If I Fall, If I Die

The boy stepped Outside, and he did not die.  

He was not riddled with arrows, his hair did not spring into flame, and his breath did not crush his lungs like spent grocery bags. His eyeballs did not sizzle in their sockets, and his heart’s pistons did not seize. No barbarian lopped his head into a blood-soggy wicker basket, and no glinting ninja stars were zinged into his throat.

Actually, incredibly; nothing happened – no immolation, no bloodbath, no spontaneous asphyxiation, no tide of shivery terror crashing upon the shore of his heart – not even a trace of his mother’s Black Lagoon in his breath.

This was one of the most exciting and mysterious openers I've read in a long time, and as I always strive to know as little as possible about the books I read before plunging in, I was wondering, “Oooh, what new dystopia is this?” And I don't think it's a spoiler (because the reader learns it right away) to say that this dystopia was also one of the most interesting ones I've ever seen (but stop reading this paragraph here if you really want to discover it for yourself): an imaginary world of apocalyptic danger created in the young boy's mind by his severely agoraphobic mother. Never before in his memory had Will gone Outside, and as a boy who removed his hockey helmet only to sleep and who wore a wetsuit to change lightbulbs, the bravery he called upon to investigate a banging in the yard was truly epic. Over time, as Will's curiosity grew stronger than his sympathy for his mother's all-encompassing fears for him – as he spends more and more time Outside – he learns that the deepest pain comes from trying to navigate the thornscape of interpersonal relationships.

Author Michael Christie writes in a simile-rich, lyrical style, to varying results. I liked passages like: From behind, the houses adjacent to his looked small and vulnerable, like the underbellies of turtles or someone with their glasses off, but thought he went too far with phrases like: Tiny birds zipped through the branches like paper airplanes with brains or She could feel her face betray her, twisting and sweating, her eyes two flushed toilets. Too often I was scratching my head and thinking, “Well isn't that a strange way to put it”, and that would totally take me out of the moment, like being kidnapped off the bridge of the USS Enterprise by a Romulan transporter (my own lame attempt at a lame simile; don't blame Christie for that one).

I thought that Christie did a good job of exploring the mental illness of Will's mother, Diane, and her flashbacks trace a lifetime of mounting debilitation. I enjoyed Will's journey as he got to meet and understand the outside world (but don't know if someone who had been raised with newspapers, television, movies, and books would have been quite that naive). I liked the setting in Thunder Bay, and especially the history of the city's decline. I really liked that the Native characters were shown to be decent and normal people who suffer extra burdens in order to make their way in the city, and while I am not unaware of the prejudice that they would face in general, I don't know if I totally bought that the teachers in the public schools would utterly ignore their Native students or that the Police Constable would overtly warn Will off from hanging out with Native kids:

Most Indians don't know how to conduct themselves in a city...You need to make sure you don't turn yourself into one of those kids I haven't much interest in finding.

But, Christie is from Thunder Bay, so maybe I am just naive and when a twelve-year-old Native boy runs away from a foster home, it's normal for no one to look for him. Christie is also a former professional skateboarder, and while I appreciate that it would be organic for him to imagine Will expressing his newfound freedom with ramps and pipes and ollies, as a grand metaphor for the courage and resilience that it takes to navigate a life, skateboarding is a little flimsy to us non-skaters.

Surfers rode waves, which were already beautiful, but skateboarders made this beautiful: the ugly, discarded nooks and leftovers of a place, the abandoned, unused architecture that people preferred to ignore. Beneath their wheels, these dead places became sites of wonder.

From the above, this might sound like a pretty interesting book, but where If I Fall, If I Die stumbles is in the mystery that Christie grafts on top of the psychological drama that he started with. As I found “the Butler” and his attack wolves to be pretty silly, it drained the mystery of any tension, and after the section from Titus' point of view, there was little mystery left. In the end, there was more I didn't like about this book than what I did, and what is most disappointing about that is that the core idea was just so fascinating; I wanted to like this so much that I'm doubly disappointed. I'd give 2.5 stars if I could, but need to round down; it was just okay.

I'm pretty excited that this year I was able to find and read the entire Giller Prize longlist before the winner is announced (with weeks to spare). If I were in charge, I'd give the prize to Martin John, and here is my ranked order of the contenders:

The longlist for the 2015 Scotiabank Giller Prize in my order of ranking is:


Anakana Schofield - Martin John 
Marina Endicott - Close to Hugh
Patrick deWitt - Undermajordomo Minor
Heather O’Neill - Daydreams of Angels
Connie Gault - A Beauty 
André Alexis - Fifteen Dogs
Clifford Jackman - The Winter Family
Alix Hawley - All True Not a Lie in It
Rachel Cusk - Outline
Russell Smith - Confidence 
Samuel Archibald - Arvida 
Michael Christie - If I Fall, If I Die

*Won by Fifteen Dogs; not my favourite but fine.