Late nights on air (Elizabeth Hay) did not grab me. It had all the elements I usually fall for: the far north (Yellowknife), small-town radio, a cast made up of refugees from other places. But no.
And before I go on, I must advise you that Elizabeth Hay won the Giller Prize for this book. It was all anyone in Canadian Publishing could talk about. So I am likely wrong when I say I felt like I was reading Northern Exposure re-runs. That is, I was having to rely for imagination on a televised fake protrayal of northern living. Why wasn't I getting a clearer image from the book itself?
Ugh, no mind. I bear Hay no ill-will, but these people are like so many I've seen before. The troubled, cruel beauty; the curmudgeonly has-been; the bad boy nobody trusts; the good girl who seeks constant validation. And they really don't seem to emerge too much from those molds though you expect that, if anything would do it, it's the canoe trip that four of them have been planning for months and months.
That doesn't do it, even though something big happens.
So...I don't know. I don't know what I felt about it. Perhaps it didn't give strong enough medicine to induce a reaction.
