Blackouts
by Craig Boyko
McClelland & Stewart (2008), 317 pp.
by Craig Boyko
McClelland & Stewart (2008), 317 pp.
“Mr. Bearden does not have a wife,” notes the thirteen-year-old girl who narrates “The Mean,” a dramatic monologue of sorts that is at the centre of Craig Boyko’s first collection of stories. “He is probably over thirty years old and he has never been married and possibly has never even had a girlfriend. I think this is kind of sad.”
Good debuts are often celebrated for their surety of voice, but Blackouts transcends such simple praise, because each of these stories — roughly half in the first person, half in the third — is relayed in a manner as nuanced and distinct as the girl at the centre of “The Mean.” It’s rare enough for a young writer to have found his own voice; to have created eleven others this convincing is nothing short of astonishing.
Blackouts is an act of literary ventriloquism note-worthy not only for its ambition but its scope. Boyko conjures Stalinist Russia and wartime London with the same vivid ease with which he resurrects a long summer in a small British Columbia town. And within each of his varied settings, his purview expands even further as his gifts for characterization and dialogue compress whole relationships — whole lives, even — into tight narrative packages. Like one of his characters, a computer programmer who works on codecs, Boyko is “intrigued by the possibility of shrinking data, making something large small.”
Thematically, the stories take the title at its word, focusing on characters whose figurative and literal self-erasure finds them changing as they efface and rewrite their lives. What results is refreshing — a collection more concerned with what it is to be a human being than what it is to be a Canadian. In other words, Boyko has already moved beyond the insecurities of his identity-obsessed literary history; he’s not interested in exploring the contours of the same old garrison. And why should he be, when there’s so much else to see and he’s such a gifted guide?
Comments (1 comments)
Anonymous: In that the Canadian "garrison" often amounts to an open field or expanse of mountains, our prison is freedom. Boyko's characters struggle constantly with the vast possibility of freedom set against a cliff of determinism; to fall is easy - perhaps inevitable. Canada's greatest (prototypical) writers know that, at it core, man vs the environment magnifies the greater challenge, man vs himself (think Susanna Moody). In Blackouts, the protagonists struggle with their environment, faith, family and society but, which is rare in such a young author, Boyko presents these struggles in nuanced, psychologically compelling portraits of Man vs Himself. Not surprisingly, the jacket blurb to this book notes that Craig received degrees in both English and psychology. I agree with the review that with Blackouts, we've found a gifted guide for our environment, be it without or within. March 21, 2008 16:08 EST