Realism, comedy don’t blend
Trevor Ferguson has spent the better part of 20 years publishing a trio of highly praised detective novels under the pseudonym John Farrow. With The River Burns, he puts aside his extended genre fiction apprenticeship — and pen name — to offer a more traditionally literary take on a crime that threatens to tear apart a small town in Quebec.
The town is Wakefield, a real Quebec town and the site of a 1984 arson that destroyed a historic covered bridge. Ferguson borrows that incident and many geographical, social and historical details from the town itself to recast the arson as the outcome of a showdown between local loggers and a loose coalition of environmentalists, local shopkeepers and cultural preservationists.
The loggers in Ferguson’s Wakefield, forced to cross the single-lane bridge one truck at a time, often after waiting for busloads of elderly tourists to vacate the historic structure, view the bridge as a time- and money-draining bottleneck. The environmentalists welcome any impediment to the logging of their beloved forest, while most of the townsfolk want to preserve the admittedly impractical heritage bridge for its historical value and importance to the tourist industry.
When the loggers’ proposed solution — to tear down the bridge and replace it with a multi-lane concrete and steel structure — is continually voted down by the town council, a few hotheads take matters into the their own hands by torching the bridge one night. Suspicion naturally falls on Dennis O’Farrell, the loggers’ spokesman, who is also the brother of the town’s police chief, Ryan.
But don’t let the plot description and moody cover image fool you: Ferguson has not written a work of social realism with crime-genre overtones, although the novel’s best sections could easily fit into such a work. The River Burns is more of an uneasy hybrid between realism and broad comedy that never quite congeals into a satisfying whole.
After a few short, lively chapters that introduce the O’Farrell brothers and two other players in the impending community standoff, the novel digresses into picaresque escapades of a travelling salesman’s first day on the job in Wakefield. The salesman is threatened by not one, but two crotchety oldtimers, a comic setup that does not get funnier with repetition.
From there, Ferguson spins out several more digressive sub-plots that draw in the town’s citizens, a collection of larger-than-life “characters” sketched in the broad, folksy style much beloved of CBC Radio writers and Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour judges.
Conversations that hardly further the plot or deepen character are allowed to go on for seven or eight pages, while long descriptive passages seem to mark every scenery change.
More mystifying, especially for an author who has mastered the terse art of the detective novel, is Ferguson’s overreliance on adjectives and adverbs.
To quote just one egregious example: “To climb aboard a flimsy, zippy scooter with an elderly driver wearing an outrageously brazen helmet felt a trifle daunting.”
Perhaps the release from the conventions of the detective novel offered literary temptations too enticing to resist, but many readers will likely wish that Ferguson had constrained his enthusiasms and applied his storyteller’s chops with a little more vigour.