A sour-sweet love letter to the city of Halifax,
Set in Halifax, “Aubrey McKee” builds a dazzling and complicated world. “Aubrey McKee,” by Alex Pugsley, Biblioasis, 400 pages, $22.95 Exuberant, freewheeling stories of the insanity of being human
“Aubrey McKee” is no austere, whitewalled art gallery of a novel. It’s abundant, highly decorated, and unafraid of extravagance, of stylistic excess: “The Mairs, the Mairs — what were they and why on earth? I have been collecting eccentric trueborn Nova Scotians my entire life but none compare, pound for pound, person for person, with the Titus Mairs of Tower Road. The Maritime provinces of Canada are saturated generally with peculiars — drunks, pundits, misfits, masterminds — but the Mairs were the oddest on record, functioning in the years of my childhood on an almost mythopoeic level.”
That unrestrained nature extends to size itself: nearly 400 pages, “Aubrey McKee” ends with “End Book One”; another four volumes will complete the series.
A book composed of 14 exuberant, freewheeling stories, each focused on a peculiar “peculiar,” “Aubrey McKee” has “the insanity of being human” as a general theme. More specifically, this coming of age story also operates as a love letter, of a sour-sweet sort, to home. That’s Halifax, “a shabby little city … worn stale and flat in detail,” in the view of one source mentioned by the narrator, and an “evil village” and a place “obsessed with itself,” in the words of narrator Aubrey McKee’s sisters.
Whether he’s recalling his phase as “an indiscriminate teenage joiner” or as a marijuana salesman in the mid-1970s, Alex Pugsley’s narrator writes from the point of a man well settled into middle age who’s seeking lost time, place and meaning. He says as much: “I have done by my to recover those moments, to display them as best I could and to display the mysteries — and people — who were to me the city’s truths.”
While McKee (who, like Pugsley, seems to have been born in 1963) can evaluate an incident in literary terms — as “a fantasia on Maritime themes — brilliancy, loss, nostalgia decay,” for example — he also conjures with fantastic, captivating detail a youth where parents, siblings, friends, and school jostle alongside episodes of municipal history (itself teeming with bootleggers, drug dealers, suicides, sanatorium habitués, eccentric scions of formerly grand families and brothel keepers).
From ordinary incidents — a childhood acquaintance, marital strife, a wedding — as well as a few extraordinary ones, “Aubrey McKee” builds a dazzling and complicated world, a childhood in Halifax as a vibrant universe in itself.
While Pugsley’s literary performance is an immediate delight, the portrait of the early days of a “wayward oddity” lingers long after.