Timothy Taylor in his office in Vancouver last month.Rafal Gerszak/The Globe and Mail
Precisely 11 years after the Chechen theatre hostage crisis, a man storms a studio where the controversial television talent show KiddieFame is being recorded. The hostage-taker, Mov, will talk only to Thom Pegg, a disgraced journalist whose Pulitzer-winning story about torture and the people and countries who commit it had one fatal flaw: an invented source. Is the fact that Mov can give Pegg the story of his career some kind of set-up by the authorities? If so, for what purpose? And how many children will have to die for it?
While Pegg is caught up in events inside the theatre, the other two main characters narrate an entirely different story about life carrying on outside. Eve, a former Olympian, still mourning her father's death and searching for her missing brother, meets Rabbit, a street artist living hand to mouth while he completes his final installation before moving to the country. Together, they track down Eve's brother and feel the glimmerings of love - hope in a desperate world.
Taylor's second novel, Story House, was accused by many reviewers of not having enough story to pull the reader along. The Blue Light Project is not short on story, exactly, but perhaps too much of it is still in Taylor's head; the effects he wants to create on the page and in readers' hearts and minds are somehow not fully realized in the text, particularly in the slightly clumsy attempt to bring together the two simultaneous stories.
This distances the characters and their concerns, an effect heightened by the way that information, back story in particular, is transmitted by one character telling another something, or even by one character reporting what another has told them (the corporate nightmare Rabbit has escaped, for instance, is reported by Eve).
What we lose here is the immediacy of the events. Even Pegg's sections, which contain some of the most dramatic moments - him entering the studio to talk to Mov, some of the children being released, the security forces attacking - have something missing emotionally.
Taylor is an intelligent writer, and one whose novels suggest that he has strong political convictions. Some of the best and most unsettling moments come when the grim ironies of the plot illustrate how governments - the setting of The Blue Light Project is a carefully anonymous North American city, quite a departure from Stanley Park and Story House, where Vancouver is fully a character - are quietly dismantling long-taken-for-granted rights and privileges and replacing them with libertarian pseudo-freedoms.
The problem is that it's famously difficult to write fiction about politics. Taylor's writing style here is very similar to his earlier novels - short sentences, filmic description, up-to-date slang and technological terms - yet it's hard for this novel to resonate in the same way as Stanley Park.
In order to be readable, politics (with a small p, here including torture, terrorism and contemporary obsession with celebrity, both one's own and other people's) often has to be deflected with humour, running the serious risk of being totally undermined and unnoticed. Taylor, however, is in earnest, which - although no bad thing, intellectually speaking - tends to flatten a novel's emotional landscape and render it less compelling.
I wanted to love The Blue Light Project. I wanted it to be 2011's Stanley Park, a novel to be pressed on friends and relatives. It is, sadly, not that book. You might say that Taylor is too intelligent for even the best editor to fully rein in his sprawling, wayward talent, with its streak of independence and thoughtful originality. You might say that he works best with strict limits (an incredible three out of 12 stories in the 2000 Journey Prize anthology, including the overall winner, were written by Taylor), and that - despite the early burst of astonishing brilliance that was Stanley Park - he's still coming to grips with the novel form.
If a book can be important without being great, The Blue Light Project is it; there is no doubt that Taylor will one day be a Canadian icon. And when his next book is released, I will still be first in the queue to buy it.
J.C. Sutcliffe is a writer and translator who lives in Canada and England.