‘Body Trade’ by Margaret Macpherson

Reviewed by Josh Rioux

The best moment in Margaret Macpherson’s Body Trade comes roughly fifty pages from the end of the book, when Rosie, a half-Dogrib teen and one of a pair of young women whose cross-continental journey is why you and I are here in this review, is riding shotgun in a dugout canoe delivering a heap of rotten bananas to some pigs in a hellish backwater of coastal Belize. The gunwale is licking water, the pigs will eat anything they can reach with their mouths, and suddenly a spider the size of a hand scrambles towards Rosie, who screams and pulls back, rocking the over-laden boat, and the pigs start squealing like it’s all-you-can-eat as the boat takes on water and her companion starts thrashing away at the spider with an oar.

It’s easily the most tense and disturbing moment in the book, where the couch you’re reclining on, chip bowl on stomach, becomes the canoe and you’re completely there, all sweaty and clenched and generally unravelled. The beauty of it lies in its gleeful meanness—you get the sense that Macpherson would love nothing better than to describe the pigs gargling Rosie’s innards like a pack of first-graders hitting the Christmas pile.

The problem is you kind of want it too, only both girls and by about chapter three, before they drag you from Yellowknife to Central America on an interminable road trip where it feels as though everything is described except anything that would develop a theme, plot, or character. Nothing is reflected on or even really experienced: instead, we get a conveyer belt of events typical of every road trip you’ve ever been on: stopping to eat, stopping to sleep, running on beaches, being irritated by little things that wouldn’t bother you if they weren’t happening eighteen inches away for hours on end.  Their car dies in San Francisco, they get in a fight, Tanya blows off steam by going dancing. A few pages later they go to Disneyland and have a very nice time.

This crawls along right up until the final sixth of the book, when Body Trade veers almost without warning into a kind of Heart of Darkness-meets-Hostel sex thriller that derives exactly nothing from the entirety of the journey that got it there. All of a sudden Tanya and Rosie are sex slaves in Belize, and there are spiders and skin infections and cock-fights and those freaking pigs, and the book ends on the kind of sick note that is meant to cause you to shudder and reflect on the dreadful inevitability of it all, or perhaps on the flat-eyed godlessness of a world where two innocent young women on a road trip can be needlessly devoured by the cruel jungle, or on something, for certain, if only you could figure out what that something was intended to be.

For the record, Macpherson is a fine writer with real lyrical strengths; evoking the small impressions of nature is a task she nails repeatedly, especially sound: waves make a “whomp-hiss and a trickle back, like a creek in the spring, shifting its feet, moving its spine, coming awake under the ice”; the abovementioned pigs “hoot and clatter” for manflesh. She’s even more in the pocket when it comes to nature’s underbelly, the filthy and grotesque: “A slimy membrane sticks yellowy gelatinous eyeball-sized eggs together,” while a catfish head is presented to “hang, bloated, over-cooked and purplish-grey”. You can tell she likes this, and more, recognizes that you don’t get nature’s beauty without the rot beneath.

The narrative moves in a comfortable third-person present-tense subjective that alternates between Rosie, to whom is delegated the CanLit pole position of witnessing the wonder of nature, and Tanya, who is responsible for making plot happen. As such, Rosie gets the typical lyric realist tone seasoned with the odd colloquial tic to remind us of her roots, while Tanya is burdened with a more overt attempt at voice, an awkward but determined take on the kind of confident working-class yak more in the wheelhouse of writers who know voice can be plot—think Bukowski, Salinger, Hunter S. Thompson.

There is also a third, albeit spindly, rail here: faux journalistic snapshots, rendered in this-is-serious italics, telling the tale of a real-life plane crash in the North that resulted in cannibalism and led to the 1972 Hartwell Inquiry. Which brings us to the crux of the thing: the crash, a genuine tragedy, is here used to provide both theme and emotional weight to a story unable to earn either.

Rosie is haunted by the story of the crash and especially the part concerning David Pisurayak Kootook, an Inuit teen who survived the crash only to starve to death because he refuses to join the pilot, Marten Hartwell, in cannibalizing the dead passengers. For reasons underexplored, she conflates this ghoulish event—a current affair in the timeline of the novel– with the recent death by exposure of her own mother. But this element, which lands in the Theme Alert end-of-chapter position again and again, fails to inform or contrast or illuminate any other aspect of the novel, and as such feels entirely contrived.

As though sensing this, Macpherson flails about for anything to prop up this noodle of a spine. Themes are rifled through and discarded like someone looking for a flashlight in a power outage. Race (native poverty in Canada, Mexican housekeepers in California); cosmic order (the main friction between Rosie and Tanya is presented as philosophical: Rosie has faith in a Creator who gives gifts when they need them, usually in the form of the kindness of strangers, while Tanya is a big believer in survival of the fittest); and the burden of the past (both have baggage—Rosie’s got her mother, Tanya the town veterinarian who coerced her into sex as a teen) all bob to the surface in the aimless murk of the first 250 pages.

Faced with this shifting ground, what becomes interesting is what isn’t there. For a book entirely centered on a relationship between two women, their feelings for one another are never explored beyond an initial attraction on Rosie’s part, and the intermittent feelings of anger and pity Tanya volleys in return. Worse, the relationship never develops from the moment they meet— after four thousand kilometers even familiarity is more implied than articulated.

This isn’t helped by the fact that both girls randomly behave in ways that run jarringly counter-character: Rosie, the shy, self-contained teen, forced down into herself by a life of poverty and cultural oppression, keeps a quirky road diary by day where she takes notes on everybody who waves at them, and by night bares her soul to life-radiating Tanya, whose emotional palette covers all the territory between passive-aggressive and hostile. You can’t help but wonder why Macpherson would put two strangers on the road together if she isn’t interested in how they come to know each other or themselves.

What really sticks, though, more so than that head-scratcher of an oversight, is the creepy, reptilian gaze Macpherson levels on men throughout the book. Body Trade opens with the funeral of a married man Tanya has been screwing in the hotel above the bar she works at in Yellowknife. Tanya thinks he’s scum, responds to his drunk-driving death (imagined at one point as a possible suicide inspired by her rejection of him) with an odd mix of pity and approval, and yet muses at one point that she may have loved him.

This confused perspective informs almost every encounter with the male of the species the girls have; when men aren’t being immediately presumed to be rapists waiting to step to the plate, they’re ogled at; Tanya, to whom as the experienced one is given the bulk of these responses, is deeply suspicious, even hostile, to every man they come across as a matter of course, presumably due to her experience with statutory rape, except for when she randomly isn’t; their eventual end in the sex trade comes about because she is drawn to a slick Mexican business man who instantly telegraphs as shady to anybody who’s ever read a book or watched TV.

What pushes this beyond an issue of wobbly character, though, is the clear compulsion with which Macpherson pushes her characters into violation. Take the remarkably disturbing moment around the one-third mark, when Tanya gives a handjob to a fat-cat Californian whose place they’re crashing at through a back-home connection. The event is presented as a transaction, handjob for a place to stay, and while the man is described as literally revolting (“He’s a pinkish-brown colour, and he’s sweating, like the meat below his skin is filled with liquid and he can barely keep his roast ham bone juices from bursting through and running all over…”) and the girls repeatedly demonstrate no discomfort at sleeping in their car or on the beach or in shifts at twenty-four-hour inner city laundromats, Tanya shrugs it off like a low-battery warning and delivers the goods in the shower, reflecting on the man’s satisfaction later with something close to professional pride.

Thing is, Tanya’s not a prostitute. Nor is she a broken thing, condemned to attract violations because of childhood trauma; nor again is she taking one for the team when such a thing is so clearly unnecessary. It’s more like Macpherson wants to write about a world where a woman’s body is always either currency or fast food, but hasn’t really accepted it yet.

There are echoes of the stomach-turning descriptions of Belizean mud in that fat American sleazeball, and this feels like the primordial soup Macpherson is meant to work with; the cruelty and wet, messy beauty of sex and nature, and what happens to a woman moving through those spheres, is the faultline making a mess of this book’s surface structure. Body Trade climaxes in a bloody cock-fight to decide who rapes whom, and there is an escape and a sacrifice that is seemingly meant to echo the sacrifice made by young Kootook, who died because he wouldn’t eat people, but the message is lost in the haze of hormones and viscera.

What you’re left is the feeling that if Macpherson took her lyric talents to the heap of sex and pain she seems so drawn to and got to work without worrying about adding anything pretty or edifying to the world, in place of Kootook we’d have the figure of Marten Hartwell, snacking on the thighs of a dead nurse in the northern waste, at the center of all this instead. And wouldn’t that be something worth sinking our teeth into.

Signature | 256 pages |  $19.95 | paper | ISBN # 978-1897109502