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Twenty-six

by Leo McKay Jr.

When those final moments come, and they inevitably will, most of us would like to have our aged heads propped up in a comfortable bed with a nice view of a garden, and to be lucid enough to impart a final sentence to the assembled family. Glory works too: a heroic act to end it all, some almost-drowned child safe on a riverbank vowing never to forget our act of bravery as our body floats downstream.

Further down the list of preferable deaths, very close to the bottom, is the fate that met 26 coal miners deep in the Westray mine in Stellarton, Nova Scotia, early on a May morning in 1992. The coal dust around them ignited, the methane followed, and the explosion, according to court transcripts, shook windows for miles.

Following Like This, his Giller-nominated book of short stories, Leo McKay Jr.’s first novel takes place in the fictional town of Albion Mines, which acts as a stand-in for Stellarton. A disastrous explosion is at its centre, but Twenty-Six is not a novel about fireballs, attempted rescues, and emotional court cases. Mining tragedies can happen with an errant spark. Mining-town tragedies, McKay demonstrates, take longer to unfold but can be just as destructive.

The novel follows the Burrows family, who live in Red Row, a working class neighbourhood scarred from the boom and bust of the coal industry. The family members are locked in a constant menial struggle against each other, and they’re large, if not in number then in size. The two sons, Arvel and Ziv, have their father Ennis’s hulking body, his big arms, his flaring temper. The real difference between them is the degree of violence in their arguments. “Each fight with Ziv it seemed, was an individual struggle over some specific issue,” writes McKay. “Their fights were about drinking or about something one or the other had said without thinking. With Arvel it was different. [Ennis] and Arvel just had one long fight that got taken up anew whenever they saw each other.”

Ziv has attempted university. Arvel jobbed around. Both are offered a real job underground at the town’s new mine, which is at once a death wish and a financial salve. Ziv quits after a day and eventually finds employment at Zellers, but Arvel stays on and sees for himself the gathering danger down in the hole.

Jumping from the early to the late 1980s and back again, McKay offers a fractal view of the tragedy and its aftermath. With its fine, understated prose, Twenty-Six is not a letdown, but like Arvel and Ziv it is very large.

McKay loves the town he has rendered, the streets of Red Row and the sad histories of its inhabitants. The anatomy of the mine disaster has been thoroughly researched, but sketching out so much detail highlights an increasingly severe problem in fiction: that of the inflated book. In this age of heft equals value, a slim volume tends to signify money wasted, making authors reluctant to winnow away and cut down what is not necessary.

Twenty-Six is by no means an environmental hazard or a 3,000-page bookshelf breaker. The passages that deserve to be included glisten with honesty, but when the story widens to include a subplot in Tokyo, the city is described in paragraphs of needless Lonely Planet detail. This secondary story, involving domestic violence inflicted on a Japanese woman, is located too far outside the main narrative to cause any resonance with what is happening in Nova Scotia. It could disappear and not be missed, an example of the expendable sections that add texture at the expense of pace.

McKay is at his best when he talks about humans, not cities, and he often makes his characters come alive in ways that appear effortless. Arvel shakes salt into his pints of beer, foaming up the head of each one. Later in the story, in a sort of sibling echo, Ziv repeats the gesture.

And though Twenty-Six does come with padding included, credit must be given to McKay’s approach to the mine disaster scenario. What could have so easily fallen into melodrama – here is the family man, there is the bureaucracy, on the outskirts of town the creaking mineshaft: cue tragedy – never does.

Twenty-Six would have been a better novel if it had been lighter but the mistake of inclusion shouldn’t take away from what is at its core. The book is an earnest exploration of the painful varieties of human loss. It’s a warning for those who don’t yet fully comprehend the regret that comes with unexpected death. It’s about the bitter resentment of sons, the obstinate nature of fathers, and those embraces that should have happened before the tragedy, before the death, but never do.

 

Reviewer: Craig Taylor

Publisher: McClelland & Stewart

DETAILS

Price: $32.99

Page Count: 380 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 0-7710-5475-0

Issue Date: 2003-5

Categories: Fiction: Novels