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Fall

by Colin McAdam

The “Fall” in the title of this finely crafted thriller is Fallon DeStindt, a student at an exclusive Ottawa-area boarding school who mysteriously disappears halfway through the book. Two people who seem to be implicated are her boyfriend Julius, son of the American ambassador, and Julius’s roommate Noel, son of Canada’s Consul General to Australia. (Author Colin McAdam is himself the son of a diplomat and attended Ottawa’s Ashbury College, so he knows the milieu.)

The presentation is similar to that in McAdam’s acclaimed debut Some Great Thing, shuttling skillfully between different points of view and making heavy use of stream-of-consciousness in the Julius sections. The immediacy of this approach suits Julius’s personality; he is an unreflective, somewhat naive bundle of hormones, living only in the moment and head-over-heels in love with Fall. The tone of political allegory takes a turn for the psychosexual when Julius meets Noel, a creepy closet case who likes to lift weights and read Thomas Hobbes. Noel tells his own side of the story looking back on the events from a mature perspective. 

There is a bit of a B-movie flavour to all of this, but the writing is fresh and alert throughout, allowing McAdam to express the random poetry of perception (“words chasing thoughts”) while recreating the claustrophobic atmosphere of the boarding school and its hermetic world of boredom, privilege, and “enforced infantilization.” The plot is also deftly handled, from the puzzle-without-a-solution at its centre to the playful asides and paranoid leitmotifs. Bald men start to seem particularly sinister. 

The only real negative is the amount of attention devoted to scenes of heavy petting and puppy love between gormless Julius and Fall. Young lovers can be annoying enough when passed on the street; the amount of close exposure here – including bumping teeth and staring deep, deep into one another’s eyes – is too much, especially given the stylistic extremes these sections go to. (Sex, for example, is rendered as “Phoo. Ooo. Aah. Mm. Sss. Pha. Sh. Ga. Ga. Gah,” etc.) Add to this the truism that the villain in a thriller is always more interesting than the beautiful people, and the love story seems even weaker. This is, however, a minor point that does little to diminish what is a smart and well-paced literary page-turner.

 

Reviewer: Alex Good

Publisher: Hamish Hamilton Canada

DETAILS

Price: $32

Page Count: 368 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 978-0-670-06720-6

Issue Date: 2009-5

Categories: Fiction: Novels

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