Michael Turner has a reputation for using the whole toolbox of literary devices in his novels. His previous work, the 1999 sleeper hit The Pornographer’s Poem, constructed a narrative out of letters, film scripts, diary entries, monologues, and even some occasional passages of straightforward prose. By contrast, Turner’s new novel, 8 x 10 (Doubleday Canada), seems almost disappointingly conventional at first. Where are the stage directions, the e-mail missives? The closer you look, however, the more the oddness comes to the fore.

For one thing, there is the 8 x 10 grid of squares that introduces each chapter – or, more accurately, each chunk of text. With each new chunk, a different square in the grid gets coloured in, which is meant to serve as a sort of road map for readers. This is important, because it’s easy to lose your bearings due to the novel’s other strange features – namely, the fact that none of the characters have names, the setting is never made clear, and none of the narrative chunks bear any obvious relationship to the ones preceding them.

As the 47-year-old Vancouver author sees it, the seemingly random flow – or non-flow – of events was the best way to tackle the novel’s chief subjects: war, immigration, and dislocation. “I wanted to create something as open as possible to the contemporary world,” he says. Part of that process included his decision to excise proper nouns. With precise names and places, Turner explains, “you immediately narrow … the possibilities.” The book opens with quotes from both Grimm’s Fairy Tales and The Arabian Nights, which Turner cites as examples of texts that benefit from a lack of names and context. “You can think of them [as taking place] in your own backyard,” he says.

As for the 8 x 10 grid, all Turner would say by way of explanation is, “We live in the grid. [This is] the way our world is structured.” He adds, however, that part of the inspiration for the grid came from some writing he had done recently about Piet Mondrian, the Dutch abstract painter known for his canvases of elaborately criss-crossing lines. It also came from his own musings on the concept of storytelling as “weaving”: The 8 x 10 grid operates both horizontally and vertically – the equivalent of both the warp and the weft. 

The question now is: will the book’s formal experimentation be too much for the big award juries and the reading public? Doubleday, Turner’s publisher since The Pornographer’s Poem, doesn’t seem to think so. In fact, Maya Mavjee, the head of Doubleday, argues that the book may well reach a wider audience than such fare usually does, due to Turner’s name recognition in other artistic fields. “The book is only one form in which he works, so [there’s an] opportunity to market to his [other] audiences,” she says.

In recent years, Turner has worked in a variety of media. He’s written an opera libretto based on a German children’s fable, a screenplay for militant gay filmmaker Bruce LaBruce, and another screenplay in collaboration with B.C. artist Stan Douglas. Perhaps his most high-profile collaborations, however, have been with director Bruce McDonald, who directed the film adaptation of his novel Hard Core Logo in 1996 and a live-to-air version of his novel American Whiskey Bar for Citytv in 1998.

Turner, who drew on his experiences in the band Hard Rock Miners when writing Hard Core Logo, says he is now more likely to turn to the art world for inspiration than the literary world. “I do look at art a lot. I will say that I look at more art than literature,” he says, calling visual art “a little richer.” 

Over the years, Turner continues, he has been growing less and less interested in the traditional prose novel. After finishing The Pornographer’s Poem, he “kind of missed the collaborative process of [script] writing,” and was subsequently reluctant to make the emotional and mental commitment another novel would require. “You really have to make it so much of [your] life. I was afraid to do that not because of what I might find, but because it would take me out of the contemporary world.” However, he worked away at three different ideas for books – the best of which ultimately morphed into 8 x 10.

Now that he’s faced down “the semi truck of novel writing” again, Turner expects to have another manuscript ready to submit to his publisher by this September. Exhibiting a rare flash of conventional novelist behaviour, Turner declines to comment on the subject matter of the new book. But chances are it will be different from The Pornographer’s Poem or 8 x 10 or Hardcore Logo or any of his other works. “I’ve never really been interested in defining my voice,” he says. “Different projects and different material require different voices.”