Late Nights on Air: A Novel [Hardcover]

Elizabeth Hay (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 3, 2008

It's 1975 when beautiful Dido Paris arrives at the radio station in Yellowknife, a frontier town in the Canadian north. Her enchanting voice disarms hard-bitten broadcaster Harry Boyd and electrifies the station, setting into motion rivalries both professional and sexual. As the drama at the station unfolds, a proposed gas pipeline threatens to rip open the land, inspiring many people to find their voices for the first time. This is the moment before television conquers the north's attention, when the future of the Arctic hangs in the balance. After the snow melts, four members of the radio station take a long canoe trip into the Barrens, a mysterious landscape of lingering ice and 24-hour light. The unexpected turns lethal — is it too late for Dido and Harry? Stark, witty, and dynamically charged, this dazzling tale embodies the power of a place and of the human voice to breed love and haunt the memory.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

After being fired from his latest television job, a disgraced Harry Boyd returns to his radio roots in the northern Canadian town of Yellowknife as the manager of a station no one listens to, and finds himself at the center of the station's unlikely social scene. New anchor Dido Paris, both renowned and mocked for her Dutch accent, fled an affair with her husband's father, only to be torn between Harry and another man. Wild child Gwen came to learn radio production, but under Harry's tutelage finds herself the guardian of the late-night shift. And lonely Eleanor wonders if it's time to move south just as she meets an unlikely suitor. While the station members wait for Yellowknife to get its first television station and the crew embarks on a life-changing canoe expedition, the city is divided over a proposal to build a pipeline that would cut across Native lands, bringing modernization and a flood of workers, equipment and money into sacred territory. Hay's crystalline prose, keen details and sharp dialogue sculpt the isolated, hardy residents of Yellowknife, who provide a convincing backdrop as the main cast tromps through the existential woods. (Apr.)
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Review

#1 National Bestseller

“Elizabeth Hay has created her own niche in Canadian fiction by fastening her intelligence on the real stuff — the bumps and glories in love, kinship, friendship.”
— Toronto Star

“Hay exposes the beauty simmering in the heart of harsh settings with an evocative grace that brings to mind Annie Proulx.”
— Washington Post

"Dazzling....A flawlessly crafted and timeless story, masterfully told.” — Jury citation, the Scotiabank Giller Prize

“Exquisite….Hay creates enormous spaces with few words, and makes the reader party to the journey, listening, marvelling….” — Globe and Mail

“This is Hay’s best novel yet.” — Marni Jackson, The Walrus

“Invites comparison with work by Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood. Outside Canada, one thinks of A.S. Byatt or Annie Proulx.” — Times Literary Supplement

“Written by a master storyteller.” — Winnipeg Free Press

“Psychologically astute, richly rendered and deftly paced. It’s a pleasure from start to finish.” — Toronto Star --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Counterpoint (March 3, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1582434085
• ISBN-13: 978-1582434087
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,351,691 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An enduring, endearing tale., May 11, 2008

By 

Cipriano "www.bookpuddle.blogspot.com" (Planet Claire) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Late Nights on Air: A Novel (Hardcover)

Let's face it. Few things in [Canadian] life possess the sheer, unmitigated potential of being more innately boring than CBC Radio, anywhere.
So. How about tuning in to CBC Radio..... in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories! In the year 1975! Exactly. The mere thought of it is enough to send a muskox into premature hibernation.
But enter the literary genius of Elizabeth Hay, for the above-mentioned is the exact setting of Late Nights On Air, a novel that is never for a moment, boring.

She peoples her book with fascinating, somewhat eccentric yet believable, transients.
Harry Boyd is a castaway from the Toronto television scene, now working the late shift at CBC Yellowknife and obscurely living out his banishment in the far north. One night he falls in love with the "low-pitched sexiness" and "elusive accent" of a new voice on the airwaves.
The voice belongs to Dido Paris, a novice, literally "hired off the street."
Harry begins immediate flrtations with her, and is immediately rebuffed.
Dido comes from who knows where and is as mythical as both her names. An ethereal, commanding presence throughout the book, even though in the last half of it, she is largely absent, having run off with the technician, Eddy Fitzgerald.
She seems to be the benchmark against which other female characters in the book assess themselves, one being Gwen Symons, another novice broadcaster.
Gwen does not have the natural skills that Dido enjoys. In fact, Gwen needs a lot of patience and understanding, and the new interim manager [Harry Boyd] is able to nurture and encourage her toward a realization of her own skill and proficiency.

The novel gravitates toward the discovered mutual interests of four co-workers at the radio station, these being Harry Boyd, Gwen Symons, Eleanor Dew, and Ralph Cody. Together they embark on an arduous six-week canoe journey through the Arctic wilderness known as the Barrens.
None of them could have prepared adequately for how arduous it would indeed, prove to be. All are changed, marked for life, and for death, through the experience. Loves are gained, and [tragically] lost.
I would describe the author's attention to landscape as being downright Urquhartian. You sense the rippling waters and crackling ice, hear the tinkle of Northern Lights, and slap yourself for mosquitoes, as you read.

I found the book evocative of a bittersweet play between disclosure and reticence. Between characters being drawn and attracted to each other but for diverse and understandable reasons, unable to acknowledge it in time.
Harry's feelings for Dido are denied, withheld, temporarily assuaged, and then returned to a state of numbing unrequitedness. Dido herself suffers the pain of unrequited love, while maintaining a sort of second-best relationship with Eddy Fitzgerald. Similar frustrations occur in several pairings of relationships, culminating in the heartrending shattered dreams of Ralph and Eleanor.
The last few pages offer the reader a beautiful redemptive reversal to this trend.

Hay, herself an intrepid canoeist, former Yellowknifer, and radio broadcaster, is obviously in her element here in Late Nights. And not on these levels alone, but also on yet another, very important one...
Superb novelist.
I look forward to reading more of her work.

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not compelling (2.5 *s), April 21, 2008

By 

J. Grattan "Ideas can move the world" (Lawrenceville, GA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Late Nights on Air: A Novel (Hardcover)

The author hooks the reader immediately as forty-two year old Harry Boyd, an announcer at a small Yellowknife radio station and on the rebound from a career that has spiraled downward, hears while at home the exotic, sensual voice of Dido Paris, a new-hire who he has not yet met. Unfortunately for the book, Paris remains an alluring though mysterious, peripheral presence in the book. Other than Harry, three others associated with the radio station are the key characters: Eleanor, the wise receptionist; Gwen, the novice, though determined, announcer; and Ralph, book critic and photographer. Frankly, the weather is more prominent in the book than radio station happenings: the bone-chilling cold, the extremely shorts days and long nights of the winter; the confinement; the perils of venturing forth, etc.

The author taps into the controversy of the proposed Mackenzie River Valley natural gas line that pitted natives and old-timers like Harry versus business types, though mostly as a background device for the 1970s. The history of the Artic north is replete with legends of rugged survivalists and those who succumbed to the elements. The tragic death of one such individual John Hornby in the 1920s intrigued Harry sufficiently that he along with Ralph, Eleanor, and Gwen undertake an arduous journey by foot and canoe to visit the site of his death with, once again, the harsh, unpredictable weather bringing about a distressing outcome. However, not only on the journey, but also around town, the details of the landscape remain murky.

The book is choppy: for the most part a sequence of disconnected scenarios. The promise of the radio station as a unifying theme is insufficiently developed; the shift to a wilderness adventure seems abrupt and not particularly credible in light of practically no wilderness skills on the part of the participants. The characters, with the possible exception of Gwen, are inadequately developed. The author repeatedly indulges in foretelling: a character is going to have some sort of feeling or three things will happen to someone. The author's attempt to bring closure to this saga just does not rescue the overall spottiness of the book.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Yes...compelling!, May 28, 2008

By 

Karen B. Baierl (South Bend, Indiana) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Late Nights on Air: A Novel (Hardcover)

I loved this book! The characters were real, so fully developed, and loveable despite their flaws. The setting was intriguing- I even got my atlas out and found Yellowknife and followed the canoe trip. The writing is superb! I had to make myself slow down to savor the beauty of her words: "By evening the sky was clear. The light luminous and rich. Not brilliant as in the Mediterranean( where Harry once removed a splinter from a woman's finger on the street of Sete in light that acted as a magnifying glass). Gentler. Almost autumnal. The hills didn't have light on them, they were in light, the way something is in water." Elizabeth Hay writes about the human condition and our place in the natural world in a lovely lovely way so that when I finished, I was sorry to leave the world she created.