>>FEATURE
ALLIGATOR
Lisa Moore
House of Anansi Press, 306 pp.
In the opening nine pages of Lisa Moore’s Alligator, there are downloaded beheadings, mushroom clouds, a nuclear reactor training video, scrunchy-wrapped testicles, bum-fight videos, a suburban house party, a peanut butter and honey sandwich, and an alligator attack. This is the super-mediated world of 17-year-old Colleen Clark, the background noise in her head as she flips through Cosmo.
"I wrote that in one morning," says Moore, "although it was certainly rewritten several times. The images just came. It was a matter of tinkering with Colleen’s voice. I had no outline. I just got up each morning and wrote."
I spoke to Moore from her Newfoundland home on the day she launched Alligator and a cross-country tour at a downtown St. John’s restaurant – just before the book was shortlisted for this year’s Giller Prize. "It’s nerve-wracking and joyous," she says of the writing process. "Every book is a kind of argument. I want it to have readers. I want people to argue back. I want people to care about it."
Fellow Newfoundland writer Michael Crummey, in an interview in Quill & Quire, has said of her new novel, "Money is the alligator in the book. This incredibly ancient reptile that flows in and out of everybody’s life… it seems benign but it’s incredibly dangerous." I ask Moore if she agrees with this interpretation.
"I am surprised by how much this book is about money," she replies. "I wanted a portrait of St. John’s, and downtown St. John’s is full of artists and writers, and many, many people living on limited means."
Alligator is told through the voices of a half-dozen main characters. "There’s no central character, really," says Moore. "The plot moves through each character. Madeleine is the spirit of order. She’s telling the story of Newfoundland – the act of trying to articulate." Madeleine’s sister Beverly and her daughter Colleen make up one triad in the novel.
Colleen is accused of eco-terrorism as the book begins. Moore writes, "She had put herself in peril, Colleen thought, and then retrieved herself from peril. She liked to see what she could get away with, how far she could go…." Moore takes a fearless joy in pushing her characters toward their violent crescendo in Alligator.
Valentin, a brutal Russian sailor, is the closest character in the novel to a pure predator. He acts from the ancient reptile part of the brain. In Moore’s words, "He had come to a cold and ugly island that hardly existed, could not be found on many maps. He was nowhere…. The idea of torching the house came to him when Isobel Turner was opening her mail…. He could see a gaping weakness in her, a profound vulnerability that he knew he could take advantage of."
Above all else, Alligator is stuffed with astonishing writing. A boyfriend is introduced as "ridiculous, vital, super-horny, athletic, a liar and a cheat…. who introduced her to tahini and Tarkovsky." Or, "The alligator shakes his head as if he’s having a disagreement. He really disagrees. He disagrees vehemently. The alligator is trying hard to tear the man’s head from his shoulders."
The winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, Canada’s richest literary fiction award, will be announced on November 8. For more information, go to www.scotiabankgillerprize.ca |
Copyright ©2005 FFWD. All rights reserved.