience.
I was also annoyed, at times, by the writing style. Many passages were fragmentary, which can be poetic or disjointed. Where they were poetic, I revelled in them. Where they were disjointed, I was confused and a little bored. I actually can't believe it took me two weeks to finish this book, but I was rarely looking forward to picking it up.
My last complaint: the excessive foreshadowing. I don't know if I have ever read a book that promised so often that something horrible was going to happen. The device did not keep me intrigued, and by the time the tragedy occurred, I was just happy to be getting near the end of the book.
I'm not surprised that Late Nights on Air won the Giller Prize; it is unabashedly a Canadian novel, if something of a throwback to early Atwood, but in the end, you know what I wanted? More Canada. At the risk of negating everything I said about not thinking Canadian literature can/should be reduced to its geography, the following geographical passage is where I think Elizabeth Hay gets it right in this book:
Somewhere between three and four in the morning, as they were paddling back, they saw a world that Ralph might have photographed had he seen it, and that Gwen would later try to paint. But it wasn't possible to duplicate the colours except by closing her eyes. Then the islands in the distance became the right shade of jet black, and the sky and the water were an identical, intense, unblemished peach.
I would love to see that scene, even vicariously, and am left wanting more.
