Tarstopping by Christine Rehder Horne

Tarstopping, by Christine Rehder Horne (NeWest Press 2015)

Christine Rehder Horne’s debut novel, Tarstopping, is a quasi-political thriller minus the politicians.  It is a novel about environmental activism with Calgary as its epicenter. But if you’re searching for a simplistic rant about saving the world, you’ll be disappointed.  In its place, Tarstopping offers a complex argument for a complex issue.  

Middle-class Tim and Shannon find both their security and their presumptions threatened by the overnight arrival of environmental protesters in their affluent suburban neighbourhood.  The protesters have converged on Calgary in response to a kidnapping.  The messianic “Wendy and her Boys” are holding the family of an oil baron hostage in their own home.  The ransom is simple.  Shut down the Tar Sands.  

Tim and Shannon’s friends, many of whom work in fields related to the oil industry, are angry and maybe even a little afraid.  They argue vehemently and sometimes with vitriol about the best way to rid the city of its infestation.  Within their small nuclear family, Tim and Shannon occupy seemingly flip sides of the argument.  He is the director of a non-profit serving the city’s poor.  She runs her own event-planning company catering to a corporate clientele.  Their son, Armie -- a twenty-year-old university dropout – doesn’t know here he stands. 

Enter Deke, Tim’s crusading brother, a blogger and environmentalist who quickly becomes the chronicler and unofficial voice of the Tarstoppers.

Tensions run high as the city becomes the locus of a movement that draws protesters from across Canada and around the world. At first, Tim and Shannon are unwitting observers. One of the largest encampments is established in the park and school grounds across the street. But soon even they are drawn in.  Tim opens his home as a temporary shelter from a storm, and even as an ad hoc medical station, after things turn dark.  Shannon, for her part, becomes the target of a mysterious stalker, parading as a journalist.

In response to the Tarstoppers another anomalous group forms at the edges of town.  The Wildcatters are right-wing radicals and local rednecks looking to crack heads, initially.  But things grow quickly out of hand once mob mentality sets in.

There is a lot of talk in the opening scene of this novel – perhaps a little too much exposition – as the author seeks a way to lay out the intricate setting, both temporal and psychological, which might realistically give rise to such a spontaneous congregation, as well as the incidents and beahviours which eventually flow from it.  However, once the story gains traction – and it does – Tarstopping is a compelling and suspenseful read.   

Horne approaches the thriller the way Henning Mankell approached to crime writing.  Her protagonists are intelligent, refined, and well-educated.  They are victim to marital issues and parental anxieties.  Their jobs are at once fulfilling and, at times, all-consuming and problematic.  However, Tim and Shannon do not check these lives at the door once the Tarstoppers arrive.  If anything, the protest and its spinoffs play second fiddle to their more personal stories.  As with Mankell’s detective, Kurt Wallander, both Tim and Shannon dispatch with the plot “in the midst of life – of work and family and the intrusion of tensions from the outside world.”  They grapple with the events unfolding around them at the same time as they tackle their personal difficulties.  And sometimes the two are indistinguishable.

As such, the ideological struggle taking place between the Tarstoppers and the Wildcatters is eventually mirrored in the lives of Tim and Shannon, their friends and family members. What is most frightening in this, is that their reactions are often no less polarized or violent.  A close family friend says to Shannon, “The last thing those people have is balance.  I wouldn’t have realized how many unbalanced people there are in the world.”

If there is a central theme in Tarstopping, this is it.  We can marvel at our ability to come together and fight for what we believe, but sometimes we must recoil from the petty sight of our own self-interest and the extent to which we might go to protect it.


Tarstopping interweaves the personal and the global with a deft hand. 

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Friendly Fire

Friendly Fire, by Lisa Guenther (NeWest Press 2015)

To call Lisa Guenther’s debut novel a mystery is a bit superficial, and possibly reductive.  At the heart of Friendly Fire there is indeed a secret, but it is only the engine which drives her story – the vehicle she uses to reveal the complex dynamics of family and small town relationships.  And Guenther, an agricultural journalist from Livelong, Saskatchewan, knows a thing or two about both.

              When Darby Swank, a university dropout, accidentally discovers the body of her beloved aunt floating in Brightsand Lake, the veil through which she viewed her tiny rural community is lifted to reveal the violence and wilful ignorance that may always have existed just beneath the surface.  The comfort and safety she sought in leaving school and returning home are pulled from beneath her, and Darby is forced to re-examine her relationships with family and friends, including her on-again-off-again lover, Luke, her silent father, and her fun-loving uncle Will.

              In spite of the fact that Darby’s lucid dreams may be subconsciously leading her toward the killer, she is a reluctant protagonist.  Like the community around her, Darby prefers to let sleeping dogs lie.  She tells a friend, “Things don’t usually work out too well for the whistle blowers, you know.”

              The strength of Guenther’s story is its characters.  They are – all of them – flawed in very human ways, including the novel’s protagonist.  And the author does her best to skirt stereotypes while maintaining the truth which sometimes lies at the heart of stereotype.  In a thumbnail sketch, Darby exposes the distrust and fear she harbours for outsiders at her aunt’s funeral:

Women in dark bootleg jeans, tailored blouses, and pointy heals, big sunglasses hiding eyes.  Men in sports coats and ties, one of them subtly checking his PDA … I want to smash his gadgets, break the women’s sunglasses.  Drive the strangers out of the lobby like rats from a grain elevator.

At the same time, this juxtaposition reveals everything she and her community are not – stylish and urbane.  Both things Darby perhaps desires to be herself, had she the courage to leave town and pursue her music in Edmonton.

              In many ways, Darby is stifled, as much as protected, by the illusions of rural life. “Families, relationships, they literally mark our landscape out here,” she says.  “You don’t say, ‘Turn left at the green house.’ You say, ‘Turn left at the old McNab house.’  It is these attachments to family and landscape that pin her down and stop her from pursuing her music.  But it is also these entanglements that stop her from uncovering the mystery of her aunt’s murder, even when the answer lies before her in plain view:

I was missing something.  It was like sitting in a boat and watching jackfish swimming.  You can never figure out exactly where they are because of the way the light bends when it hits the surface.

              However, the truth cannot stay buried forever.  Like the brush fire that burns literally and metaphorically throughout this novel, threatening the community, “smouldering deep in the muskeg,” the truth must eventually “flare up.”

              In the end, Guenther’s novel is a well-paced character study with a strong sense of place.

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