And now the Pot thickens

Lisa Moore steps outside her comfort zone for a folk hero tale of escaping prison and running drugs in 1970s Newfoundland

in the name of freedom?”

Caught has also freed Moore, in a sense, from her past work. It is a novel unlike anything else she’s produced, a throwback — from its slightly garish cover to its brawny dialogue to its twisting plot — to the pulp novels of last century. She describes it as “a gentle parody of [a] thriller.” It is also likely the first Canadian novel to be sent to the media accompanied by a package of Zig-Zags.

Its release comes at a perfect time. Her last novel, February, about the 1982 Ocean Ranger disaster, won this year’s edition of Canada Reads, and has now sold 50,000 copies — her bestselling book to date.

“I was very trepidatious about it, about having the book go through Canada Reads,” admits the one-time panelist on CBC’s popular literary debate show. “February was a very difficult book for me to write but also to see reviewed. Because I really felt like the subject matter was so sacred that — I found it just extremely difficult. I felt responsible when people didn’t say good things about it, or took it in the wrong spirit, or misunderstood it.”

Some people didn’t say good things, the most notorious of whom, Barbara Kay, ripped the book — or at least the idea of the book — to pieces in this newspaper’s pages without having even read the novel. The headline was “Unreadably Canadian” and Kay blasted February for adding to “the unrelenting self-regard of CanLit, where it’s all about nobly suffering women or feminized men: men immobilized in situations of physical, psychological or economic impotence (that is when they’re not falling through the ice and nearly drowning), rather than demonstrating manly courage in risk-taking or heroic mode.” When Kay did read get around to reading February, she still hated it.

“How did that piece make me feel? I’ve never talked about it, and maybe I won’t,” Moore says, before talking about it. “I thought it was poorly written. I thought it was poorly researched. And narrow-minded.” She smiles. “And how did I really feel?”

Caught, I suggest, almost seems like Moore’s direct response to the critics.

“Are you saying, ‘ Did I write this novel for Barbara Kay?’ No,” she laughs, adding she’d been thinking about the idea for a decade. “But I did want to try and write something, just for my own growth as a writer, that was very different from February, in terms of form.”

While February is a “compositionally challenging book,” arcing backward and forward through time, Caught barrels straight ahead. It is an adventure story; not “the colonialist concern with conquering other lands, but the idea of adventure as willing to, at all moments, put your life at stake in order to learn, in order to gain experience. Because it’s also very much a novel about innocence and experience.”

Also, “I wanted to write from a guy’s point of view, and a pot smoker, which I’m not, really.” She laughs. “I’m really not!” (She does, however, think marijuana should be legalized.)

If Caught is about innocence and experience, it’s also about the ways in which our experience of the world has been changed by technology. As Slaney races across Canada, and, eventually, heads back to Colombia, he’s unwittingly followed by the RCMP, who deploy a satellite-tracking program called CYCLOPS.

“The novel happens in a moment when technology changed so dramatically that there was no way he could have foreseen what was coming at him,” she says of Slaney. “And I think that we are in exactly the same position. We are being surveilled at every corner, and have not yet put together the kind of freedom that’s been stolen from us. People are talking about it, but nobody has any idea the monstrous implications. I mean, my children are going to school with surveillance cameras on them. They have no privacy in their childhood, when for me childhood was about intense moments of freedom.”

Moore now finds herself facing another kind of freedom, although it’s one she doesn’t relish.

“I think this is the first time that I haven’t really had an idea for a novel,” she says. When I suggest that must be freeing — the fact she hasn’t committed to a project means she can go in any direction she wants — Moore looks at me as if I’ve just escaped from prison myself.

“Freeing, no? That’s horrendous!” She admits she’s “very uncomfortable not knowing what I’m going to do next.”

“I don’t like this feeling at all,” she says. “Maybe I don’t like freedom.”