Author weaves Aboriginal culture into tale of death, reconnection with family
Beautiful Beautiful: A Novel
Brandon Reid Nightwood Editions
The story is a simple one. A young son and his father, Derik and George, go north along the B.C. coast to bury an estranged grandfather and reconnect with other family members. They fish, survive a big storm and painful family dinners, and return with some peace and new connection. Yet a simple story can be made new and ageless by the craft and heart of the telling. This version sings and glitters and sounds long-lasting echoes.
Imagine having the literary ambition, the sheer glorious gall, to publish a first novel that blends the influences of your ancestral Heiltsuk culture with a deep and passionate engagement with some of the giants of 20th-century modernist fiction, not to mention pop culture as richly experienced by your 12-year-old protagonist. Richmond teacher Brandon Reid has that nerve and in his debut novel he is largely successful at the daunting task.
“Finnegans Wake by James Joyce turned me on to lyricism and esthetics in literature. I didn't understand the majority of what I read, yet I found pure joy in the musicality of his words. Subject matters less to me than how language is used,” Reid told the Georgia Straight on Nov. 18, when his novel Beautiful Beautiful was published.
The book is rich in the “pure joy in the musicality of his words,” that Reid loves in Joyce, but it also delivers lots of subject matter, content that ranges from memories of residential school horrors to lessons on the proper way to fish for salmon, to addiction and recovery, to a glorious final integration involving a shaman, a spirit guide and cannibal dancers, with stops along the way to reflect on outlaw bikers, Freemasons and the British Royal Family. This is not a book with simple, linear polemics to deliver, not even about the issues that matter deeply to the author. It is a chorus of contending voices, a luminously intersectional network far more complex and lovely than any simple binary. The characters shout, sing, dance and jostle, mock and mourn in ways that are altogether persuasive, but resist the narrative temptations of easy resolution or cheap redemption.
Derik and his father George are moving and memorable figures, but the many singers in the novel's chorus add to the resonant chaos that forms the background music for all dysfunctional families and all great myths and art.
Highly recommended.