The Canterbury Trail
By Angie Abdou
Brindle & Glass, 277 pages, $19.95
REVIEWED BY
LESLIE ANTHONY
In mountain towns, free thinking goes hand in hand with alpine liberation, attracting not only sport-minded folk, but those looking to escape the insanity of the modern world. That such places lead individuals to cook up their own brand of insanity - disguised as eccentricity - is moot.
You meet all sorts of freaks in mountain towns, and the bigger the town, the bigger the supply. Likewise the spectrum of more conventional archetypes, especially if the town's economic paradigm includes a waning resource-extraction past, a tenuous ski-resort present, and a pie-in-the-sky future in recreational property. Welcome to Anywhere, B.C. - particularly if Anywhere has a postal code somewhere in the Kootenays.
Such is the setting - both geographic and human - for Angie Abdou's novel The Canterbury Trail, which brings together a menagerie of mountain folk out to manufacture backcountry adventure on the last big snow weekend of the season. The book's plot revolves around the dysfunctional intra- and inter-group dynamics of having to share this time together.
The town of Coalton (easily identified as a stand-in for Fernie, B.C., even if you don't know the author lives there) supplies the personnel, but the mountains they stagger up - under plenty of metaphorical baggage - supply the backdrop for their drama. The story is pulled along by the book's clever architecture of jumping focus from one group or person to another as they head toward a collision of sensibilities in an overcrowded backcountry cabin.
And what are these calamitous sensibilities? So many labels accumulate it's hard to keep track: hippie, redneck, hermit, earth mother, lesbian, bi-curious, hot chick, out-of-her-realm urbanite, pregnant wife, local, foreigner, French Canadian, First Nations, miner, millworker, ambitious developer.
The snow sports ledger registers skier, telemarker, snowboarder, snowshoer and snowmobiler. All spread among 14 people. Lest this seem too anthropological, even the dog world is sampled: aggressive Huskies, crippled Golden Retriever, neurotic mutt. Add a surfeit of drugs, alcohol and maximum discourtesy and you're in for rough times. Abdou's many inspired descriptions of vomit aside, things indeed get ugly.
As in her first novel, The Bone Cage, Abdou here displays a talent for vividly blending a character's thoughts, observations, and actions. Added to the detail-laden tableau around them, and you can visualize every little finger wiggle. When her drunk, stentorian ex-husband bursts unexpectedly through the cabin door, newly-minted lesbian Ella doesn't merely turn back to her book to avoid the panic his presence instills: "… She pushed her stiff legs toward [her sleeping bag] got her back against the wall, slid down into the bright red cushion of down. Her hand groped for the book on the ground next to her, opened its cover, turned her eyes to the black and white of the page before her, stared at the blur of words and listened to her own short, quick breaths, and pulled her arms and legs into her body to make herself smaller, trying to become a hollow cave of nothingness."
At times the book seems well researched, at others bizarrely off the mark. You cannot, for instance, have "… deep into the bottomless fluff, his body suspended, weightless and free. The loose soft powder flew over his head …" when it is raining. The temperature at which rain falls metamorphoses snow to make such a thing physically impossible. And mistakes like "cotton-baton" for "cotton batting" seem egregious.
The book's real weakness, however, is in mining every known ski-bum cliché, starting with the hovel "filled with soggy beer cases and sweaty ski socks" and expressions like "wake and bake" (the breakfast joint), "bro's before ho's" (technically incorrect; the real expression is plural and not possessive), and "No friends on a powder day."
These add up so quickly that I actually found myself anticipating those that were missing - like the bumper sticker "Why's it called tourist season, if we can't shoot them?" - and then it magically appeared. The problem extends to the characters, who are so beyond cliché as to be caricatures, rendering the story not so much literature as a stage piece, less simple fiction than borderline fantasy. If you live in a mountain town you know bits and pieces of all of them, but none with so much cartoon swagger or antipathy toward each other. It all adds up to a lack of believability.
As a result, despite Abjou's sharp writing, the book's abrupt but predictable ending is as merciful as could be hoped for both characters and reader.
Whistler-based Leslie Anthony is the author of Snakebit and White Planet.