Fictional take on meaning of B.C. murderer’s life
In 1987, Robert Frisbee was convicted of first-degree murder in the death of Muriel Barnett, his employer. He had been charged with bludgeoning Barnett to death with a whiskey bottle, allegedly because she intended to reduce the size of his bequest in her will. Frisbee had also been in the employ of Barnett’s late husband, with whom he had a homosexual affair. (Frisbee’s conviction was downgraded in 1989 to second-degree murder.)
The case was the subject of “Fatal Cruise: The Trial of Robert Frisbee,” a 1991 nonfiction volume by William Deverell, a noted true-crime author and lawyer who served as Frisbee’s defence attorney at trial. Deverell’s book is cited as inspiration in an afterword to B.C. writer Brett Josef Grubisic’s new novel, about a homosexual man in prison for bludgeoning his elderly employer. Nearing the end of his life, the novel’s anonymous protagonist dictates his story onto a series of cassette tapes that he leaves for a prison nurse, who transcribes the recordings and fashions them into a kind of ad hoc memoir of the man’s erotic history.
Grubisic (who often reviews for the Star) is careful to specify that “My TwoFaced Luck” is a work of fiction, though the facts of the novel map fairly closely to the facts of Frisbee’s life. But Grubisic adds a carefully considered narrative scaffolding: Seerat Gill, an infirmary assistant at the Horsetail Institution, a minimum security men’s facility in B.C., collates the tapes following a breakup of her own and posts them to the editor of a fictional Toronto publishing house in the hopes they might become a book.
The narrator’s story unfurls in retrospect; Gill’s letter, dated April 2020, makes it clear that the subject of the tapes has been dead for 29 years. The bulk of the novel, then, represents the transcripts of an inmate looking back from the perspective of his incarceration and trying to impose some meaning on his life. This is further complicated by the fact that the bulk of the tapes are unlabelled, leaving Gill to guess at the order in which the entries should fall. The novel’s fragments frequently jump around in time or loop back on themselves, lending the narrative a kind of Möbius-strip aspect.
“My Two-Faced Luck” is a voice novel, which is simultaneously its greatest strength and its most immediate weakness. Facing the boredom and pain of his final days, the anonymous inmate fires up his tape recorder and talks. And talks and talks and talks. Gill’s letter asserts that the narrator was called variously a “chatterbox” and a “motormouth,” and a reader will find it hard to disagree with these assessments. He talks at length about his abusive father, his long-suffering mother, his brother — with whom he had his first homosexual experience as a child — his wife and their dead son (he briefly tried for a domestic life as a straight man before admitting his homosexuality), and various lovers.
The narration is circuitous and repetitive, which is arguably true to the way a person would narrate the story of a life — “Am I repeating myself? I get lost in these bygones” he says at one point — but on the page it makes for a certain difficulty, as does the narrator’s penchant for clichés. Unlike the young man of John Rechy’s beat classic “City of Night,” another novel about the urban erotic adventures of an anonymous homosexual, Grubisic eschews linguistic freshness and surface pyrotechnics for a kind of mimetic narrative flatness; when the narrator says, late in the novel, “I’m not fascinating, that’s been made clear to me,” the irony is only intermittently apparent.