FAITH, SCIENCE AND THE BRAIN
Will Ferguson unveils his new novel
The Shoe on the Roof Will Ferguson Simon & Schuster
Giller-winning author Will Ferguson is toying around with a new idea for a novel.
“My next character will be a former travel writer and journalist who sleeps in too much and works in his sweatpants,” says the former travel writer and journalist, who admits he is a little groggy from sleeping in and may or may not be in sweatpants during a phone interview with Postmedia. “My research will be just me looking around my room: ‘He sat down. He had a dead plant in one corner and a coffee ...’”
“I think, next time, it won’t be a brain surgeon,” he says.
The Calgary writer is talking about the heavy lifting he was forced to do when researching his newest novel, The Shoe on the Roof. The brain and its many mysteries play a major role in the Boston-set novel, which centres on a heartbroken medical student with a cloudy past who sets out to cure three men who all believe they are Jesus.
Our protagonist, Thomas Rosanoff, is the son of a famous psychiatrist who used his son’s childhood as the basis for his bestselling, ground-breaking book, Boy in the Box.
Determined to blaze his own trail — and to win back his girlfriend, Amy — Thomas attacks his Jesus experiment with an obsessive zeal and soon begins losing his own grip on reality. Things don’t improve when his meddling father gets involved.
Throughout it all, Ferguson fills his novel with intriguing tidbits about the brain and delusions and mental illness and pharmaceuticals and medical equipment and the history of psychiatry.
“You know how much research you have to do just to fake it?” Ferguson says.
He is mostly kidding, as the three-time winner of the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour often is. Ferguson actually found the research fascinating and had plenty of help. That included consulting the Hotchkiss Brain Institute and a friend’s daughter who happens to be studying neuroscience at the University of Calgary.
But while it’s an important thread in the story, investigating the brain is only one. The Shoe on the Roof delves into medical ethics and various theories of psychiatry. There’s also the messy, obsession-tinged romance at the heart of the novel, the notion of Thomas’s peculiar fame as a child experiment, some intense father-son dynamics and, thanks to our three delusional messiahs, a study of the Trinity as a narrative device representing three approaches to God.
Ferguson even throws in a creepy murder-mystery, when homeless people living in Boston’s tent city begin dying.
But perhaps the most prominent theme is the chronic rift between science and religion, faith and reason. While Ferguson acknowledges he’s not a religious man himself, it would be hard to argue that the book falls onto the side of science and reason.
As the novel’s representatives of atheism, Thomas and his father come across as arrogant, cold and condescending. Meanwhile, the religious characters, including Amy, one of the delusional wouldbe Jesuses known as the Magician and a saintly nun named Frances Bedford, are sympathetic, wise and kind.
“I do find that science, lately, has become very reductionist,” Ferguson says. “The materialism has reared its head again; the idea that we’re just atoms, we’re just molecules. With Thomas, I wanted someone who believes in that and then he falls in love and everything goes off the rails.
“No matter how many times you tell yourself we’re just molecules, it doesn’t really help. It doesn’t really answer any key questions. It doesn’t answer the interesting questions.”
It all makes for a massive web to untangle for the reader, and presumably for the author himself. But the first glimmer of the story actually came from Ferguson’s mother, who worked as a nurse at a mental hospital in Weyburn, Sask., during the 1950s. She told her son of U.S. experiments she heard about, where patients who suffered from the same messiah delusions were brought together. The idea was that they would face each other and eventually come to the conclusion that not all of them could possibly be Jesus. At least that was the theory.
Ferguson first heard the story as a student at York University in Toronto and thought it would make a good short film. When he realized he didn’t have the filmmaking chops, nor could he find actors good enough to embody his three delusional messiahs, he abandoned it.
But he resurrected it years later as a screenplay. He shopped it around in the U.S. and found some interest, but it never got made. When he was thinking about how to follow up his often funny but also harrowing 2015 nonfiction book, Road Trip Rwanda: A Journey into the New Heart of Africa, he returned to the idea of delusional messiahs and medical experiments.
Not unlike Road Trip Rwanda, The Shoe On the Roof is often laugh-out-loud funny despite its serious and tragic underpinnings. But it’s also thought-provoking, occasionally violent and will likely stay with readers long after the last page is read.
It’s also Ferguson’s fictional followup to 419, the intense Africaset thriller that won the author the 2012 Giller Prize.
One might assume that Giller followups are daunting prospects for authors. But Ferguson says he is nowhere near calculated enough to write stories with his career or reputation in mind.
“To me, working in the creative arts is tough but the one thing about supporting myself as a writer all these years is that I get to pick what I do,” he says. “That’s the payoff. If I can’t pick what I do than what’s the point? If I’m going to be writing to a market, why would I be doing this? Every step I just try to get a project that I’m excited about. This story was just so exciting. It was a fun book to write.”
Science, lately, has become very reductionist. The materialism has reared its head again; the idea that we’re just atoms, we’re just molecules. With Thomas, I wanted someone who believes in that and then he falls in love and everything goes off the rails. Will Ferguson