Harmless

You read about these personal catastrophes, relieved that your kid wasn't missing, but also secretly disappointed to have missed out on the experience, because how often in this bloodless age do you get the chance to test your mettle against the elements, against the bad guys? You imagine what you'd do in the parents' situation, how you'd act with courage, sacrifice, and resolve right up until the final scene, when your dirt-streaked child jumps into your arms, crying, “Daddy you found me!”

Harmless by James Grainger is an interesting look at what it means to be a man in this “bloodless age”; in a time when even real and pressing danger causes our hero Joseph to stop and scan his memory for appropriate reactions sourced from the action movies he has seen, because nothing from his actual life has prepared him for this. I just wish that Joseph was a more likeable or genuine character – he's about as useful in an emergency as the pricey hiking shoes he bought for the weekend based on their flashy reflective stripes.

The setup: Joseph and his moody teenage daughter Franny go for a weekend visit with old friends at a remote farmhouse. Joseph is an online journalist and arts editor (like Grainger himself), a former Party Boy, and currently, broke, divorced, and disillusioned. The owners of the farmhouse are Alex – a powerfully built man who left his city job as a documentarian for the authentic country life, where he now fashions rustic furniture with his bare hands – and his wife Jane – Joseph's former lover who wants a weekend of debauchery with her erstwhile high school friends, despite the presence of children and her disapproving husband. Two other couples attend the weekend, but they don't matter to the story. After getting wasted at the campfire, they realise that Franny, along with Alex and Jane's daughter Rebecca, have disappeared (that's on the back cover, so not really a spoiler) and their Dads must enter the never-ending woods surrounding the farm to find them. From here, the story becomes tense and dangerous, and even where the storyline strains credibility, it remains a thoughtful examination of modern masculinity.

Grainger stuffed so much into Harmless about modern life, as it affects young boys:

Bereft of ancestral lore, national myths, holy books, and rituals to bind the generations, Mike was initiating his sons in to the world of the Cool Geek, where aggressions and aspirations were channelled into superheroes, video games, movies, TV shows, and the right pop music.

And as it affects teenage girls:

They exuded self-denial and a sensual receptivity focused at the mouth, neck, and belly, their backs as rigid as aristocrats' wives in seventeenth-century portraiture. Time rushed forward and he saw each girl at eighteen, her body a map of tattooed Celtic knotwork, Chinese calligraphy, and Native American icons, a map for lovers, with piercings marking the erogenous zones.

As a modern Dad, Joseph has a mental “Father's Worst Nightmare scrapbook” based on what he assumes porn-raised boys will one day expect of his daughter, and he even worries about those (apocryphal) “Rainbow Parties”. And yet, he doesn't feel the right to intervene when his fourteen-year-old wears slutty clothes or sneaks off to smoke a joint with her friends? Repeatedly, while Franny is missing, Joseph can imagine in graphic detail what various perverts might be doing to her, yet, early on, he can't imagine how to have a long overdue heart-to-heart with his only child. As a character, I had a hard time understanding Joseph, but from what he shares of himself and his history, I really didn't like him:

As Joseph nestled the stock in a convenient hollow between his shoulder and chest he hadn't known existed, he was startled by a sense of impending climax. He stared down the barrel at a pile of boulders outside. Imagine if a man was standing in front of them. Who did he want it to be? Everyone had a list of worthy targets these days – bankers, CEOs, hedge-fund managers, career politicians, religious fundamentalists, climate-change deniers. He squeezed the trigger, wanting the room to fill with sound, smoke, and broken glass. He handed the rifle back to Alex, disoriented by a sudden feeling of weightlessness. It had felt good to hold the gun in his hands.

That's his list of “worthy targets”? Career politicians and religious fundamentalists? No child-molestors or cop-killers? And Joseph isn't even the most liberal of the men, so the intermittent politicking didn't sit well with me either.

As for the writing, Grainger is simile rich and that has varying results:

• Because it was still light out, the flaming logs looked artificial, like a video installation commenting on the cultural practice of building bonfires on summer holidays.

• Martha withdrew his hand, and the sordid history of their break-up lay on the table between them like a platter of freshly eviscerated entrails: his wavering commitment to their marriage; his refusal to ‘prostitute’ his talents and settle for a nine-to-five job; his inability to quantify what he provided in place of financial and domestic stability.

• The forest towered higher with every few steps, pulling him into its wake like a ship passing silently in the moonlight, and when the wind picked up, the rustling treetops became the silhouettes of rats running along the decks.

And yet, and...yet, I can see what Grainger was writing about here. Overall, I appreciated the meditation on modern masculinity (even if he makes sure that Joseph is clueless about modern femininity), there were some genuinely tense moments in the second half, and much of the writing was really lovely. I was not disappointed to have spent time in this world.

Like Joseph (like Grainger?), I also worried about how boys raised on easy access to porn would one day treat my girls. I assumed that modern boys would expect everything that they had seen online, and in my mind, most of that would be degrading. But you know what? All of the young men that I've met so far have been respectful and polite to me, and unless they're truly Jeckyl/Hydes, they seem to be respectful of my daughters as well. I suppose the factor I didn't figure on was that my girls have also likely seen just about everything there is to see, and they aren't babes in the woods -- I'm sure they have ideas about where the lines are drawn and even what they're interested in. And unlike Joseph, my girls don't have disengaged parents -- neither of us would just shrug helplessly as we see a skankily clad daughter smoking pot with their friends, at fourteen. (But please girls, don't correct me on this if I'm wrong. Parents don't actually want to know the details despite our fears.)

I had another complaint about this book, and since I got to voice it anonymously elsewhere, I didn't add it to my review: Why did Grainger feel the need to set this up as an American story? In this article, Philip Marchand calls Harmless a "strong contribution to the literature of Ontario Gothic", and I had to disagree, commenting:

OK, but can we call this Ontario Gothic if Grainger pretends the story is set in the States? Measuring distance in miles and feet, having war vets be from the Vietnam or Gulf Wars, or even contemplating "Murder One" as a potential criminal charge -- these are all American affectations. I understand a writer wants to sell some books and that might mean trying to pass as American, but let's not then pretend it's set in Southern Ontario with a wink.

This is  one of my biggest pet peeves, and although I truly do understand the desire to appeal to Americans and their market share, Robertson Davies, Alice Munroe, and Margaret Atwood were all best sellers with stories set firmly in Ontario. Embrace the setting!