Customer Reviews

Late Nights on Air: A Novel

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Evocative setting and complex, fascinating characters topped by a thriller of a canoe trip through Canada's Barren Ground wilderness, Elizabeth Hay's Late Nights on Air was so good I had to read it twice. The second time through, I could appreciate the craft the author wields as she deftly shifts points of view, blends in flashbacks, and paints word-pictures of that land of the northern lights, Yellowknife, Northern Territories. Set in a provincial small-town radio station, the book does not neglect the Dene natives and their battle to protect a frozen but beautiful environs from a natural gas pipeline. Hay weaves all these elements into a seamless narrative. A definite buy.

Elizabeth Hay certainly knows how to invent clever phrasings. But what is the deal with contemporary writers and run-on sentences? Or sentence fragments? Ugh.

Hay also knows the flora and fauna of the area, having lived there herself. But she imputes her own knowledge into the oddly cardboard-like characters. Hay's central characters are also far more literate and literary than one might predict. Except for a 61-year-old with no visible means of support, the rest work in a poor radio station, and live in poor conditions in a poor backwater town.

The characters have generally uninteresting and unfulfilled relationships, with shallow episodes of lust, jealousy, disdain, affection, and affectation. I guess they are supposed to be sad people trying to get unstuck from their habitual ruts. To pull them out of their ruts, Hay sets them on a treacherously naive 6-week, 350-mile canoe trip across difficult and dangerous territory. Their misadventures are clumsily foreshadowed, so there is not much tension or surprise when bad things happen.

Hay tries to deliver an uplifting ending, but the lack of believable spark among the remaining characters undermines the finish.

I really liked the setting: Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories, Canada. The setting was definitely a character in this book ... like New York City is in Vivian Gornick's wonderful "Fierce Attachments." I remember when I read "Arctic Dreams" by Barry Lopez how much he talked about what a difference it made to be so far up north on the globe. It creates all kinds of differences, including cultural ones, to have "nightless summers and dayless winters."

I really liked the characters in this book - clearly differentiated and interesting. I enjoyed their conversations and predicaments. Four of them go on a journey that was a mix of solitude and danger.

I think you will enjoy reading this book.

This is a tremendous book, a moving invocation of the North and of the less-visited reaches of love. It gathers so much momentum that by mid-book you can no more stop reading than stop breathing.

Elizabeth Hay's novel starts in 1975 and uses the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry in 1975-1977 - an inquiry into the diverse perspectives of people living in the Canadian North and those coming there for work or business purposes - as a kind of backdrop to her award-winning novel. Her focus, however, is a group of radio journalists, some 'old hand', some new arrivals, some local, others from the South, all working with the Northern Service of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). Hay's central characters and a few hangers-on are all highly individualistic - some deeply attracted to the open spaces of the North, others with a more urban mentality, finding climate and changing seasons an ongoing challenge. In all, we are exposed to an intriguing set of people.

Inter-personal relationships are not simple in a close-knit work environment of a small radio station; solidarities and allegiances are shifting as quickly as animosities and jealousies. Among the changing perspectives, three individuals have stronger voices than others. Harry, the troubled acting station manager, an experienced radio personality, is in a less than comfortable position and his days may be numbered. Gwen, the newest arrival, enthusiastic and dedicated to learning that might, she hopes, balance off her lack of experience. Eleanor, the administrator, represents the calm and responsible voice of reason. One of the groups challenges is Dido, a young woman from the Netherlands with a "natural" radio voice and a mysterious and seductive personality. While the characters are all interesting, I didn't feel strongly engaged with any of them for a long time; they remained vague and lacked a level of depth. Like the meandering Mackenzie river, they, very slowly, gain in strength and focus.

For two thirds of the novel the reader is invited into the hearts and lives of this small group and a few minor characters we meet along the way. Dramas happen but mainly on a small scale. Hay has exquisite one liners in her depiction of the characters and their views of each other, such as "I have a great face for radio." One intriguing and recurrent theme is the memory of lost ones, especially fathers who had exercised very strong influences on their daughters. "The past had never gone away, had not intention of going away." While considered in a different context (the pipeline)it applies just as well to the characters in the novel. For each of them the past is very much present.

It emerges over time that several in the group feel drawn to explore the Northern Wilderness more closely by following in the footsteps of an explorer team several decades previously. The author brilliantly evokes the landscape of the "Barrens", also depicting the challenges any group would face trying to navigate the frozen lakes in the Mackenzie River Delta. Hay's sense of awe at the beauty of the scenery, the summer lights in the Artic and of the vastness and potential loneliness and also its dangers is captures in lyrical and intimate language. This segment is, for me, by far the strongest part of the novel. Not only for its descriptive power but, especially, for suggesting new connections between those who went on this journey. Last not least, Hay exquisitely explores the connections between natural environment and human beings - whether they live traditionally in close harmony with the land or are visitors moving through, but still forever altered. [Friederike Knabe]

If a heart is torn apart in the Canadian arctic and no one hears it, did it really happen? Elizabeth Hay would answer a resounding "yes."

All of her characters - a diverse group of wounded lost souls who work together in a small Yellowknife radio station in the mid-1970s - are aching. Harry - the curmudgeonly acting manager with the cauliflower ear - has returned from a gig in television with its tail between his legs. Dido ran from the only man she ever loved - her own father-in-law -- and quickly connects with the station "bad boy", Eddy. Eleanor fled from the memories of a husband who could not consummate their reunion. And Gwen, the youngest, who arrives at Yellowknife "subtle in her camouflage" with a buff-grey shirt with a pale brown collar and no adornment, looking to make a fresh start in an area in which fresh starts are legendary.

Within the course of this subtle and timeless novel, we get to meet these characters and more, as they reveal themselves like slowly blooming flowers. Events encroach on the town: a television station threatens to supplant the intimacy of the radio, a gas pipeline (based on the Mackenzie Valley pipeline project) is poised to disrupt the rhythm of the community and particularly its native people. The natural and charged quality of the narrative is slightly disrupted by these events and there's a bare hint of the authorial voice.

But this author weaves her magic when she focuses on her characters, all of whom are connected to each other in intense and ultimately transformative ways. As summer turns to harsh winter, one of them muses, "Winter here does terrible things to people. You'll find out." And indeed, it does; people disappear or drift away or sometimes, forget to listen too closely. And what holds them together is the power of stories: Gwen's creation of soundscapes and songs of longing during her late-night sound spot; others who present back stories that are so poignant and real you feel as if they're coming from someone you know.

One of the strongest - and there are many - parts of this amazing book is when four of the characters embark on a journey into the rarely-traveled Arctic wilderness, where real-life Englishman John Hornby and a party of two starved to death in the Barrens in 1927. Each has his or her own compelling reason to go: "Ralph wanted to prove himself - prove that at sixty-one he was still youthful. And Eleanor had indicated that she and the Barrens might be a good spiritual fit. And Gwen had the young person's all-consuming desire to see a place for the first time especially since it would complete a story that had captured her imagination as a child..." And Harry? "He was looking forward to a clean break from his old dissatisfactions, a summer that would help him forget his winter."

The descriptions are exquisite: "They passed over the line into a world without walls, a land of rolling plains as exposed as the open sea. Their backs were sudden trees. Their hats were leaves the mosquitoes rested upon. Birds flew past their shoulders, like familiars. And at night, their quiet talk around the little bannock fire was similar to the voices of the trees that spooked the early Eskimos..."

Some characters will find redemption, others will face more questions. Some will make it, some will not. When Harry muses about the caribou, "He'd never known before that migration wasn't one outbroken forward movement; it was sideways, backwards, forwards, a passage enlivened with indecision in the face of real and imagined danger", he might have been speaking of himself and the others. The morning after I completed this book, I woke up yearning to reinhabit the world of these characters. No higher compliment can be paid.

"...this summer of 1975 took on the mythical quality of a cloudless summer before the outbreak of war, or before the onset of the kind of restlessness, social, spiritual, that remakes the world."

In the Canadian Northwest territories, a place of harsh winters and summers of unrelenting light, the hamlet of Yellowknife remains like an anachronism. Population ten thousand, including native people that have lived on this land for thousands of years; it was their flesh and blood. Now the Mackenzie Pipeline project, a huge construction of an oil and gas pipeline, threatens to "rip open open the Arctic...like a razor slashing the face of the Mona Lisa."

A little radio station of the CBC is the center of the novel. Harry Boyd, the 40-something interim manager, whose luckless history of ill-repute but brilliance has brought him back to radio after a wash with TV, is an unlikely romantic. He has fallen in love with the sound of Dido Paris on air, a resonant, smoky-voiced and Netherlands-born young woman of unconventional beauty, a wide-shouldered, slim-hipped enigma of melancholy temperament. She was hired as a parting shot of the former manager.

Gwen Symon, a mousy young girl-woman from Ontario, has bravely driven herself in her Boler trailer all the way to Yellowknife to work in radio. She listened to a radio show as a child called "Death on the Barren Ground," about John Hornby, the Englishman who starved to death on an Arctic adventure into the Barrens in 1927. She has since read his biography, three times! Harry is familiar with Hornby's history and his biographer, who lives close by. He is willing to be patient with Gwen's parched and defenseless voice.

Eleanor Dew is the point person or office manager at Yellowknife radio, a woman who manages to be pretty even though no part of her is pretty. She is a striving poet and a thoughtful friend to everyone.

Eddy Fitzgerlad is the cipher, a radio technician of unknown other talents, a well-cut but terse, insolent man, an unsettling presence in the radio station, with his eye on Dido.

Ralph Cody is the radio book reviewer and prodigious photographer of the far North Canadian landscape, with small nicotine-stained hands that are deft with a camera and tripod.

This cast of well-drawn, unforgettable characters, as well as some lively secondary characters, is the driving force of the novel. Hay's sumptuous sense of place, redolent of author Jane Urquhart (but more droll), and her precision with character building, fuels the story with an electric and kinetic buzz. Her use of radio as an extended metaphor, her vast store of literary allusions, and her buoyant linguistic play are the ingredients that make for an intelligent and contoured novel. The back story of the proposed pipeline add dimension and depth to the tale.

During the summer, four of these characters agree to a six-week Arctic adventure by land and canoe to visit the place of John Hornby's exploration and death. The Barrens were the rugged, treeless, and desolate landscape of the interior Arctic. This would be a mighty challenge for the group, even in summer. The adventure is filled with drama and a supple examination of the human spirit. All four of the radio adventurers will be put to a supreme test of inner and outer strength and tenacity.

This is the first book I have read by Elizabeth Hay. I am a delighted admirer of her work now, and I look forward to reading her previous novels. Highly recommended for readers interested in solid and original characters, evocative depiction of landscape, and piercing themes of human survival.