Layers run deep in this rural thriller
Author’s second novel an ‘otherworldly hothouse of fantasy and introversion’
When Iain Reid’s debut novel “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” came out in 2016, its over-the-top psycho-thriller plot drew a number of apt and complimentary comparisons to the films of M. Night Shyamalan. These are likely to continue with the publication of “Foe,” a very similar but deeper work.
Both Shyamalan and Reid are masters of suspense. “Foe” reads like a house on fire — almost impossible not to finish in one sitting. The story has a gimmick to it, but it works. You know that twists are coming, but they’re not easy to figure out. Only when it’s over, and you have time to catch your breath, do you start to raise objections in your head as to whether any of it made sense.
Without spoiler alerts, only the basic setup can be described. “Foe” is set some time in the future, on a farm operated by a young couple: Junior and Hen (short for Henrietta). As the story begins, a stranger named Terrance arrives with some disturbing news: Junior has been selected to be part of the workforce on the construction of a space station. While Junior is away, the organization Terrance works for doesn’t want Hen to be left alone and so offers to provide her with a duplicate Junior to keep her company.
The details are left deliberately vague, which adds to the unease. There is an air of comic menace reminiscent of a Harold Pinter play, with characters that seem drawn from the same paranoid matrix. Terrance is the threatening but nerdishly comic bully who drops in out of nowhere, Junior is the frustrated, increasingly desperate Everyman who has his comfortable domestic life turned upside-down and Hen is the oddly passive woman in the middle who gives the impression of knowing more than she’s letting on.
If “Foe” were just a thriller it would be a catchy beach read, but it’s not a book without further layers. It may, for example, be read as a parable about the blurring boundaries between ourselves and our technology, especially when we see Junior being gradually reduced to a pile of data collected by the organization.
Why does he find it so hard to resist? To what extent is he complicit in his own undoing? These are questions we’ve all had to face.
Another angle to the story has to do with Junior and Hen’s relationship. How well do they really know one another?
While Junior enjoys his life down on the farm, Hen feels herself to be in a rut. Then, as Terrance insinuates himself deeper into their lives they drift even further apart, while paradoxically the bond between them grows stronger. Even after the final reveal, we’re left to wonder at the weird mix of dependency, trust and affection in their feelings for each other.
Perhaps the most striking thing about “Foe,” however, is something it shares with “I’m Thinking of Ending Things”: the way Reid — who also wrote two very popular memoirs — takes the familiar Gothic setting of the isolated farmstead, which has been a weird enough place in Canadian writing going back many years now, and turns it into an otherworldly hothouse of fantasy and introversion. The rural routes of our national unconscious are getting creepier even as they become the roads less travelled.