After James

A space had opened near the entryway and now she saw on the wall the title for this part of the show. After James. The words dropped inside her for a few moments before going off. She'd told no one the name of her lost child. She said something aloud. The room seemed to move at great speed.

After James is a mindbending, genre-busting novel that is actually composed of three distinct novellas: Alice After James, which is a Gothic horror story; Decor, a detective thriller; and The Boy in the Water, so-called “apocalyptic fiction”. With themes and situations that echo throughout – fathers and daughters, lost children and dogs, a return to nature, plague and extinction, the locus of creativity – author Michael Helm is, on the one hand, encouraging the reader to make a cohesive storyline out of the disparate parts, but on the other, consistently makes the point that it is a mere quirk of the human brain to create connections where none are actually present. In the moment, the reading experience felt uneven as I enjoyed some characters and situations more than others, and after finishing, I can only sit here, mentally exhausted, and marvel, “What was that?” The book opens with a prologue that felt pure Cormac McCarthy:

The dog kept to the (stream) bed, where the vapours were strongest, crazed into the firstness of things. He had come a long way and had organized the scents as they recurred along the route until a new one came on the air and he found himself moving into the leaves. He was at the source and digging before he understood that the form set into the ground was human. The discovery confused him and he backed off the shape and barked and continued barking until the smell sent him forward again in a wonderment half-full of forgetting, and when he followed up from the human hand along the arm and then uncovered the muddy head, the discovery was new again and he ran up out of the trees and stopped and circled back down, then came up a second time and a third. At some point he lowered onto his belly and looked for a long while in the direction of the humanform until a shortened whimper escaped him, the sound sending him to his feet barking again, hearing the strangeness of his sounding in the air of this new place.

I loved this so much that I was a little disappointed when this style wasn't carried over into the first of the novellas, but as the main character Alice – gone to ground after exposing her drug company's wrongdoing – reads a Henry James ghost story and discovers a warning from her new landlord about an unsavoury neighbour, the atmosphere became incredibly tense: I was so interested and the situation became so foreboding that I wanted to stop reading and I couldn't stop reading; even when I couldn't perfectly understand what the author was trying to convey: 

When she came around the barn she did so without fear or with fear secured by her conviction and watching her so that Shoad would be equally there and not there regardless of what or whom she found, and she felt every living thing for miles, every leaf on every tree felt distinctly without falling to senselessness or the lie of words like green.

The second story sees James, a rootless and unemployed failed writer, hired as a literary detective to determine if a series of anonymous online poems are actually messages aimed at his new employer. The more he digs the more James realises that the poems seem to speak directly to anyone who studies them too closely (including himself), and he needs to figure out if they are merely an example of apophenia – the brain finding connections which aren't present – or if they are the result of online hacking/phishing or if they represent something more dangerous: just who is that man following James around Rome? And why does he sound like a character from the first story? Could it all be coincidence?

Dreams are ours alone. Never to be spied on, stolen, and never really to be shared, even when we try. If we’re lucky something in the waking world, some artifice, roof of wet cedar shingles, sail of meringue on a passing dessert plate, poem, maybe a poem about a dream of a dog in a port slum street, will seem to have the impress of the dream, and for a short time we can set the secret inside the found shape, and imagine that we are known.

In the final story, Celia – another woman who works for a pharmaceutical company (and as her name is an anagram for the similarly employed "Alice" in the first story, I can only assume we are supposed to conflate the two even as we are warned against it) – joins her anthropologist father on a cave exploration and unwittingly exposes herself to a conceptual artist who will co-opt her identity and use it as inspiration for his work (brief animated scenes that use elements from both Celia's and Alice's stories). When her father has a late-in-life religious experience, Celia recognises how the human brain fools itself yearning for meaning and a significant place in the universe.

Now and then we find ourselves in story. Events, some of them casually connected, begin to seem inevitable. Their presentation becomes distinct. Maybe a theme emerges. But because life is not literature, we drop out of the story before it ends.

After James has positive reviews from many of my favourite Canadian authors on its cover, and while that does impress me, it also tells me something else: this might be the kind of book that is written for writers more than for common readers; it's the meta-analysis of what makes a modern novel that seems to be its greatest accomplishment (which is no small accomplishment, even if it doesn't mean that I totally connected to what was going on). This is a big read, but not in the usual sense, and it won't be to everyone's tastes; I still can't quite figure out if it was to mine but I'm certainly glad to have experienced it.

2016 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize nominees:

Michael Helm for After James
Anosh Irani for The Parcel
Kerry Lee Powell for Willem de Kooning's Paintbrush
Yasuko Thanh for Mysterious Fragrance of the Yellow Mountains
Katherena Vermette for The Break

 I would give it to The Break.

*And in the end, the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize went to Thanh for Mysterious Fragrance of the Yellow Mountains.