‘Friendly Fire’ by Lisa Guenther

Reviewed by Tom Ingram

Darby Swank, the twenty-one-year-old narrator of Friendly Fire, is the sort of person who brags about her skill at pouring coffee. She is a small town girl, suspicious of her own ambitions and harbouring a narrow idea of success—for her, making it big means going off to study music at an obscure college in Edmonton. Darby’s quiet and peaceful world is abruptly burst open when she finds her Aunt Bea dead in a lake, apparently strangled to death.

Friendly Fire is the first novel by Lisa Guenther, who works as an agricultural journalist in the area of Saskatchewan in which the story is set. At 149 pages, it’s slightly anaemic and parts of the story feel underdeveloped. But, though uneven, Guenther’s tale of secrets and pain hiding beneath the surface of rural life is also compelling and honest.

When the police question Darby, suspicion quickly falls upon Bea’s husband Will. Spoiler alert right here: the revelation in chapter 11 that Will is in fact the killer seems inevitable; the novel is about a murder, but it’s not a murder mystery. More shocking than the murder itself is the revealing of Will’s gruesome abuse of his wife and the community’s apathy toward or even complicity in the abuse.

One subplot follows Darby’s gradually dissolving relationship with her childhood friend Luke as she cheats on him with Jack, the exciting new owner of the diner where Darby works. Jack is an enigmatic figure with traces of urbanism about him. Guenther makes the curious choice of making him the novel’s moral centre: he is an outsider, and despite his flaws he is not sucked into the conspiracy of silence surrounding Bea’s death.

As a novel set in Saskatchewan in the summer, Friendly Fire would not be complete without forest and brush fires. These occasionally give an unwelcome break from the principal plot, but the forest fire imagery is not a detachable part of the novel’s conception. Any victory against the fire is only temporary; the fire “isn’t exactly extinguished, but driven underground, smouldering deep in the muskeg. It might wait weeks, even months, to flare up.” And when it does flare up, it is liable to appear in unexpected places.

The tedious danger of fighting the brush fire provides an interesting counterpoint to the gradually emerging details of Bea’s plight. Frightened of what her husband might do, she refused to press charges or run away from him. Her family and friends knew about the abuse and tried to protect her, but never confronted Will.

“Roy always knew when Will was in a mean mood,” one character reveals to Darby. “He’d help Will out with chores, and if Will was drinking, Roy would drink with him and keep him away from home until he sobered up.” They treated the symptoms, leaving the disease to smoulder below the surface. “Of course, Will still beat Bea. He just got smarter about it.”

Music is a major focus of the novel, and the dancing parties at which Darby’s father Roy dons his Johnny Cash shirt and strums his Telecaster approach a communitarian ideal of music and dancing. The dance incorporates people of all ages. Partners are exchanged freely and with no sexual connotation. The dancers move in an energetic but orderly manner, united as a community by the rhythm of the music. They dance with each other, rather than dancing at each other as they might in a nightclub or mosh pit. Depicting this musical culture is Guenther’s way of highlighting the positive aspects of the tight-knit rural community.

But she is not afraid to lay bare the sort of evil that this community is capable of perpetuating. In bringing together the images of the forest fire, the “friendly fire” of Will’s brutality and the community’s complicity, and the harmonious musical culture of the Saskatchewan countryside, Guenther ultimately comes down on the side of Sherlock Holmes’s dictum that “the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.”

Stylistically, Guenther is at her best describing her homeland and at her worst when her characters are talking to each other, especially about their musical preferences. Some of the best parts of the novel are affectionate chronicles of small town foibles—fighting, drunk driving, penny-ante sexual shenanigans and the attendant gossip. Darby and her friends rarely have anything interesting to say—“My family is so awesome” is all she can manage after a fight between her grandfather and Will, and one character’s entire personality is that he calls Darby “Littlefoot.” Emotionally, Darby’s final break from Luke and their friends barely resonates.

Guenther mixes striking images in among cringe-inducing ones, such as this one:

“Smoke makes the evening grow dark more quickly than normal. As night falls, the moon rises, fat and bloody. I gaze up in awe for a moment, then continue throwing dirt on smouldering embers. The ash and dirt mixes with my sweat. I glance at Luke, shovelling beside me, and he winks. I start singing ‘We Are the Champions,’ the Queen classic that we always used to sing while playing floor hockey.”

There are extended flashbacks nearly every other chapter, giving the book a quiet oscillating rhythm that pushes backward in time as much as forward. There are also endless playlists and song lyrics, which add nothing and are just tiresome.

At times the literary observation of rural life threatens to swallow up the main plot, which feels perfunctory. Darby’s relationship with her father is left undeveloped, as is her budding love affair with Jack. If she is drifting away from the nonentity friends she has outgrown, it’s not clear she’s moving toward anything more substantial.

We see astoundingly little of Will, and it seems hard to believe that anyone would be willing to cover for this obvious murderer. One seemingly important character—Darby’s grandfather, the only family member who rebels against the conspiracy of silence—disappears a third of the way in and never returns.

The novel is a brisk evening’s reading; while perhaps not fully achieved, Friendly Fire is a remarkably honest and self-critical look at life in rural Saskatchewan. Parts of it are highly suggestive of more interesting material to come from Lisa Guenther.

NeWest | 220 pages | $19.95 | paper | ISBN # 978-1926455419