An unflinching darkness
Vancouver’s seamy side comes to the fore in Lee’s debut novel
There is a dark side to Vancouver. It’s not just the city’s less savoury aspects, which are — understandably — glossed over in the tourism marketing materials and surveys which routinely place Vancouver at the top of the world’s most livable places. No, it goes deeper than that. There is a history of violence underlying the beauty of Vancouver that many British Columbians simply overlook, or wilfully forget. Not Nancy Lee. Rather than shrinking from the darkness in her work, Lee embraces it.
Her debut story collection, Dead Girls, was set against a series of disappearances and murders of young prostitutes from the Downtown Eastside. Although the serial killer was dealt with obliquely and in the background, a palpable sense of dread threaded through the stories, acutely capturing the sense of darkness that suffused Vancouver in the late 1990s and early 2000s. When the book was published in early 2003, the RCMP were a year into their search of a farm in Port Coquitlam, and Lee’s sensitivity to the tone and mood of her city seemed prescient.
With her debut novel The Age, Lee moves Vancouver’s darkness from the background to the foreground.
Set in the early 1980s, The Age revolves around Gerry, a teenager haunted by the spectre of nuclear annihilation, struggling with her father’s abandonment ( he’s settled in California with a new family), and with her mother’s new boyfriend. To cope, she rides around her neighbourhood on her bike, and spends time with her paternal grandfather, who is suffering through a painful ( third) divorce. She constructs, and disappears into, a dystopian narrative in her own mind, a story which threads through the novel, chronicling the rise of a society made up of survivors of some sort of apocalypse, and the levels of savagery they quickly progress to.
Gerry also insinuates herself into a group of anarchists. Although she is originally drawn in by her attraction to Ian, a boy several years older, she is captivated by the ragtag group of dissenters. When her attraction to Ian goes wrong, she pushes the group to allow her to be the linchpin of an upcoming operation, a violent attack during a peaceful protest.
Echoes of the early 1980s terrorist group the Squamish Five and of the anarchist- protest movement of that period are clearly intentional, but never overplayed. This is a novel not of movements, but of individuals, and Lee demonstrates a deft hand with her characterizations. Even minor characters — like Gerry’s mother’s boyfriend — are well drawn and rounded, revealing surprising depths despite their limited presence.
Gerry herself, though, is something else. It is rare to find a character so richly drawn, and so resolutely unpleasant, in mainstream fiction. Over the course of the novel, Gerry reveals herself as venal and petty, manipulative and meanspirited, cruel and callous. She is, frankly, awful, and completely unlikable.
Much has been made in the media over the past few years as to whether a central character in a novel needs to be likable for the reader to relate to or connect with the novel as a whole. Lee, however, makes this recurring question moot: despite the fact that she is, in many ways, loathsome, Gerry is also scared, and hurt. Scarred, and a survivor. Uncertain of herself, and desperate, aching, for human contact.
You may not like her, but you will find yourself sympathizing for her, empathizing with her. To your surprise, she — and the novel — will break your heart.
It’s a galvanizing and shocking effect, and Lee should be credited not only for succeeding so brilliantly, but for taking the risk in the first place.
The Age is a powerful, often disturbing, read. It sags a bit in the middle — there’s a little too much development without enough happening in the back stretch — but by the end, it is utterly transfixing. It’s a fundamentally human novel, unflinching from the darkness, both outside and within.