Dido and Eleanor are escaping unworkable marriages. Dido married a man younger than herself, only to fall in love with someone much older – her father-in-law. Eleanor had the misfortune to love a man who did not want to consummate their union. Harry returns North, disgraced after an unsuccessful jump to TV. Gwen, younger than the rest, is the only one who has not married. She arrives with a bruised throat. Yellowknife, she thinks, is “a place where anyone could make a fresh start.”
But it’s also a place that can get to you after a while, as it did to Eleanor’s former roommate, “who’d decided suddenly she couldn’t face one more day in Yellowknife.” Another says, “Winter here does terrible things to people. You’ll find out.” People depart as suddenly as they arrive. More than one character disappears in the blink of an eye.
Overlaid against all this local colour are a couple of fantastic themes. One is the story of John Hornby, whose death in the Thelon in 1927 has reached an almost mythical status. Gwen, who has read The Legend of John Hornby several times, reminds Harry of Edgar Christian, who died with Hornby. There is so much musing about that fateful event that a canoe trip to the Thelon is inevitable. Naturally we expect the worst.
The other fantastic theme is pure myth, the story of Queen Dido of Carthage. Our present-day Dido is the olive-skinned daughter of a Latin teacher, raised in Europe and come to Canada to cause confusion in the hearts of men and women, perhaps because she herself is romantically (and possibly sexually) ambivalent. While she waits in Yellowknife, hoping for the arrival of her father-in-law, she becomes involved with two men. One of them is Eddy, a technician at the station and former Viet Nam vet, who arrived in Yellowknife one day on a whim. He is, of course, the story’s Aeneas.
The portrayal of Yellowknife was excellent. I also liked learning about the workings of a radio station – the pots and carts and stings, and editing tape the old-fashioned way, with a razor, and how to create different sound effects, like using corn starch to simulate walking across snow. I liked the way the author investigated the intimacy and isolation of radio broadcasting, announcers alone in a darkened room speaking to an invisible audience. "Extroverted introverts," one character calls them.
More Yellowknife
Late Nights on Air came out around the same time as my own novel, Yellowknife. They share some interesting similarities:
- Both take place at pivotal periods in the history of resource extraction in the North. In Late Nights on Air it's oil, in Yellowknife it's diamonds.
- A Japanese adventurer pops up in both books, and John Hornby, who is frequently mentioned in Late Nights on Air, makes an actual appearance in Yellowknife.
- Both novels culminate in a trip that heads off in the same direction -- the Thelon in Hay's book, the East Arm of Great Slave Lake in mine. Both trips end in a similar fashion.
Other books of interest, in no particular order:
Yellowknife by Ray Price. An entertaining history of Yellowknife.
Solomon Gursky Was Here by Mordecai Richler. A visit to Yellowknife and a survivor of the lost Franklin expedition are just two elements of this many-faceted novel.
A Discovery of Strangers by Rudy Wiebe. An historical novel about Franklin's disastrous journey through the area in 1820.
Snow Man by Malcolm Waldron. A classic account account of John Hornby in the Arctic.
The Third Suspect by Staples & Owens, and Dying for Gold by Selleck & Thompson. Two differing views of the underground murders at Giant Mine in 1992.
Denison's Ice Road by Edith Iglauer. A classic account of one of the pioneers of ice-road construction.
Rogue Diamonds by Ellen Bielawski. Excellent portrayal of the Dene point of view during the diamond negotiations in the 1990s.
