VIRTUAL CLEARCUT: or, the Way Things Are in My Hometown
Brian Fawcett
Thomas Allen Publishers, 320 pp.
Way back in the heady days of 1990, in the second issue of Geist magazine – probably the best magazine in Canada, people, where have you been? – Stephen Osborne subjected Brian Fawcett to "An Investigation into the Disappearance of Kamloops, B.C." He laid roundly into Fawcett for allowing Kamloops to be edited out of a story that came to comprise part of his book Public Eye: an Investigation into the Disappearance of the World. Kamloops had been replaced by a point "somewhere between Berwick, Pennsylvania and Stroudsberg."
Despite the lingering ironies of that incident, there’s no erasing the local from Fawcett’s new book. Virtual Clearcut is an investigation into the disappearance of Prince George, B.C. into the black hole of the Global Village, as the machinery that runs the once-thriving northern city becomes farther and farther removed from its citizenry.
After a jerky and lumbering preface, which may be better left unread, Fawcett writes about four separate trips to his hometown and the nearby Bowron River clearcut – the world’s largest, the only one visible from space. He measures his childhood memories against what he finds on each of the trips, and measures the trips against each other, to give a portrait of a town that’s increasingly, over time, "being screwed in a special way by all the wealth-sucking forces of globalization."
The handy bookstore category on the dust jacket says "memoir/current events," and that’s a deep divide. As a literary memoir, it’s a bumpy ride, following an awkward-seeming man into a bunch of vaguely uncomfortable situations. There’s a lot of smoking and pottering around other people’s houses, interspersed with the "current events" bits that often read like a No Logo (mercifully sans revolutionary cheerleading) for northern towns, where life in the coming decades is "going to get harder and uglier."
A prime virtue of Virtual Clearcut is that Fawcett lets other people do some of the talking for a change. And he’s not blind to the irony that, while the Bowron River clearcut is healing (the astronauts can’t see it anymore), the town it was supposed to benefit is being erased from the map. It’s now somewhere between Spokane, Washington and Fairbanks, Alaska.
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