I'm having a hard time deciding what I think about Cataract City. I liked the main characters, Owe and Dunk, well enough; cared about what was happening to them in the present and was interested to discover what events in their pasts created the men that they became. Having been to Niagara Falls as a tourist a dozen times or more, I enjoyed the peek at its gritty underbelly -- and not least of all because I have wondered what it must be like to live in such a touristy place (even though I was imagining that everyone works on Clifton Hill, not at Nabisco). This is an intensely plot-driven book with an interesting structure and muscular, testosterone-soaked prose, but I don't know if I liked the writing. As a rather pre-emptive response to my reaction, Craig Davidson has Owen say at one point: "How can you ask someone to tell a story then call BS when it doesn't turn out the way you want?" There's truth to that: I did pick up Davidson's book, asking him to tell me a story, and he succeeded at holding my interest -- can I ask for more?
I'm going to reveal some spoilers here so I can go into specifics about what didn't really work for me. First of all, early on Owen says: We grew up in Niagara Falls, also known as Cataract City -- a nickname based on the Latin word for waterfall. Because of this nickname I had never heard before, the setting of the book is never referred to again as "Niagara Falls" (except in the name of the town's newspapers and a reference to the train that used to connect Niagara Falls and Hamilton) but it is called "Cataract City" upwards of eighty times (according to a word search through google books). That grew incredibly annoying to me -- I can't imagine a book set in Toronto, even if that book was called Hogtown, where no character ever refers to the city by its proper name. And while that may seem a small complaint, since Davidson titled his book Cataract City, and used the phrase ad nauseam, it seems rather important to what he meant the book to be.
Also, I became a bit bored of the deliberate dichotomy of everything. The cop and the con. The rich boy and the poor boy. The antagonism between union and management. The good and trustworthy Silas Garrow vs. the despicable and dishonest Lemmy Drinkwater (the two main Native characters). The elegance of greyhound racing vs. the brutality of pitbull fighting. The staged phoniness of pro wrestling vs. the deadly stakes of bare-knuckle boxing .The boys wandering lost in the searing heat of summer vs. the same boys, now men, wandering lost in the bitter cold of winter. The hostility they showed the old pervert who showed up at their campfire as boys likely saved their lives while the compassion the grown Duncan showed to Drinkwater nearly cost him his hide. There are kittens in a trash bag and puppies in a Dumpster -- but one litter is dead and one alive. Meanwhile, the only two characters who have a real shot at greatness and escaping the cesspool of a town they inhabit are Owen with his basketball talents and Dolly the greyhound with her racing -- and they both have career-ending leg injuries
My last complaint is that I didn't always understand what Davidson was trying to say. As an example:
At first I told myself it was just me. I'd been away too long, returning under a dark cloud. But as the days bled past I recognized that it wasn't me -- or it was me, partially at least, because I'd inhabited these streets before, bearing the infection I'd harboured since birth.
I'd stay up at night, imagining a vast sea of poison underneath the city. A churning sea of lampblack-coloured ichor burbling, leaching into the soil as it spread infection.
Not only am I still having trouble understanding what the first paragraph even means, but there are a number of idiosyncratic words like "ichor" used throughout Cataract City that I don't know. I'm not afraid of a book with a challenging vocabulary, but some of the words used didn't sound natural in the mouths of the two narrators (even if Dunk completed a diploma program in English while incarcerated -- people just don't talk like that. And this quote is from Owen.)
As I stated at the beginning, this is a very masculine book, and while that in itself wouldn't turn me off, it may explain why I didn't fully connect to the story -- I have no more interest in basketball than I do in MMA fights -- and without sounding sexist, could that explain why men seem to be rating this book higher than the women are? I would understand completely if I rate Margaret Laurence higher than the average man -- she simply speaks to who I am. Possibly also working against me making a perfect connection is the fact that my own Dad worked in an office instead of a factory (not that we had any money -- I never felt any class distinction amongst my friends because I don't know if any family had much money back then) and we weren't hopelessly stuck in a manufacturing town. As a matter of fact, we moved progressively west across Canada as I was growing up; I lived in four different provinces by the time I was 14, and the idea of not being able to just leave a city without opportunities is foreign to me.
On the plus side, I was intrigued by the plot of Cataract City, if not its deliberate structure, and I had no idea how Davidson would end it -- truly, anything could have happened and I was absorbed through to the final pages. "How can you ask someone to tell a story then call BS when it doesn't turn out the way you want?" If that is ultimately the contract between author and reader, then Davidson fulfilled his end of the deal and I have no cause to call BS. This is a wonderfully Canadian story, full of references that made me smile (and I wish I had been keeping track of them), so I am unsurprised that Cataract City was a Giller Prize finalist.
As an afterthought, one of the very Canadian references I do remember is when the boys discovered that Edwina was working as a stripper at Sundowners, the same club that my brother once told us a story about and which I wrote about in this blog post. Small world, lol.
