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Blood Sports
By Eden Robinson
McClelland & Stewart, 278 pages, $32.99

Eden Robinson (whom I've only met a couple of times in passing) has one of the most uproarious and infectious laughs in Canadian literature. Her hoot would have been something to hear if she could have seen my jaw drop to the floor and my socks pop off as a couple of carefully placed sentences in the final pages of her novel Blood Sports turned the larger sense of her second novel inside out and upside down. Robinson's sting worked precisely as the trickster in her intended, and caught me out in much the same way that Alice Munro cunningly leads most of her readers, most of the time, into asking more insightful questions about difficult human situations by surreptitiously revealing the capriciousness that conspires against the best of intentions in even the more virtuous among us.

Eden Robinson is not usually mentioned in the same sentence with Alice Munro because her most obvious influence is the Stephen King of 30 years ago. Blood Sports is violent, and its violence is so twisted and explicit that midway through I was tempted to send the review copy back to my editor with a note that it should be reassigned to the biggest fan of David Cronenberg he knows.

I'm delighted that I didn't, even though the second half of Robinson's tale ratchets up its assault on the sensibilities of anyone not given to playing video games, as living and dead bodies are abused in ruthlessly shocking ways: Worse things than death overtake her characters, and death is never the final indignity for any of them. But I kept reading for much the same reason that I persevered with Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers when it was first published. Like Cohen, Robinson combines a variety of narrative forms and conflicting styles with such a high degree of technical virtuosity that the very act of reading a cracked and splintered narrative becomes spellbinding, addictive, unstoppable, until the final payoff causes a reader to loop back to the first page and start in reading it again in a quite different and larger way.

On first reading, Blood Sports seems to be about the nicest introduction any warm body seated in a comfy chair can reasonably expect to the radical acts of dysfunctionality that pass themselves off as ordinary human behaviour among the more sadistic drug dealers and their masochistic, streetwise users in East Vancouver.

Tom Bauer is a twentysomething epileptic who medicates himself with marijuana as he tries to break free of the cycles of abuse that link him to his alcoholic mother and his psychopathic, coke-snorting cousin Jeremy. Tom's pothead way out is to father a baby daughter with Paulina, his cousin's ex-junkie girlfriend, and establish some kind of normal family life at the edges of Grandview Park, amid "a mix of anarchists and activists, blue-collar families and immigrants ..... hippies who couldn't afford Kitsilano [and] ..... new condo owners." He supplements his salary from the night shift at Lucky Lou's corner store with irregular withdrawals from a briefcase stash of cash and drugs that Jeremy left behind when he went to prison. When Jeremy is released, the past reasserts itself and Tom, Paulie and their baby become hostages to some other people's missing fortunes.

Blood Sports is a continuation of the cat-and-mouse games between Tom and Jeremy which Jeremy compulsively videotapes and which Robinson began chronicling a decade ago in the novella Contact Sports, in her first book, Traplines (1996). One of the most successful story collections of the 1990s, Traplines was translated into several languages, won the Winifred Holtby Prize in England, was named a notable book of the year by The New York Times and earned Robinson enough money that she's been able to write in her own way and at her own pace, especially since Monkey Beach (2000), her first novel, was short-listed for the Giller Prize.

Blood Sports picks up the threads of that earlier story set in 1993 by way of video plays, letters and e-mails that strategically intercut a more conventional, riveting noir narrative that opens on June 22, 1998, and closes on July 10.

Read alongside the three other stories in Traplines, Contact Sports seemed almost a case study of the near impossibility of escape from abuse when family members are both tormentors and jailers. Here, the story of Tom and Jeremy, and the intersecting triangles that link them to other people and places beyond the Downtown East Side of Vancouver, opens out into something much broader, and darker, than the harrowing underside of family life without losing any of its devastating domestic impact.

Robinson is far more ambitious than her earlier works suggest. Although she admits in an end note that she has "borrowed shamelessly from the stylistic conventions of social realism," Blood Sports is, she writes, "homage to the original Hansel and Gretel, the version where Hansel uses a finger bone from a previous victim to convince the witch he's still too skinny to eat." She calls what she writes "dark fantasy," but if it is that, it is so in a peculiarly postmodern way. Whatever you call what Robinson is doing, it gives her much more room to manoeuvre than Leonard Cohen found in the form he created and abandoned in Beautiful Losers.

Robinson is already talking about a sequel called Death Sports, and a lot of readers, myself included, are going to demand it. By the end of this book, it will be very difficult for any reader to think of Eden Robinson as merely the nerviest Generation X-er in the writing business — or the first Canadian aboriginal (Haisla and Heiltsuk) writer to gain international recognition. With Blood Sports, she now is one of the half-dozen highly disciplined, fiercely determined younger novelists in this country who are radically revising the face of our fiction by abandoning Northrop Frye's puzzled question, "Where is here?" in favour of what U.S. critic Christoph Irmscher has characterized as "a patiently repeated, genuinely amazed 'What is here?'."

Contributing reviewer T..F. Rigelhof has been genuinely amazed by the "What?" of Canada since first reading George Grant's Lament for a Nation, which he rereads every federal election campaign. He is the author of George Grant: Redefining Canada, among other works.