Monday, 19 June 2017

We'll All Be Burnt in Our Beds Some Night: A Novel


Mumble mumble down there. Some sorta big talk to his wife or his girlfriend. An oath, a curse. Talkin about Johnny, gotta be. Big talk, nothin he'd say to Johnny's face. Role-playing. Shag this. Johnny's down the stairs and out the front hall to the door. He dont even bother to put on the sneakers cause he's not gonna be using his feet. You gotta be able to dance, dance, dance whenever the mood takes you. That's the rule, that's the law. Johnny gives the knuckles a good scrape across the panelling in the porch before he opens the door. Sting and burn, bleed, come on bleed. Clench and release, clench and release. Buddy started it, didnt he? Good night, he says. Johnny's night. Good. Johnny raps on buddy's door. It's a new door with a big patterned window to let the light in. Must be nice, letting all that light in. Must be nice to have it all lined up, new doors, taking the garbage out.
We'll All Be Burnt in Our Beds Some Night started off as one of my favourite kinds of book – grittily intriguing with a sociopathic character whose present situation needs to be puzzled out (I mean, Johnny wants to have a little chat with buddy just for saying good night to him, even though Johnny isn't technically supposed to be leaving his apartment after ten p.m.) – and from there it whizzes along, moving Johnny forward through the present while he mentally revisits the events in his past that led him to where he is; how he is. This is a formula that worked so well for me in books like Trainspotting or The Glorious Heresies – that satisfying mental evolution I experienced from initially regarding the characters as trash to recognising their humanity – but in this book it all felt a bit...formulaic. Early conversations that Johnny has with others (and himself) dangle the clues – What do you know about car fires, Johnny? How did that brand new John Deere cap get up in the branches of the black spruce? Just when will we get back to the jeezly hens? – and it becomes obvious that the point is: No matter how bad you think Johnny is, his childhood was worse. Author Joel Thomas Hynes is a bit too obvious in his plotting and pacing here for my taste, but I do love a Newfie tale and enjoyed the voice of his sentences.
We're all looking for a change of scenery, at the very least. We're all lookin for our ticket. Who's not lookin to claw their way out from under what they're tangled up in? Who's not, underneath it all, desperate to let go of what they're hangin on to? And what's really worth hanging on to anymore?
Mild spoilers as I summarise the plot: We soon learn that Johnny is awaiting trial for the assault of his girlfriend, Madonna. We eventually see that she was the love of his life – the only person he ever settled down with; happy whether they were shoplifting, or cooking breakfast, or getting sober, or falling off the wagon – so why did Madonna have to ruin everything by smashing her face into the teapot Johnny was holding and then calling the cops? Because Madonna doesn't appear at the trial, Johnny is set free, and events send him on a cross-Canada road trip; running from the cops and a St. John's crime boss; hitchhiking west in increasingly filthy clothes and a deteriorating body. Although Johnny does share some of his history with the people he hitches rides from, most of the narrative occurs in his own head (where his thoughts return again and again to the same seminal moments until they're fully revealed), and by the end, we're supposed to realise that this broken, violent misanthrope couldn't have turned out any other way. Helpfully, this is spelled out a couple of times:
What do any of us ever know? That we used to be children but now we're not. That what we are now is just a collection of our blunders and our missteps, a mashed and battered accumulation of all our wrongs. Sick as our secrets. And now we mainly gotta lean into our years and hope too much of it dont splatter back into our fucken faces.
And speaking of what splatters back into our faces...no, you'd have to read that part to fully get it. The “road trip” might be a stock plotline, but I can't remember reading another one set in Canada. So as someone who has made this drive many times, I enjoyed the stops in Truro and Edmundston; could picture running into the woods to evade the Sûreté du Québec; winced when Johnny, heading to the west coast, left a car travelling to Timmins to make his side-trip to Kingston. On the other hand, and by coincidence, my husband and brother-in-law were talking the other night about some of their own youthful hitchhiking adventures and bemoaning the fact that those days are gone; no one in their right mind would pick up a solitary young man on the side of the road anymore. And here's Johnny: his face both sunburnt and swollen from ant bites from sleeping in the forest, wearing a stinking, filthy poncho to disguise the disintegrating suit he ran away in, limping from decaying boots, unable to do much more than grunt and scowl at people, and getting enough rides to move himself (and the plot) along. That made me wonder what time period this is actually supposed to be and that's confusing: Johnny mentions having had a DVD player with Madonna, but no one – not even his drug dealer pal, Shiner – seems to have a cell phone, and while a cop is able to run a (stolen) driver's license through his in-car computer, the law doesn't seem interested in tracking down the van he eventually steals. And another quibble: Diane Schoemperlen, in This Is Not My Life, made it sound a bit more complicated to visit an inmate, even in minimum security.

I wish I couldn't see the man behind the curtain of this book – Hynes doesn't quite pull off art here – but that's not to say I didn't like it quite a bit. I'm waffling on a rating, so will feel like it's generous to round up to four stars.
The 2017 Scotiabank Giller Prize Longlist: 

David Chariandy: Brother
Rachel Cusk: Transit
David Demchuk: The Bone Mother
Joel Thomas Hynes: We'll All Be Burned in Our Beds Some Night
Andrée A. Michaud: Boundary
Josip Novakovich: Tumbleweed
Ed O'Loughlin: Minds of Winter
Zoey Leigh Peterson: Next Year, for Sure
Michael Redhill: Bellevue Square
Eden Robinson: Son of a Trickster
Deborah Willis: The Dark and other Love Stories
Michelle Winters: I Am a Truck


After finishing reading the longlist, I'll rank the shortlist (according to my own enjoyment only):


I Am a Truck
Minds of Winter
Son of a Trickster
Bellevue Square
Transit

*Won by Bellevue Square - a surprise, to me, but not an unwelcome one. Congrats to Michael Redhill!

The 2017 Governor General's Literary Awards Finalists:


Won by We'll All Be Burnt in Our Beds Some Night - which seems an odd choice to me. I liked it, but would have personally given the award to The Water Beetles.
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