National Post (National Edition)
New thriller straddles genres
Boundary: The Last Summer By Andrée A. Michaud Biblioasis 328 pp; $19.95 There’s some unfortunate irony at play when a thriller doesn’t live up to its name, the genre’s all-in labelling too bold a statement of what readers might expect to allow accommodation for much else. Books with that branding do more than gamble on expectation: their epithet seems to hamstring strong appeal to higher taste, too, something in “thriller” rather unfairly implies a cheaper read as well — fat, vaguely familiar paperbacks gripped in sweaty fists on sardinepacked TTC cars, heads nodding through quasi-conscious guesses at whodunnit.
Narrow assumptions rarely prove useful, but here they make a shame worth tears: if shelf-mates like dark suspense and classic thriller put anyone off Andrée A. Michaud’s latest book, Boundary, presumption will have cost that prospective reader one of 2017’s finest reads yet.
First published in French as Bondrée, Boundary: The Last Summer won 2014’s Governor General’s Award for French-language fiction — Michaud’s second, among other literary honours, and no large surprise to fans of the Quebec author’s work. For over thirty years, Michaud has built a legion of readers enthralled by her singular brand of lit-myst hybrid fiction: tense, emotional books built just as much on even-tempered suspense as deep character study within. All big words and brainy questions, Michaud’s method begs patience — in Boundary she riffs a little on that old existential favourite: what does it mean to be alive?
Set in Boundary Pond, a border-straddling holiday paradise between northern Maine and Quebec’s southeasterly mountains, Boundary is deceivingly simple to describe: besties Zaza and Sissy are having a summer straight out of Dirty Dancing when they disappear, one after the other, in the dark of night. The plot says thriller, and its story is told with enough energy to make good on that expectation, but Boundary’s straightforward fiction leaves room for its author to play, literary nuance woven deftly in Michaud’s approach. There’s a near-total embargo on dialogue, to start, and some jaunty narration throughout — mostly omniscient, with a dash of one unlikely witness’s sporadic first-person here and there. There’s a mythic undercurrent, too, swelling gradually and never explicit enough to scare, but heavy and haunting nonetheless, sketches of Boundary Pond’s centuriesold criminal past weighing heavily on its present and the girls’ sudden disappearance.
Boundary is Andrée A Michaud’s 10th book, and the author has gone and treated herself to a little well-earned eponymy within. That first person voice ringing through the narrative belongs to a young girl named Andrée, and the lead detective responsible for investigating Zaza and Sissy’s murders — no great spoiler here, their fate revealed in Boundary’s jacket copy — rounds out the author’s full credit: Inspector Michaud, on the case.
There’s a sturdy cast of backing characters, come courtesy of legendary trapper Pete Landry’s story laced seamlessly throughout, pacing Michaud’s story and thickening the plot, melding fiction and fable and something more sinister, too. If the girls’ personalities grate, prone to the petty, reckless trappings of teenage-hood, their story doesn’t suffer for it; sympathy might be a reach in the character sketch Michaud draws, but Zaza and Sissy’s flaws are familiar to anybody who’s lived, blushed or otherwise blundered their way through that phase before.
Boundary bucks the thriller genre’s typecast quickly, Michaud making clear that crime here is secondary to her exploration of the human condition. Zaza and Sissy’s disappearances and deaths are grim, but no more grisly than the way the girls’ small community reacts, Michaud making the most of her border-biguous setting by drawing a deep rift along Boundary Pond’s linguistic lines: French and English-speakers settling comfortably into their ancestors’ presumptions of one another, colonial clashes only hardened by time. Wellresearched setting, sure, but more likely better-lived, Michaud herself a product of Quebec’s southern border.
My degree is in FrenchCanadian history, and the only thing worse than four years’ hard work resulting in abject unemployment is that I damn well enjoyed the education I received and love talking about it, too. My final upper-year core seminar began with a rousing seven students on roll call; that number cut to five by midterms and, looking back, I might’ve been the only person who submitted a final paper. It was not the bestfunded or most-liked degree on campus, but those who loved it, loved it — finding within a rich, luminous history of our country that’s dictated both silent and spoken assumptions forming a great deal of today’s political landscape. So much of our country was conceived in the lush wild of Quebec, its history a resonant tale of two languages and the colonial mutt they bred to make Canada.
This isn’t a history for the impatient attention span; French-Canadian relations are tricky to tell, particularly on the border, and the who’s-who hates-who is hard to pin at any point. Michaud seems to know that and has done her country a great service here, packaging FrenchCanadian colonial history in a thriller with enough drive and emotion to make it palatable for most anyone — even us lowly single-language Anglophones, thanks now to Donald Winkler’s smooth translation. Stylistic nuances might test tolerance — it takes a little to find her deeper story without much dialogue — and there’s no simplicity in the questions of existence at hand, but in Michaud’s Boundary, readers will find freedom: a skilled, award-winning author stretching folklore without leaping from truth and within crafting a true thriller, lyrical and satisfying, taut and beautifully told.