Mahihkan Lake by R. P. MacIntyre

Mahihkan Lake, by R.P. MacIntyre (Thistledown Press 2015)

Sometimes I watch a movie without an explosion. It isn’t filmed in 3D and it doesn’t have computer generated animation.  There aren’t any death-defying stunts, either.  It’s straightforward and dependent upon character and dialogue.  Perhaps it’s something by Robert Altman or Woody Allen, or maybe it’s Denys Arcand or Jean-Marc Vallé.  It’s quietly funny and darkly serious all at once.  There is a touch of the absurd, and maybe even a moment of magical realism. This is a little like reading Mahihkan Lake, by R. P. MacIntyre.

              Following the somewhat mysterious death of their older foster-brother, Dave, estranged siblings Denny and Dianne are left to reassemble the pieces.  However, alcoholic Denny – the folk-singing, one hit wonder – is in dire need of an intervention.  And his younger sister, Dianne, who looks as though she stepped “straight out of a fashion magazine,” is already burdened with a rebellious teenage daughter and a floundering marriage – not to mention the care of their Alzheimer-stricken mother. 

              Reunited and argumentative, the two set out for the family cabin on Mahihkan Lake in the north of Saskatchewan, where their troubled brother once found solace.  Their intent is to make peace and scatter the remains, which are stored in a cookie jar.  At the same time, down-trodden Harold Huckaluk, the truck driver held responsible for the death of their brother, sets out on a quest of his own.  In a bizarre twist of fate and coincidence these three “strangers” are reunited on the shore of Lake Mahihkan one last time.   

              MacIntyre has a knack for concise description.  And setting plays a key role in the unfurling of this story.  The “thick green tangles” and the “low meadows of marshy drain” come alive in Mahihkan Lake.  The wild-life too contributes. A wolf, “its yellow eyes clear and forlorn,” follows Harold along his paddle north. And a pair of ravens cluck “like pebbles dropped into a wooden bucket half full of water.”  It is dialogue, however, that becomes the driving force behind this novel.  Philosophical discussions between Denny and Dianne circle around themes of happiness and memory – both as elusive as reconciliation and forgiveness amidst siblings.

              Surfacing throughout Mahihkan Lake is a secret that ebbs and flows like the river which fees it.  And there are no answers to the myriad metaphysical questions of its protagonists -- only moments which define them for good and for bad.  Mahihkan Lake is the bleak cinematic vision of an art-house film, which offers just enough illusory shimmer of hope and dark humour to keep you watching.  Or in this case, reading.

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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. 

Comment on this post below, before November 14th, and automatically enter for a chance to win a free copy of this book -- courtesy of the publisher.

The Winter Family by Clifford Jackman

The Winter Family, by Clifford Jackman (Random House 2015)

You will not find many sympathetic characters in Clifford Jackman’s debut novel.  But then again, sympathy is hardly an accurate litmus test for good literature.  Hateful characters can still be good characters.  And the Winter Family has plenty of both.

                The Winter Family traces the trajectory of a loose band of outlaws over the course of three decades. Chronologically, it begins in Georgia during the last gasp of the American Civil War. Sherman’s troops are blazing their historic path through the state after the fall of Atlanta.  A small advance army, headed by the psychopath, Quentin Ross, contains the seed which will become the Winter Family. Their horrific penchant for violence – particularly their actions in Planter’s Factory -- is what causes the Union Army to disown them, sending the group north and west to Chicago in 1872 on a bizarre quest for pardons. 

By now, they have all become hardened criminals.  Stories of their intervening years and the vicious trail behind them percolate to the surface. But all tales pale when compared to that of Augustus Winter – a bit player in Quentin Ross’ early band, now among the most feared and depraved. The very glance of Winter’s yellow, cat-like eyes is enough to instill terror. His arrival in Chicago with the fiendish Lukas Shakespeare – a teenage murderer -- causes a rift among the outlaws.  And his dissolute dispatching of his foes forces one member to fall “to his knees, among startled, scampering pigs” and begin to throw up. “We’re building something here,” he tells the man.

                But “building” is a misnomer.  Driven by a nihilistic worldview, Winter is really tearing things down. He has moved beyond simplistic notions of society, justice, and order.  He has transcended them. He says, “This is how everything works.  Everything they tell you is just a lie to hide it.”

Having peeled back the gloss of civilization, Winter leads his gang south to Phoenix in 1881. They have now become scalp hunters and guns for hire. Casual slaughter follows them. But here, Augustus Winter is shaken by an encounter from the past. His convictions are challenged by an unlikely opponent. And the unstoppable wickedness which is the Winter Family runs up against a force of nature equal to or greater than their own.

Ten years transpire before we pick up their scent again in Oklahoma, and this time it is they who are hunted. Reduced by death and desertion, The Winter Family is on the verge of extinction. The world, and members of his inner circle, has turned on him.  Cataclysmic violence, apparent throughout, erupts in an almost cinematic showdown.

Jackman’s writing has been compared to the American author, Cormac McCarthy. On the surface, similarities do exist.  Both write about hard-scrabble men cutting swaths through various incarnations of an amoral, lawless West. But where McCarthy’s prose is sparsely elegiac, Jackman’s is more grounded and straightforward. The emphasis is on action. Jackman’s characters are also not as archetypal. The Judge, for instance, from McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is practically cloven-hoofed – a metaphor for the evil in the world. Winter, a scalp-hunter like the Judge, for all his savagery, is still a man.  We witness the twisting of his soul through upbringing and experience.

Therefore, as a man, he is subject to his own mortality.  Or is he?  

There is nothing overly redemptive about the conclusion of this novel. If anything, the brief epilogue in California, 1900, reminds the reader that malevolence endures. But like the hateful characters of Quentin Ross, Lukas Shakespeare, and Augustus Winter himself prove, redemption isn’t necessary in a good novel.

Blurbs: Passing Through by David Penhale

Passing Through, by David Penhale (Cormorant 2011)

Why you should read it:

The sudden redundancy of Penhale's protagonist, Daniel Foster, is a metaphor for the modern world.  A man who rode the wave of shady banking and investments finds himself abandoned and bereft by the corporate culture which originally "fostered" him. The writing is wry and the characters unsentimental in this quest for relevance and reinvention.

Blurbs: Caught by Lisa Moore

Caught, by Lisa Moore (House of Anansi 2013)

Why you should read it:

Moore's writing has a sixth sense. There are moments in this novel that are so real and so raw that reading it is like staring at a Polaroid -- striking for its immediacy and voyeuristic in its candour.

Blurbs: Just Beneath My Skin by Darren Greer

Just Beneath My Skin, by Darren Greer (Cormorant Books 2014)

Why you should read it:

A sense of dread descends like a curtain over this novel the deeper you delve into it. And yet, like a bystander at an accident, the reader cannot turn away. Greer pulls no punches.

Blurbs: Interference by Michelle Berry

Interference by Michelle Berry (ECW 2014)

Why you should read it: 

Berry captures the quiet desperation of her suburban characters in this claustrophobic, deftly plotted novel. Interference seethes with sinister possibilities.