CANADIAN WRITER ELIZABETH Hay has been justly praised for her strong yet lyrical descriptions of the Canadian countryside, her evocation of its loneliness, its treachery, and its beauty. But the reason such personalising of the landscape showcases h
er talent so well is precisely because she's in the business of revealing psychological insights. Marrying the outer world with the inner is a real trick for a writer, and Hay performs it with ease and skill.
So her novel doesn't start with descriptions of mountains or ice, even though it's set in Yellowknife, in Canada's far north. It begins with the voice of a woman, speaking on the radio, and a middle-aged man's reaction to that voice. It is 1975 and Harry Boyd is the boss at the Yellowknife radio station. Many years ago, a rising star in radio, he was ambitious and moved to Toronto and a career in TV. But that move proved disastrous; and, one broken marriage and one broken career later, he has returned to the small, remote place where it all began. Lonely, a little bitter, and certainly not inclined to fall in love too readily, he finds that's exactly what he's doing – falling in love with the owner of the voice, a beautiful, exotic young woman called Dido.
Dido is in flight from a marriage that collapsed because she fell in love with her husband's father, but it's a compromised flight – she's hoping her father-in-law will come after her. She and Harry flirt with each other, but to his frustration, it is never more than that. Soon, it is the radio station's surly, silent technical engineer Eddy who has captivated her, even if that captivation is a dark one, resulting in the occasional black eye and rows that repeatedly separate them. Meanwhile, another new girl, Gwen Symon, has begun work at the station. Compared unfavourably to Dido in just about every respect, Gwen's confidence suffers at the beginning, forcing Harry to relegate her slot to the dead-hour night-time one they all dread. Gwen is in awe of Dido, who flirts with her as much as she does with Harry. Dido, it seems, is causing everybody in this small town huge problems.
But all small-town stories need an evil in their midst, usually represented by the stranger from out of town; Hay's story shows that they are all, natives excepting, "strangers". As a backdrop to the emotional fall-out at the radio station, she shows the battle to preserve the town and the landscape from a proposed pipeline development, one which will also displace the area's native population. Tensions are personal, therefore, and political: liberal Harry wants newsreaders at the station who can speak the native tongue and so reach out to the native populace, but he also finds himself at odds with the station owners over the pipeline deal. Dido, meanwhile, toys with him, as all out-of-towners do when they arrive in new places, while considering her options with Eddy.
Hay's skill at quietly weaving the unusual landscape of the area with the absolutely run-of-the-mill emotional human dramas endured by those living there cannot be understated. There's always a risk with writers like Hay – as with Anne Tyler perhaps, or even Joyce Carol Oates, although the violence embedded in her tales makes this less likely – that their emphasis on human mess, on the ordinariness of emotional entanglements, could slip into the world of soap, reducing everything to so much emotional froth. What prevents this happening, however, is the kind of emotional intelligence that marks all great literature, and which marks Hay's too. It's impossible to predict, therefore, the direction of her story, and this unpredictability keeps us watching her characters for clues. We can't rest, because if we do, that's when we'll slip.
Possibly the only point when Hay herself slips is a moment of self-indulgence: when Gwen, Harry, Eleanor, the station's receptionist, and Ralph, the radio's book reviewer, head off together for an adventure holiday on Lockhart River. Although it's a trip that's crucial to the plot, it does drag just a little, possibly a result of Hay's own fondness for the area. This novel has been very much a labour of love. But love, as Hay herself has shown, can occasionally trick us into taking wrong turnings if we're not careful.
• Elizabeth Hay is at the Edinburgh book festival on 22 August.
The full article contains 755 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
