‘Caught’ by Lisa Moore

Reviewed by Richard Cumyn

The inimitable Elmore Leonard’s first rule is that if it sounds like writing cut it out. If Lisa Moore had followed his orders to the letter, Caught would have been just another thin police-procedural about the hunt for a would-be drug smuggler (who, incidentally, doesn’t seem to have heard that other cautionary adage, the one about shame and being fooled more than once in the same ruse).

With linguistic verve and a magnified curiosity about whatever passes through her field of vision, Moore elevates the cops-and-robbers subgenre to literary respectability. Her scenes operate on two levels. On the surface is twenty-five-year-old David Slaney’s attempt, after escaping from a Nova Scotia prison in 1978, to elude capture long enough to transport two tons of marijuana from Colombia back to Newfoundland, his home. Deeper, enlivening a convincing though standard-issue plot, is Moore’s genius for character depiction. The sangfroid of the long-haul trucker, the silly-serious alternating current of bridesmaids smoking in a hotel stairwell, the jumpy addict trying to hawk his wife’s vacuum cleaner to patrons of a bar—these supposed incidentals vie with the overarching plot for star billing. They are so evocative, their scenes so concrete and self-contained, they remind us that Moore’s primary talent is as a short story writer.

The novel’s first part, in which Slaney evades police while trying to reconnect with Brian Hearn, his childhood friend and partner-in-crime, reminds me of the movement in Charles Frazier’s Civil War masterpiece, Cold Mountain. As each novel is pulled towards its inevitable ending, our reading pleasure derives from the hero’s chance encounters along the way, from vividly frozen moments of beauty or terror, and from the exquisite tension between the image-rich specificity of now and the murk of what might come.

Writers can be separated crudely into two groups, those who build their sentences with “but” and those who primarily use “and.” As a conjunction, old mud-stick “but” does the job, but it will never really advance an idea much beyond a neutral position. Lisa Moore, on the other hand, belongs to the latter bunch, Hemingway’s progeny, and as such hers is an elastic prose of continuity and unfettered possibility. Who, for example, would ever think mosquitoes could be so erotic?

“They settled on his skin and put their fine things into him and were lulled and bloated and thought themselves sexy and near death.”

Even sound becomes intensely visual under Moore’s pen. Slaney hears approaching police sirens as “hoops of hollow, tin-bright noise.” The click of a screen door closing is first seen then felt, carried by a breeze over open fields to Slaney’s jawbone. What is static becomes animated in the fugitive’s newfound freedom. Lupines in the ditch where he is hiding are turned liquid by approaching headlights, “spilling” like water from a burst dam. It makes perfect sense that after four years Slaney would see everything outside his jail cell in Technicolor. The sight of a white horse, flanks streaked golden pink by the setting sun, is worth the entire escapade even if he gets caught that same day, he decides overcome with joy.

Those who would ban the poetic from the crime novel lack vision. As long as it doesn’t impede narrative flow and the reason for the image makes sense, we should welcome the occasional metaphor. A steady diet of Harlan Coben and Henning Mankell dulls the ear. Farther into the novel, after Slaney has had time to adjust to life on the outside, we might begin to question the continued artiness of what we see through his eyes.

The requisite counterbalance in this story is Patterson, a sweaty, overweight, Toronto drug-squad officer with a rich backstory worthy of its own novel. Patterson has compelling reasons for wanting both to thwart Slaney and Hearn’s drug running scheme and to save Ada, the young woman embroiled with them. One failure away from being put out to pasture, he hangs on to the slim hope of being promoted to police inspector. He also has an adult daughter he’s lost touch with. Technically Patterson is working with the RCMP on the case because four years earlier, the first time Hearn and Slaney were caught smuggling drugs, Hearn jumped bail while in Patterson’s jurisdiction.

As Slaney’s nemesis, Patterson becomes the moral center of the novel, however flawed the laws expressing that morality might be. In another nod to Hemingway, Moore puts Patterson ringside watching a Mexican bullfight:

“He loved that the fight was fixed…. Always the bull would end up dead…. The best stories we’ve known from the beginning.”

It seems the fix is in, as far as Slaney’s chances of success are concerned. The book is titled Caught not Free and Clear, after all. In the world of 2013, as former CIA and NSA operative Edward Snowden seeks asylum from prosecution after exposing his government’s illegal wiretapping of it own citizens, and as we spend untold riches criminalizing marijuana instead of striving to control its production and sale, Caught exhibits a sly prescience, one fuelled by hindsight. Although the novel avoids making overt political statements about the relative futility of today’s war on drugs and the disturbing docility with which we have allowed our every move to be tracked and recorded, it makes its stand pretty clear.

In the end this is a story about freedom and trust. David Slaney mistakenly believes himself to be free, and yet every time he apprehends the astounding fact that he is exuberantly alive, he proves he is as free as anyone. Meanwhile his immediate survival depends on whether or not he can trust certain people. Patterson tells us that trust is “predicated on a flimsy belief system. Trust was an unwillingness to think things through.” Reason, then, becomes a most valuable tool, although none greater than the ability to perceive, as Slaney does in those first minutes after his escape from prison, with artistic imagination, all sense portals jammed fully open.

Anansi | 328 pages |  $29.95 | paper | ISBN # 978-0887842450