Late Nights On Air
by Elizabeth Hay
McClelland & Stewart (2007), 376 pp.

Elizabeth Hay’s previous novel, Garbo Laughs, was about our romance with the movies. In her rich new novel, she writes about the power and intimacy of radio, and how we can fall in love with certain voices.

Late Nights On Air is set in a small Yellowknife radio station in 1975, where two young women are learning on the job as novice broadcasters reading the news during the slow hours of the night. A radio station is a perfect setting for writing about the isolation and the community of the North.

One of them, the alluring Dido Paris, is a natural, with a voice “like a tarnished silver spoon.” The other is a shy but unswerving easterner, Gwen Symon. It was a cbc radio drama about the English explorer John Hornby and his fatal journey into the Barrens that compelled Gwen to get in her car and drive over 3,000 miles to see the tundra for herself. Hornby, in fact, is the ghostly central character of Hay’s story.

People pull up stakes abruptly in the North, and so do the multiple characters in this book, which is a bit unnerving. Once several affairs are set in motion among the staff, the story abandons the radio station and moves out into the landscape. Two couples embark on a six-week canoe trip where the evocation of the tundra — its emptiness, silence, and delicate beauty — is stunning, almost a new species of erotica. Hay portrays the tender bonds that are forged (and broken) in such wild places.

The novel brims with curious data, too. In the course of her story, Hay swoops down like a raven on odd, shiny bits of information about the North. The tufts of soft muskox hair that snag on branches in the bush are called qiviut; the violet shades of the northern lights are due to nitrogen; the sound of someone crawling into a tent pitched on dry lichen in the tundra is a dry crackling, like wrapping paper. Nothing seems to escape her. This is Hay’s best novel yet.