Steven Price, whose poetry collection Anatomy of Keys won the Gerald Lampert Award and was named a Globe and Mail Book of the Year in 2006, has recently published his first novel. Into That Darkness is a harrowing tale. It is an apocalyptic read— spell-binding, frustrating and darkly epic. Imagine, if you will, the end of the world, a Mad Max movie combined with Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Now throw in an earthquake that rocks the entire west coast of North America. Give the whole scenario a slightly off-kilter, dream(nightmare)-like feeling. Then toss in an old man, a young boy and an injured mother and… ta da … you have Into That Darkness.
Price has given us fiction, of course, but the recent quakes around the world, the tsunamis, the hurricanes and floods, force us to read this novel with a sharp, present, heart-breaking perspective. We’ve seen something like this in the news or maybe we’ve experienced it personally. These scenarios are a horrible reality, they are happening all the time, all around us. Price’s mixture of this reality with his imagination makes for a wrenchingly beautiful but very difficult story. This would be a feat for any fiction writer, let alone a first novelist.
Sixty-nine-year-old Arthur Lear has gone out to buy cigars. Ten-year-old Mason has been suspended from a school field trip and is hanging out with his mother, Anna Mercia, in her coffee shop, which is directly beside the tobacconist’s shop. It is a calm fall morning in Victoria, BC. Suddenly the quake hits: “Car alarms along the street began to screech. The glass jars were rattling. Then his [Arthur’s] knees buckled and he grabbed at the pitching countertops, he looked out in time to see a car leap in the street beyond and the asphalt crest like a wave and then like that it was upon them.” Anna Mercia and Mason are trapped underground and Arthur begins the often futile process of helping with the rescue teams. Eventually he rescues Mason and they set off through the devastation hoping to find Mason’s sister, Kat, and then later, hoping to find Anna Mercia.
The old man and the young boy traveling down deserted and dangerous roads, coming across looters and scavengers, reminds one of The Road. That constant threat lurking everywhere, hidden people watching from blackened windows. That silence all around. The dust, the destruction, the death.
Price evokes smell and sight and sound throughout the rescue and the walk:
A great fetid whoosh of air walloped past them and out up the tunnel and the old man coughed in the black reek and the headlamps were bending weirdly off the bricks and broken furniture beyond and the shapes wavered in the glare and then the light steadied and the old man squinted to see what lay within.
But what really compares to The Road is when Anna Mercia awakes in a field of corpses (she was thrown there because she appeared to be dead). Stumbling out of the decay she makes her way back to her house thinking that both her children, Mason and Kat, will go there to find her, but, instead of her children she finds an evil almost unbearable to comprehend. This part is certainly very difficult to read. People in this novel sink quickly down into their basest forms, they become animals, their eat-or-be-eaten survival mechanisms kick in. They rapidly become immoral, or perhaps their immorality is now given the freedom to exist – there are no laws. There is no structure. There is nothing.
Each of these three characters, Arthur, Mason and Anna Mercia, walk a great distance, figuratively and literally. Price has interspersed chapters of the past, of their previous lives, within their journey forward. The point of view of each of the three characters is given voice in turns. We see where they came from, what they were like before the quake, and how their journey now changes them.
This novel is a real feat. It is visceral. You feel this book creep into your very organs while you read.
That doesn’t mean it is without small problems. Often Into That Darkness is unbelievable, but I’m willing to suspend my disbelief – after all, you can’t know what would happen until it happens. Maybe it only takes four days for people to start murdering each other in a situation like this? I don’t know. Maybe the rest of the world wouldn’t help out as quickly as I think they would? Again, I don’t know and hope I never have to. I can easily put some factual realities aside for great fiction.
However, I can’t ignore one criticism I have of this novel. Because of the dream-like quality of Price’s prose, because of the constant forward motio— his characters are actually physically moving forward throughout the whole book— when the author suddenly takes sixteen pages to have his main character, Arthur, tell a story to Anna Mercia about a geologist and a creationist and their loss (and gain) of faith, no matter how thought-provoking and interesting that story is, no matter how much we need to know about faith and science, those sixteen pages stop the plot. Seize it up like a bad leg cramp. Edit those sixteen pages down to, perhaps, three (a nice little story Arthur might just mention in passing) and this is one fine, thought-provoking book. Because, Steven Price, you don’t have to come out and tell me about different ways of interpreting disasters, about all kinds of perceptions of all kinds of faith, you’ve already illustrated that so subtly and maturely throughout the entire novel. In fact, the sixteen page story Arthur tells is easily summed up in Price’s lines: “The old man sat and she sat with him and they waited like that as if guests in a house not of their choosing. Which in a way they were. As are all the living in this world.”
Into That Darkness has small faults (within big geological faults – sorry, it had to be said), but it is a superb novel.
Thomas Allen | 240 pages | $22.95 | paper | ISBN #978-0887627378
‘Into That Darkness’ by Steven Price
Book Reviews
Steven Price, whose poetry collection Anatomy of Keys won the Gerald Lampert Award and was named a Globe and Mail Book of the Year in 2006, has recently published his first novel. Into That Darkness is a harrowing tale. It is an apocalyptic read— spell-binding, frustrating and darkly epic. Imagine, if you will, the end of the world, a Mad Max movie combined with Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Now throw in an earthquake that rocks the entire west coast of North America. Give the whole scenario a slightly off-kilter, dream(nightmare)-like feeling. Then toss in an old man, a young boy and an injured mother and… ta da … you have Into That Darkness.
Price has given us fiction, of course, but the recent quakes around the world, the tsunamis, the hurricanes and floods, force us to read this novel with a sharp, present, heart-breaking perspective. We’ve seen something like this in the news or maybe we’ve experienced it personally. These scenarios are a horrible reality, they are happening all the time, all around us. Price’s mixture of this reality with his imagination makes for a wrenchingly beautiful but very difficult story. This would be a feat for any fiction writer, let alone a first novelist.
Sixty-nine-year-old Arthur Lear has gone out to buy cigars. Ten-year-old Mason has been suspended from a school field trip and is hanging out with his mother, Anna Mercia, in her coffee shop, which is directly beside the tobacconist’s shop. It is a calm fall morning in Victoria, BC. Suddenly the quake hits: “Car alarms along the street began to screech. The glass jars were rattling. Then his [Arthur’s] knees buckled and he grabbed at the pitching countertops, he looked out in time to see a car leap in the street beyond and the asphalt crest like a wave and then like that it was upon them.” Anna Mercia and Mason are trapped underground and Arthur begins the often futile process of helping with the rescue teams. Eventually he rescues Mason and they set off through the devastation hoping to find Mason’s sister, Kat, and then later, hoping to find Anna Mercia.
The old man and the young boy traveling down deserted and dangerous roads, coming across looters and scavengers, reminds one of The Road. That constant threat lurking everywhere, hidden people watching from blackened windows. That silence all around. The dust, the destruction, the death.
Price evokes smell and sight and sound throughout the rescue and the walk:
A great fetid whoosh of air walloped past them and out up the tunnel and the old man coughed in the black reek and the headlamps were bending weirdly off the bricks and broken furniture beyond and the shapes wavered in the glare and then the light steadied and the old man squinted to see what lay within.
But what really compares to The Road is when Anna Mercia awakes in a field of corpses (she was thrown there because she appeared to be dead). Stumbling out of the decay she makes her way back to her house thinking that both her children, Mason and Kat, will go there to find her, but, instead of her children she finds an evil almost unbearable to comprehend. This part is certainly very difficult to read. People in this novel sink quickly down into their basest forms, they become animals, their eat-or-be-eaten survival mechanisms kick in. They rapidly become immoral, or perhaps their immorality is now given the freedom to exist – there are no laws. There is no structure. There is nothing.
Each of these three characters, Arthur, Mason and Anna Mercia, walk a great distance, figuratively and literally. Price has interspersed chapters of the past, of their previous lives, within their journey forward. The point of view of each of the three characters is given voice in turns. We see where they came from, what they were like before the quake, and how their journey now changes them.
This novel is a real feat. It is visceral. You feel this book creep into your very organs while you read.
That doesn’t mean it is without small problems. Often Into That Darkness is unbelievable, but I’m willing to suspend my disbelief – after all, you can’t know what would happen until it happens. Maybe it only takes four days for people to start murdering each other in a situation like this? I don’t know. Maybe the rest of the world wouldn’t help out as quickly as I think they would? Again, I don’t know and hope I never have to. I can easily put some factual realities aside for great fiction.
However, I can’t ignore one criticism I have of this novel. Because of the dream-like quality of Price’s prose, because of the constant forward motio— his characters are actually physically moving forward throughout the whole book— when the author suddenly takes sixteen pages to have his main character, Arthur, tell a story to Anna Mercia about a geologist and a creationist and their loss (and gain) of faith, no matter how thought-provoking and interesting that story is, no matter how much we need to know about faith and science, those sixteen pages stop the plot. Seize it up like a bad leg cramp. Edit those sixteen pages down to, perhaps, three (a nice little story Arthur might just mention in passing) and this is one fine, thought-provoking book. Because, Steven Price, you don’t have to come out and tell me about different ways of interpreting disasters, about all kinds of perceptions of all kinds of faith, you’ve already illustrated that so subtly and maturely throughout the entire novel. In fact, the sixteen page story Arthur tells is easily summed up in Price’s lines: “The old man sat and she sat with him and they waited like that as if guests in a house not of their choosing. Which in a way they were. As are all the living in this world.”
Into That Darkness has small faults (within big geological faults – sorry, it had to be said), but it is a superb novel.
Thomas Allen | 240 pages | $22.95 | paper | ISBN #978-0887627378