| Natalee Caple loves to read thrillers. But when the Toronto author set out to write one of her own, she found she needed to do some tinkering with the genre.
Caple, who arrives this week to take up her position as Markin-Flanagan writer in residence at the University of Calgary, centres her novel on a family counterfeiting operation in Quebec’s Laurentians. Her crime family is a matriarchy, though, instead of the more familiar Tony Soprano model.
"I sort of reversed the gender politics on this," she explains by telephone from Toronto. "In other crime stories you have the sexy, older, inaccessible male, but I’m imagining how it might be different if that character were female." And so Martine, the self-destructive but protective mother and counterfeiter at the heart of Caple’s Mackerel Sky, was born.
Just like any male antihero worth his salt, Martine is dangerous and sexually magnetic. The novel’s men, all irresistibly drawn to her, mostly end up getting hurt and looking a little foolish. This is certainly the fate of Guy, the main male character. As the novel opens he is returning after a long absence to meet the daughter he fathered with Martine, back when he was still a teenager. Guy is well-intentioned, determined to at least be able to say he tried to live up to his fatherly obligations. He’s also kind of lost and a little klutzy. So he’s the perfect character to go haplessly into the Quebec woods towards the isolated house where Martine weaves a modern kind of magic. As counterfeiters, Martine and her daughter are what Caple calls the "artisans of the crime world." If you think all this makes Martine sound a bit like a siren, a little like a witch, you’re spot-on.
"I wanted to retain a kind of magical mysteriousness," says Caple. Mackerel Sky is not meant to be "an urban, gritty realistic crime story. In many ways it’s an erotic thriller that explores the psychology of relationships and how they’re affected by money."
Some of the magic and mystery comes from the novel’s setting in the Laurentians, a region with its share of quirky, almost Felliniesque places. (For example, a forest full of decommissioned aircraft where executive "team-building" groups play "kidnap the president" with each other’s CEOs.) Readers can now add Caple’s Laurentians to Andrew Pyper’s Ontario cottage country, the setting for Lost Girls, and Mark Sinnet’s Thousand Islands, the setting for his recent crime thriller The Border Guards. All three novels locate their spooky or dangerous goings-on in places where tourism adds a layer of eccentricity to the well-known menaces of the Canadian woods.
Caple’s graceful, vivid prose and eccentric characters combine literary satisfaction with the plain fun that thrillers offer, to the point that one wonders why more Canadian novelists haven’t adopted the genre.
Caple thinks one reason is that "Can Lit has gotten very stuffy about genre fiction" and while "we did effectively carve for ourselves a very good and authentic Canadian literature that was about high realism, we forgot that things like horror or thrillers have always been explored by the finest literary talents." Caple mentions Camus, Cortazar and Nabokov as authors who exploited genre fiction’s potential to "blend psychology and philosophy with a great story and unusual characters."
There are, in fact, philosophical touches in Mackerel Sky: Martine has theories about the economics of counterfeiting that make it sound like, between a seduction here and an abandonment there, she reads a little bit of Adorno. This is about as strange, and about as much fun, as, oh, Forest Whitaker quoting the samurai handbook while boosting cars in Ghost Dog.
While the U of C residency allows Caple to spend half of her time writing, the other half is reserved for readings and consulting with local writers on their work. As the author of two books of fiction (The Heart Has Its Own Reasons and The Plight of Happy People in an Ordinary World) and one poetry volume (A More Tender Ocean), and as literary editor for the Queen Street Quarterly, Caple’s experience should offer an invaluable resource for those with manuscripts in progress. While she brings a specific writing project of her own with her, Caple also hopes to preserve time to take advantage of finding herself among a new community of writers.
Caple marks the beginning of her residency on Thursday, September 16 at a double reading with outgoing Markin-Flanagan writer Robert Finley, entitled, aptly enough, Turning the Page. And in October she’ll also be participating in this year’s WordFest – for details on that event, see the next page. |
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