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The Extinction Club

by Jeffrey Moore

In Jeffrey Moore’s third novel, a recovering addict from Neptune, New Jersey, arrives in a snowy Laurentian town with nothing but a beat-up van, withdrawal hallucinations, and a suitcase full of inherited cash. Fleeing lawsuits, personal scandal, and a marriage felled by drugs, Nile Nightingale’s second chance at life comes in the form of Céleste Jonquères, a 14-year-old orphan and wildlife activist he rescues from certain death in the novel’s dazzling opening chapter.

Narrated in two voices – Nile’s and Céleste’s – The Extinction Club is simultaneously a story about the search for identity in a rootless postmodern world, a meditation on the survival of the fittest in a culture that preys upon defenseless things, and a dynamite picaresque about the animal-poaching trade. All these elements are beautifully interwoven in Moore’s haunting and darkly comic portrait of an unlikely friendship between two outcasts at the end of the line. 

Moore unfurls this friendship with a masterful flair for characterization and quick-witted dialogue. Over the course of the novel, as Nile nurses Céleste back to health in the barren Quebec wilderness, the two learn to trust each other, all the while fending off a group of vengeful wildlife poachers. These secondary characters imbue the narrative with suspense, even if they are cruel to the point of caricature.

The two principal characters, however, are superbly developed. Céleste, in particular, is a fabulous literary creation. A teenage firebrand sporting wildlife tattoos and a Mensa intellect, her grungy chutzpah and cosmic empathy bring to mind Courtney Love – if she had been a child president of the Sierra Club. Céleste’s sections appear in the form of a handwritten journal; at first this seems like a contrivance, but in the end it adds a delightful quirkiness to her narration.  

Filled with dark humour and bright light, The Extinction Club is a moving and playful novel about the ultimate strength of human connections and the unquenchable will to persist in the face of hardship.

 

Reviewer: Lauren Kirshner

Publisher: McClelland & Stewart

DETAILS

Price: $32

Page Count: 362 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 978-0-67006-797-8

Released: April

Issue Date: 2010-3

Categories: Children and YA Non-fiction, Fiction: Novels