HAUNTED TALE SEEKS JUSTICE REVIEW
Angie Abdou’s latest mixes ghost story, adultery drama, consciousness raising
Angie Abdou has done it again. After the searing social realism of her masterpiece Between, reviewed in 2014, she has turned her considerable talents not to a simple and perhaps tempting reprise of the genre and approach that produced her last triumph but to a new and risky effort: an odd blend of ghost story, adultery drama, anti-racist consciousness raising, and magical realism.
In Case I Go not only features a child narrator, à la Emma Donohue’s Room, but also explores the uneasy place where white liberal guilt intersects with the horrors of colonialism. (Kids, this is even In Case I Go Angie Abdou Arsenal Pulp Press
harder than it looks.)
Abdou’s narrator Eli is 10 years old. Through his eyes and the almost pitch-perfect way the writer captures Eli’s unhappy inner life and his clear-eyed observations about the resentment and rancour in his parent’s marriage, Abdou set the human context for a story that started out, she has said on her webpage, to be a horror story. In the process of composition, the horror story morphed into something far more rich and strange.
The plot turns on Eli’s bond with Mary, a mute First Nations child a few years older than he is, on the impact of several acts of infidelity on his parents’ marriage, and on the uncanny experiences Eli begins to have once he meets Mary.
Deftly, Abdou leaves moot the question of just how real these experiences are. Are they the fever dreams of a sickly child, fantasies that help him escape the quotidian sorrows of a weak body and a family life laced with resentments, or a genuine contact with the dead? The experiences, whatever their source, seem to transport Eli to the past in which another Elijah (the narrator’s great-great-grandfather) and a young Ktunaxa woman known to the whites in a little coal mining town in the B.C. Interior as Mary, are involved in a complex relationship, part abuse and part anguished love affair.
There is one moment near the end of the book as Eli emerges from a healing trance ceremony (conducted in a hilariously portrayed New Age spiritual centre, a set piece that shows again Abdou’s talent for social satire) with new clarity about why his dead have been haunting him and moves toward both personal and social reconciliation which endangers the book’s otherwise near perfect control of tone.
The Eli in these problematic passages conveys a detailed and adult knowledge of First Nations oppression in B.C. that somewhat strains the book’s otherwise impressive plausibility. But this is a forgivable flaw in an otherwise spectacularly successful novel. This book is highly recommended to anyone who cares about strong, moving fiction and about social justice.