Violence is this story’s lived language
Author’s style anchors the action in a world that negates inner life
There’s a line early in Kevin Hardcastle’s impressive debut novel that sums up an emerging cultural ethos that several Canadian authors have begun to explore in their fiction. “It all just sort of got away from me,” Daniel, the protagonist of In the Cage, explains to his wife. “I didn’t see it coming.” The repetition of “it’ is telling, the vague pronoun a stand-in for Daniel’s inchoate and failed efforts at bettering himself.
Daniel joins the gallery of disaffected working-class men featured in the recent works of Craig Davidson ( Cataract City), Matt Lennox ( Knucklehead) and Andrew Sullivan ( Waste), to name a few. In these novels, set in Canada’s version of the Rust Belt, violence is less a matter of literary metaphor than the lived language of a life steeped in boredom, petty crime and poorly paid, short-term employment. Men fight because they’re bored, broke and desperate and, unlike in the fiction of such American heavyweights as Hemingway and Cormac McCarthy, the violence is neither poetic nor redemptive.
In the Cagefulfils the promise of its title by dropping readers straight into the world of illegal and lowtiered Mixed Martial Arts cage matches that passes for entertainment in bars, casinos, barns, First Nations and warehouses across the country. Daniel, a fighter born into the drudging poverty of rural life, is working his way up the ranks of this travelling bloodbath in hopes of one day winning a shot at the title when an eye injury ends his career.
After this introductory section, we find Daniel, now returned to his hometown, working as a hired goon for a gangster mired in a turf war with the local bike gang. The violence ratchets up when the gangster buses in his psychotic nephew to settle a few scores, forcing Daniel to choose between loyalty to his boss or his wife, Sarah, and their daughter.
He chooses the latter, resigning himself to the boredom and economic precariousness of the welding trade. When a friend from the fight circuit opens a gym in the town, Daniel is slowly drawn back into his old life as a fighter.
Hardcastle tells this saga of lowered expectations in short, action-based (and often dialogue-heavy) scenes that forgo the internalized monologues, commentary and descriptive passages so prevalent in contemporary CanLit. The effect is to firmly anchor the action in a culture and an economy that negates the inner life and the ability to reflect upon and change the course of one’s actions. It also bestows upon the novel’s many fights, staged and spontaneous, and scenes of violence a thrilling immediacy.
This is not to say that Hardcastle’s style is invisible. When the action demands, he successfully relocates the rolling, Biblical sentences pioneered by Hemingway, Faulkner and McCarthy to his smalltown Ontario milieu, and the dialogue is as punchy as Elmore Leonard’s, though deliberately less comic.
Hardcastle has a talent for sketching believable but noir-tinged criminal types with a few quick details and gestures. He is also not above disorienting the reader with bizarre, brutal imagery: a bodyguard’s skin is described as having the “boiled, pink hue of a man full with bought testosterone,” while the loser of a vicious bar brawl is left with a shoulder joint “twisted out of the socket so that the whole arm hung stretched and simian at his side.”
Only one note in the novel doesn’t quite ring true: Daniel’s unflagging gentleness with and empathy for Sarah and their daughter. No matter how hard their hard times, Daniel and Sarah remain mutually supportive spouses and concerned parents.
The sad truth, revealed by far too many headlines, is that violent men such as Daniel, their lives in full free fall, often take down with them the ones they love the most (a dynamic that Russell Banks brilliantly dissects in his novel of smalltown violence, Affliction). Though it becomes clear as the novel progresses that Daniel is that rare man who can protect his better self from the violence and chaos surrounding him, a few signs of inevitable domestic tension would have generated more empathy for Daniel, not less.
It’s a minor complaint: Hardcastle is a writer to watch. James Grainger is the author of Harmless.
Unlike in the fiction of Hemingway and Cormac McCarthy, the violence is neither poetic nor redemptive