The forest for the catastrophes

Harmless

By James Grainger McClelland & Stewart

288 pp; $22

The rural landscape of southern Ontario, complete with fields and farmhouses, has never been more sinister than in James Grainger’s debut novel, Harmless. I should state here that Grainger doesn’t name his locations, I only infer them, but when he depicts the main street of the rural town in his novel as lined with “tan brick houses peaked by Victorian gables,” that nails it: The setting is somewhere in Ontario south of the Canadian Shield. It follows, then, the big city also mentioned in the narrative must be Toronto.

The author’s reluctance to give actual place names, the last names of characters, or the ages of the adults, lends a distancing effect to the narrative — we know these people and their circumstances, and yet we don’t. We’re not sure even of the age bracket of Joseph, the main character. We know that he’s too young to be a baby boomer and yet it doesn’t feel right to call him Generation X. We also know that he’s debt ridden, and that he writes an arts column for a big city magazine — a fictional version of Toronto Life, no doubt — but that he is very uneasy about his employment. In addition to his column, Joseph performs the former website copy editor’s job for free, but even that’s not enough to solidify his position: “There’s a hundred writers who’d do my column for a third of the pay, which has been frozen for years,” he says at one point.

But Joseph feels a deeper malaise related to his capacities (or lack thereof ), when he is confronted by some unpleasant realities: “Why had he never learned to defend himself,” he asks at one point. “All the martial arts courses in the city — had he enrolled in one? Had he learned to build a house or sail a boat or read a compass or start a fire without matches? No — he’d watched movies, half-read a thousand books, talked in bars and restaurants, f--ked.”

This malaise rises to the surface during a weekend reunion at a remote farmhouse owned by ex-big city residents Alex and his partner Jane — Joseph’s one-time lover. Other couples are Mike and Liz, the latter a real estate saleswoman, and Julian and Amber, a couple with the aura of cheerful ex-hippies. In the course of events Alex emerges as Joseph’s main antagonist, a one time television documentarian who quit his job in the city to move to the country and build cabinets and sell them to locals and tourists. Alex, who has no income to speak of, annoys everyone with his sermons on the subject of the global economy, global warming and so on. Worse still, he works with his hands — and shows up Joseph and Mike with a display of wood chopping prowess.

The irony of highly educated adults feeling unprepared — and unable to prepare their children — for the “real world” runs throughout Harmless. At one point, Alex, still in the city, spearheads a parent-run, alternative school. Joseph enthusiastically supports the idea, “until the other parents backed out, conceding that, despite their multiple MAs and PhDs, they had nothing practical to teach their children.”

For Joseph, then, the weekend represents a crisis in selfesteem, reflected in his continued inability to act naturally or spontaneously. “What he needed was an acceptable role for the weekend,” he tells himself at the onset of the novel. If worse comes to worse, he reminds himself “there was no situation he couldn’t joke his way out of.”

But his jokes are not funny. Nobody else’s jokes are funny. Instead of genuine laughter, there is a good deal of nervous giggling. Sampling some dope, for example, Joseph starts giggling. “After being away from dope for years he found the giggles and the trippy connections right where he’d left them.” Later, with tension mounting between him and Alex, Joseph “fights down a giggle.” Jane, on her part, “half-stifles a laugh” but can’t “stop the giggles from spreading.” Even at moments of high stress, Joseph forces “out a public laugh, a honking sound.”

No wonder t he kids, Joseph’s 14-year-old, Frances, and her friend Jane and Alex’s daughter Rebecca, are put off by the antics of their parents. The reader can only imagine the effect on them of the spectacle of adults gathered around a fire, sodden with booze and drugs, trying to relive the wild days of their youth.

And then catastrophe strikes. As the party dies down, it is discovered that Frances and Rebecca have disappeared. Laughter changes to sobbing — the bite of Alex’s recriminations sinks deeper into flesh and nerves.

But even in these dire circumstances, Joseph cannot be natural. The situation is too close to innumerable movies he has seen. “Joseph had bought into the Hollywood Revenge Drama shtick from the first word,” Grainger writes. Every tone, every gesture, every utterance finds its echo in that shtick. Joseph says something and doesn’t even know what it means — it was “probably something he’d heard in a movie.” He moves his arms and the posture is “borrowed from movies where GIs cleared out Japanese pillboxes with a grenade toss.” Alex puts his hands on Joseph’s shoulder and looks him in the eye. “Men did this in movies when the chips were down,” Joseph thinks.

For the most part, these events and responses are credibly handled; Grainger skilfully shapes his story to maintain suspense and to evoke the literal darkness of night as well as the metaphorical darkness of the grotesque. To do this he relies heavily on metaphor — but laboured metaphors. There are exaggerated details that work — “Amber’s black eyes were already three mood swings ahead of everyone.” But there are exaggerated details that weigh heavily on the narrative — “The forest towered higher with every few steps, pulling him into its wake like a ship passing silently in the moonlight, and when the wind picked up, the rustling treetops became the silhouettes of rats running along the decks.”

The indulgent re a der will forgive this metaphor-enriched prose and enjoy, if his or her tastes are this way inclined, Grainger’s strong contribution to the literature of Ontario Gothic.

We know these people and their circumstances, and yet we don’t