Coming full squared circle
There is a common perception in some literary circles that short stories, impressive though they may be, are ultimately an apprenticeship step toward the writing of novels – training wheels, one might say, before one can be trusted with a grown-up bike.
At first glance, this might seem reasonable. After all, novels are so much longer than short stories, the scale of the storytelling so much greater. But it’s not a matter of size: a novel is no more a long short story than a wolf is the result a German Shepherd devoting hours to the gym; they might be the same species, but they’re very different animals.
The two forms each come with their own approaches and skill-sets. Despite this distinction, some writers hone their craft in strictly one field – Alice Munro, for example, has never written a novel – while others such as Hemingway, Atwood and Stephen King are comfortable moving between the forms.
Toronto writer Kevin Harcastle joins the latter camp with his first novel, In the Cage. His first book, Debris, published in 2015, was a stark and powerful collection of short fiction, one receiving almost universal praise as well as the Trillium Prize and ReLit Award. Several years later, it is easily one of the most memorable collections of that year.
In the Cage is equally powerful, and demonstrates not a development in the writer’s talents, but a comfort and skill in a very different form. To see this shift, one need only look back to Montana Border, a short story in Debris, which introduces readers to Daniel – a cage fighter developing a reputation, with fans asking him for autographs and young women whispering things in his ear. He’s also developing a relationship with Sarah, a triage nurse he meets when she stitches his broken forehead. By story’s end, Daniel is being hunted by bikers, hiding in Sarah’s apartment with the lights off, Sarah carrying both a shotgun and their child.
The story is fragmented, almost impressionistic, cutting from scene to scene with minimal dialogue emphasizing the unspoken and weighting with significance every utterance. The language itself is lean and sinewy, fat cut to fighting weight. THE DEVELOPING TRAGEDY SUGGESTS MANY OF US, IF NOT ALL OF US, ARE IN CAGES OF OUR OWN MAKING.
In the Cage continues Daniel’s saga, but immediately shows the difference between the two forms, as the novel’s prelude fills in Daniel’s backstory. The language is still muscular, but there is an ease to it, with less urgency and more room for spare details; more flesh on the bone. The ensuing chapters bring us up to the present, where, after suffering an eye injury, Daniel has been forced to retire from the cage and move back to his hometown in rural Ontario with Sarah and their daughter. He’s working as an enforcer for the local gang, but trying to break away to make an honest living.
That dynamic, of desperation and thwarted escape, forms the spine of a novel that revolves not only around poverty and the decisions it forces upon individuals (the cage in the title is both literal and metaphorical), but around the powerful bonds of family and friendship; the social structures and strictures of small- town life; and the keen human need for self- definition and identification.
Daniel’s struggle and its inevitable failure fuel the novel’s narrative, a slow-building, gutclenching suspense. Like Daniel himself, readers will ache for an eventual triumph, for safety and security, all the while knowing that this probably isn’t the sort of book to provide that kind of ending.
In the Cage is a novel of toxic masculinity in a variety of forms, each more insidious than the last. And through Hardcastle’s style – sentences plain and broken, glinting with moments of beauty even in the depths of violence and pain – we become part of Daniel’s world, part of the very structure he fights against, inside the cage and out.
As we follow the developing tragedy, Hardcastle seems to be reminding us that many of us, if not all, are in cages of our own making. Our struggles may not involve straight razors and shotguns, broken knuckles and shattered glass, but the cage is there, all the same.