The story got complicated. As stories tend to do, they take on a life of their own. The characters take on lives of their own ... It was just sort of organic.
Linden MacIntyre on writing his new novel, The Winter Wives
The Winter Wives Linden MacIntyre Random House Canada
Linden MacIntyre's new book began with the author and veteran broadcaster's fascination with dementia. Specifically, he was interested in what would happen if someone became obsessed with the idea they have Alzheimer's. How would they act? How would they treat those around them?
“I read a feature in the New York Times a while ago about a guy who went into one of these ancestry searches to find out a bit about his family but also a bit about the future of his health,” says MacIntyre. “It comes back saying that he was probably going to be diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's before too long and the guy got disturbed as one would. Then he finds out after some more scientific exploration that the first diagnosis was incorrect. What do you do if people have begun to explain your behaviour as the consequence of dementia and you begin to accept it as an excuse yourself for a lot of things that you have a hard time justifying and then all of sudden they take that excuse away from you? Where does that leave you? Do you start correcting the people who have come to understand your bad behaviour as a product of Alzheimer's or dementia? Or do you just leave them to think `Oh, that's not really him?'”
This curious `what-if' scenario became the spark for The Winter Wives, MacIntyre's sixth novel. To be clear, this is not really a book about someone with Alzheimer's. The Winter Wives is not a medical drama or a story about family caregivers. But the book's protagonist, Byron, does spend a good deal of time obsessing over the idea that he may be slipping into dementia, a fear that is at least partly based on the fact that his mother suffered from Alzheimer's. It becomes even more pronounced after his friend Allan, a mysterious businessman Byron has known since university, has a stroke and begins to exhibit signs that he is losing his faculties.
But that's really just a jumping-off point for the Giller-winning author. The Winter Wives is a psychological drama that is paced like a thriller and explores deeper themes of identity, deception, friendship, marriage and aging.
“The story got complicated,” MacIntyre says. “As stories tend to do, they take on a life of their own. The characters take on lives of their own and so it just grew and grew and became what you read. It was just sort of organic. I didn't know where it was going to end up. It just sort of got there.”
Perhaps. But this is Linden MacIntyre. While he has certainly enjoyed success in the literary world — including his 2009 Scotiabank Giller Prize win for The Bishop's Man — most of his time spent in the public eye has been as a dogged investigative journalist. He retired from the CBC's flagship investigative program The Fifth Estate in 2014. So while the story may have unfolded organically, there were also elements that required MacIntyre to put his journalistic talents to good use.
The Winter Wives is essentially a story about identity and how it can be altered or created by circumstances, deception, self-deception and mental health. Central to this theme is the character of Allan. As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that his success as a businessman has some darker elements that he has taken pains to hide. Byron is his friend and lawyer. The two are married to the Winter sisters. While Byron was always infatuated with Peggy, who he met in high school in rural Nova Scotia, she ends up marrying his best friend while Byron marries Peggy's sister, Annie.
So their relationships are understandably complex. All four have played a part in building Allan's business empire, although it remains unclear how aware Byron and the two sisters are about the criminal activities at its centre that slowly come to light after Allan's stroke. But it was those shady dealings that required MacIntyre to use his investigative skills to write authentically about financial crimes.
“I was a reporter for decades and I was in the business of what we like to call investigative,” he says. “It was a lot of financial crime and criminal stuff and I met a lot of people in shady lines of work. So I just followed my nose through that. The most research had to do with money laundering, the technical details of money laundering. I consulted with my accountant. It was quite interesting. I asked him how he would define the whole money laundering thing and he said `Turn around and look out that window.' I did and it was a building under construction across the street, which was pretty near finished. He said `You're looking at money laundering.' He went on to explain how certain East European organizations were using buildings like that in Toronto as places where they could funnel money with the volatile real-estate market that they have in Toronto and Vancouver and places like that. You can explain all kinds of strange things that involve serious amounts of money showing up and serious amounts of money disappearing.”
It's not the first time that MacIntyre used real-life experiences, journalistic or otherwise, to inform his fiction. The Bishop's Man dealt with sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, which is something he followed closely both as a journalist and as a Catholic who had grown up in a religiously conservative community. His 2012 book Why Men Lie, while centred on the troubled affair between an aging university professor and a journalist, was inspired by an imprisoned and eventually executed murderer whom MacIntyre met in the U.S. while on the job. The characters in Punishment (2014), which include an idealistic corrections officer and a troubled prisoner, were all drawn from experiences MacIntyre had while on assignment.
“All these things were informed by being a reporter and being a reporter requires you to listen when people talk and to listen to what's important in what they say and to listen to what best illustrates what they are trying to say,” he says. “You get an ear for language and you get an ear for dialogue. I'm particularly fond of using dialogue as a storytelling tool. You unfold the story as much as possible through the dialogue among the characters. As a reporter, especially on TV, you have to take very complicated ideas and reduce them to small catchphrases and sentences.”
While this may come as very bad news to fans of his novels, MacIntyre says he believes The Winter Wives will be his final novel. The 78-year-old writer continues to work on a non-fiction book about a historical figure central to the Irish War of Independence, which he thinks will take another few years. After that, he suspects he “won't have much juice left.”
“The last book, I think, will be non-fiction based on history,” he says. “I'm enjoying working on it and it makes me feel like I'm a reporter again. I spent 50 years as a reporter. I realized what it was that kept me going in that line of work for 50 years.
“It was the pleasure of finding out what really happened in a real situation to real people and who those real people were, and what the consequences of what they did and what happened to them were for people they didn't know, for the whole universal human condition.”
Being a reporter requires you to listen when people talk and to listen to what's important in what they say and to listen to what best illustrates what they are trying to say. Linden MacIntyre