Bidini shines spotlight on new North
Bidini has done the country an immense favour bringing our wild North to life
The undisputed “star” of Dave Bidini’s portrait of the wild and raucous new North is a truculent old-style journalist named John McFadden. On the back foot in the boondocks after one too many scrapes with media honchos down south, he’s reinvented himself as crack police reporter at the “Yellowknifer,” the broadsheet in the Northwest Territories’ capital. This is where Bidini encounters him when he arrives in town and which he describes in “Midnight Light: A Personal Journey to the North.”
A prolific journalist/novelist, Bidini’s interest in the North was initially sparked when he attended a 2014 Yellowknife literary festival. After losing a Toronto journalism job, he happily got his summer gig in 2016 at the “Yellowknifer.” “Midnight Light” is a Janus-like literary exercise: an under-the-hood examination of today’s journalism and a tour d’horizon of the new North.
McFadden’s run-in with the local RCMP for obstructing justice is the narrative centrepiece of the book and provides its Hollywood ending. In some ways the book is one of the best takes on the news business since Ben Hecht’s classic play, “The Front Page,” but it’s also a stunningly vivid portrait of a new society emerging North of 60.
It’s an area where, unlike the rest of the country, truth and reconciliation is not an everready political buzzword; rather, it’s a work in progress. One of Bidini’s strengths as a writer is his reportorial skill, and the book includes many voices, including a First Nations writer, Tim Querengesser. His take on the city reflects its essence: “Yellowknife just kinda works. Indigenous people come here because they’re respected. They aren’t segregated the way we are elsewhere.”
As much as I revelled in Bidini’s vivisection of the fourth estate, it’s the book’s ancillary non-journo characters who really enthralled me. Among them a crusty Dene woman named Susan Chafee who informs Bidini off the top, “Don’t get me mad. You don’t want to know the last person got me mad … I put him in the hospital. Oh I can fight. I can fight good.” Forewarned, Dave minds his Ps and Qs.
Then there’s the Dene elder who confronts Bidini directly, “Have you ever seen any First Nations take up arms and terrorize non-Indigenous people … No, you haven’t. It’s not our way. Is any of this celebrated by other Canadians? No. But that’s OK, too. You’re here. You’re figuring it out.”
And so he does. With a novelist’s eye for nuance, detail and character, Bidini has done the country an immense favour bringing our wild North to life in this exquisitely evocative book.