Last Night in Montreal

Stop looking for me. I'm not missing; I do not want to be found. I wish to remain vanishing. I don't want to go home. – Lilia.

Last Night in Montreal – Emily St. John Mandel's recently re-released first novel – is a beautifully structured meditation on the natures of obsession, loss, and the doggedness of family ties; even when we've run away from our families; even when our families have run away from us.

In the beginning we meet Eli – a Brooklyn-based academic working on his thesis about dead and dying languages – who, even though she had warned him of her inability to stay in one place, is devastated to discover that his girlfriend, Lilia, has disappeared. In the next chapter, we get a glimpse of Lilia's childhood – spent on the run with her father, all lonely miles and cheap motels – and we get the first hint of the mystery central to this book: was Lilia abducted, and why? In ensuing chapters that shift between time frames and points of view – including those of a private eye and his daughter – the back stories of every character are filled in, and not until the very final chapters does the reader get the entire, devastating, picture. This book reads at the pace of a thriller, but without any cheap tricks or red herrings – you simply want to know more about recurring memories; the desert mirages, a fading map, a knit rabbit dropped in the snow. And with lovely, sparse language, Mandel ties it all together with a satisfying aaah.

As I imagine it is for many readers, the mental picture of a little girl on the run with an older man (even if in this case it is with her father), crisscrossing the Continental US and staying in nameless motels, made me think of Lolita, and while that made it seem even more curious that her name is “Lilia”, Mandel embraced the comparison, having Eli say of her, “She had four or five unevenly spaced freckles on her nose, like Lolita.” I liked that she confronted that head-on, and that kind of intelligence is evident throughout this book. More than once, Eli criticises the type of artists who spend more time talking about art than actually creating any (or, in his own case, talking about his thesis instead of getting down to writing it), and the information that he shared about dying languages was really fascinating to me. I do wonder, however, how fascinating the scenes set in and about Quebec would be to non-Canadians:

“The Québécois are speaking French with an accent so ancient and frankly bizarre that French people from France can’t understand it. It’s like a fortress in a rising tide of English. It’ll be like research for you.”

“What do you mean, a fortress?”

“Imagine a country next to the sea,” she said, “and imagine that the water’s rising. Imagine a fortress that used to stand near the beach, but now it’s half underwater, and the water won’t stop rising no matter how they try to fight it back. Eventually, in the next century or so, it will more than likely rise over the top of the walls and overwhelm them, but for now they’re plugging the cracks and pretending it doesn’t exist and passing laws against rising water. I’m saying that French is the fortress, and English is the sea.”

When Eli goes to Montreal in search of Lilia, the people are so rude to him and the weather is so numbingly cold (at the beginning of November) that I'm going to guess that Mandel didn't have a good time living there herself, however “briefly” (as stated on the book jacket). Even the detective's daughter Michaela – a native-born Anglo Québécoise – is discriminated against for her poor French and bitterly explains to Eli the “101 ou 401” graffiti spray-painted under bridges. Despite the hostility of these passages, what's true for Lilia must also have been true for Mandel: Safety is a car driving quickly away.

Other than the extremes of the Montreal-set chapters (and the extremes of the detective's preternatural skills), I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It's interesting to see Mandel's early work – especially since Station Eleven has become a major success – and note that her clear and lovely voice was present right from the start.