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Some Great Thing

by Colin McAdam

We’re in Ottawa in the 1970s. It’s the capital’s decade of growth, the sort of era when a city’s girth finally flops over its belt and expands without bounds. It’s a time when the surrounding untouched land is up for grabs, and those who are grabbing for it will make their fortunes and leave an indelible mark on the city.

Jerry McGuinty, one of two central characters in Colin McAdam’s voice-drunk first novel, is a plasterer-turned-developer devoted to spreading quality homes out into the suburbs. He makes the right kinds of deals, hires the most accomplished, and probably most foul-mouthed builders around. He makes sure his contacts in government have reason to like him. McGuinty, we’re reminded, is a big man, and his vision for the city is broad. It’s not one of civic beauty or parks. He sees lines of solid houses where the walls don’t bend, the roofs don’t give.

McGuinty loves his houses but also what surrounds them, the peripherals. These include Kathleen, the woman who drives a local lunchtruck to feed the construction workers. Kathleen is known to disappear for weeks at a time, and usually has a bottle of Dewars hidden under the seat, but McGuinty is drawn toward her regardless.

At the other end of the social scale is an aging civil servant named Simon Struthers, who comes from a prominent family, with his MP father, Type A mother, and his resulting “long, golden and pestilent” childhood. With a recent promotion to a job shaping Ottawa’s development policies, Struthers has been given a perfect opportunity to write his famously persuasive memos, all the while seducing his female colleagues. Edging toward 40, he rarely feels alive in his own body except when he’s on top of someone else. Even when Struthers is engaged in one of his frantic love affairs, he can’t keep the desperation completely at bay.

McAdam tells his story in chapters that alternate between the jocular recollections of the builder and the affairs of the civil servant. Occasionally, they overlap – or rather collide. With two voices so different, set so distinctly on opposite sides of the city’s class barrier, there’s no mistaking one for the other. But McAdam isn’t content to let the two voices simply push the book along.

It’s still early, but Some Great Thing is already in the running for Most Frustrating Book of the Year. Every few pages an urge rises up to scream out “Just say the words! Just say what you need to say!” But like a painter who dabbles and wanders instead of drawing a confident, straight line, McAdam’s novel is full of prose that serves no purpose other than to obscure the passages that do ring with truth.

Instead of inviting readers into the story, the novel’s stylish, disjointed prose tends to push them away. The tumbling monologues of the McGuinty sections are so packed with repetition, unexpected imagery, random capitalization, and direct address that the other characters involved in the builder’s life seem opaque and never fully explained. The human beings around him simply don’t feel human. Kathleen slips into alcoholism and McGuinty’s son, also Jerry, struggles with his own place in the family, but the author seems less interested in telling us about these events than presenting them in a roundabout fashion.

McAdam’s writing uses repetition so much that the poetic slips to pedantic. On Jerry and Kathleen’s first meeting we get: “Her name was Kathleen Herlihy and the first thing she said was this: ‘My name is Kathleen Herlihy.’” Just to be sure, halfway down the page: “My name is Kathleen Herlihy.” In the sections dealing with Simon Struthers’ life, there are pages upon pages of unattributed dialogue between two, sometimes three characters. At these moments the book reads like a script for an unfinished play.

I hope McAdam is at work on a second book because considerable talents are evident here. There is a terrific idea at the novel’s core – the promise of land; the battle of civic duty, experimentation, and planning versus the reality of getting good houses up. There is the drama of those who want to take a city and turn it into something, and McAdam sets up two love stories with incredible promise before letting them drift to unfulfilling ends. With his next book I hope he will enlist the advice of someone with a very sharp editor’s pencil who is not afraid to trim 400 pages down to 250 and who will question what some of McAdam’s loose language means, no matter how it may sound on the page. It’s easy to pay someone that ambiguous compliment of “technically ambitious prose” but being technically ambitious is only good if it doesn’t act as a hindrance to the novel’s meaning.

Too often the stylistic ambition of Some Great Thing pushes the story to some lesser corner. We’re told it’s about Ottawa. We’re told it’s about growth, progress, families, and the unsure, destructive nature of love. Well, sometimes you just have to say it.

 

Reviewer: Craig Taylor

Publisher: Raincoast Books

DETAILS

Price: $34.95

Page Count: 408 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 1-55192-695-4

Released: Apr.

Issue Date: 2004-3

Categories: Fiction: Novels

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