Author to read from his latest thriller
Local author explores protagonist’s difficult life after surviving an airplane crash
Vancouver writer Timothy Taylor’s new novel The Rule of Stephens is about survival of both the physical and emotional kind.
At the centre of the thriller is 30-something Catherine Bach. Bach has survived a major airline disaster and now has to survive life after that fact.
Taylor will be reading from the new novel at a Writers Fest Incite event on Monday at the Vancouver Public Library’s main branch.
Taylor’s protagonist is the brilliant mind behind a Vancouverbased biotech startup that is creating an ingestible diagnostic device. Her life is the 24/7 world of tests, deadlines and in this case an angel investor who isn’t all that angelic.
Then a phone call in the middle of the night from one of the few other survivors of the plane crash jolts her awake.
The caller on the other end quickly becomes a dark cloud dispensing cryptic warnings — warnings that lead her down the rabbit hole of survivor’s guilt.
“You survived, get over yourself. That is a really complicated thing for survivors to do,” said Taylor over the phone recently.
Taylor said that survivors of trauma have a lot in common when it comes to life after the fact.
“The literature on survivors guilt is amazing for its consistency,” said Taylor, whose previous novel Stanley Park was a national bestseller and a finalist for the Giller Prize. “People tell similar stories. They agonize over similar things. They encounter similar existential moments of doubt.”
A big part of that doubt here is whether Bach has lost her mojo, used up all her luck. But for a woman deeply involved in the world of science, the mere concept of luck is not really a thing.
“When she was young and certain she used to lecture her rather romantic-minded sister about the Rule of Stephens, the world either works according to Stephen Hawking which is to say by the cosmology of physics or it works by spookier paranormal rules like that of the world of Stephen King,” said Taylor, explaining the title and Bach’s subsequent outlook. “You kind of have to choose. You can’t believe both.”
Well, you can’t until you fall from thousands of metres out of a burning, blown-apart airplane.
“Her own faith in a sort of (Hawking-esque) view of the universe is sort of shaken, because weird things start to happen to her,” said Taylor.
Those weird things include the strange and dark force of the former cancer researcher and fellow flight survivor who tells Catherine about his terrible post-crash life: a life he feels has been destroyed by a doppelganger.
Bach of course thinks the good doctor has gone mad. That is until things get complicated and strange as a hostile takeover of her company appears to be spearheaded by another red-headed woman who bears a close resemblance to Bach herself.
In Bach, Taylor has created an interesting character that you really do pull for as she stutters and then steadies herself and ultimately secures her destiny. While Bach is bang on in this new era of #TimesUp and #MeToo, Taylor said about a year into writing The Rule of Stephens he suffered “a crisis of confidence about putting a woman through the wringer.”
“I thought oh my God, what am I doing? Am I going to get shy and uncertain at the moment of truth? So I tried to convert her into a guy and I rewrote quite a bit of the early stuff with her as a male character and it was like the whole train came off the rails,” said Taylor. “I just didn’t like it anymore. It wasn’t working. It wasn’t the person I had originally met in my imagination, so I took an early draft out of a drawer and I read it again and said ‘you haven’t written anything in six months that convinces you as much as this does,’ so I went right back to Catherine.
“I had blinked and created a whole bunch of problems for myself. It took me several months of working away at that to realize no, but that just speaks strongly to where she came from. She came very vividly and very strongly into my imagination as a character and she came back,” added Taylor.
Bach is not the first female to take centre stage in the awardwinning writer and UBC creative writing professor’s works, so it wasn’t her gender that made him blink, but rather the level of anxiety she was living with. That all changed for him when tragedy struck and Taylor’s father Richard, his mother-in-law Jill McDougall and close friend Kent Ennsall died within three months of each other.
“Low and behold shit started happening to me in 2016 and I had no problem accessing anxiety or accessing that staggering sense of doubt that comes with wondering what the hell is going wrong with the world,” said Taylor.
Bach, it turned out, was just what he needed at that stage in his life. She suddenly was helping him survive. So in the end, finishing this book was indeed bittersweet.
“This one I was almost a little sad,” said Taylor. “Through a process that I could have never predicted and that I would not recommend anybody try to duplicate I ended up kind of going through a real horrible period personally around the time I was putting Catherine through the most horrible period. Yeah, the book is dedicated to three people who passed in three months. So that was a bad time for me and I just happened to be putting the book together right at that time. Finishing the draft, getting her into the most awkward spots that she gets into psychologically and otherwise. I ended up feeling that I empathized with her more than any other protagonist I have ever created, so yeah, letting that go was sort of interesting. I felt like I was pretty close to that character.”
The literature on survivors guilt is amazing for its consistency. People tell similar stories. They agonize over similar things.