Brian
Brett meets
his
Magus:
The
Byline: John Moore
Source: Special to the Sun
Perennially
popular,
suspense fiction is also the most ecumenical of genres, embracing such
disparate talents as Sue (M is for Moronic) Grafton, the great noir
masters
Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, and the best writers of almost
every other
generation.
With Coyote, Saltspring Island poet Brian Brett
pulls the
wings off
a few genre cliches in one of those rare, hypnotically compelling
novels that
keeps the reader turning just one more page until the dawn-song of
birds warns
it's already a long tired day.
In the mid-1960s, John Fowles' The Magus
made
sleep deprivation a mass phenomenon. It's that book Coyote most
resembles, not
only because of its island setting but also because Brett weaves a
multi-level
novel of ideas out of a background of lesser murders as we wait for the
main
event.
Both Fowles and Brett obey Agatha Christie's first
rule of plot
drama:
Isolate the main characters (in a country house or castle, on a ship or
a
train). The Magus was set on a Greek island; Coyote is set on
In
Coyote, a
character named Brian turns up on the island and begins making
inquiries of the
locals -- the usual gang of ideological dropouts, hemp weavers, organic
farmers, crystal therapists and dreamcatcher sales reps. Once the
grapevine has
made his presence known, Brian is allowed to find the person he seeks:
"old Charlie," an aging hippie who lives in a treehouse above his
garden.
Brian suspects Charlie of being Coyote, a notorious
late-1960s
eco-terrorist who freed animals from testing labs and crippled a huge
petrochemical
facility before disappearing, officially believed to have died in his
last
raid.
His reasons for hunting Coyote are personal and are
only revealed
after
he moves in with Charlie and they engage in a Nietszchean"re-evaluation
of
all values" while subtly stalking each other in a dangerous battle of
wits.
As in The Magus, a woman links the two, but in
Coyote she is
dead, a
murder victim lumped in with a number of murdered women from
Separating
her death
from the others draws into the story RCMP Inspector Janwar Singh and a
subplot
involving the procedural politics of the modern Mounties. When Singh
visits the
island as a guest at a holistic healing spa, he begins to recover from
illnesses resulting from the internalized stress of life as a
success-driven
child of immigrants. He even discovers love for the first time while,
only a
few miles away on the island's labyrinthine roads, Charlie and Brian
are locked
in a deadly debate crucial to his case.
Brett's immense skills as a
novelist
show in the way he maintains taut suspense through a plot that mainly
consists
of people telling stories to each other. With old Charlie/Coyote in the
role of
Conchis (the magus of Fowles' novel) and the odious Brian playing a
similar
role to that of Fowles' shallow cynic, Nicholas Urfe, Brett challenges
the
long-term implications of the '60s revolution in social morality.
Had
he done
this in a series of essays, he might have produced another weary
critique of
pop culture and goosed nobody but fans of Mark Kingwell. The popularity
of the
murder mystery genre has always been vested in its power to make social
criticism a matter of life and death, and Brett exploits it here with
vision
and stylistic vigour.
He is the antithesis of the callow "spokesperson
for
a generation." Coyote took half a century of living and 14 years of
writing. The experience, wit, wisdom and sadness gained in that time
are
evident in every line.
JOHN
MOORE speaks
to Brian
Brett about Coyote, a mystery in three senses of the word:
JOHN MOORE:
Margaret Atwood
put a mystery at the heart of The Blind Assassin, as if to help control
the
sprawl of a big book. Did the mystery genre's demands for suspense and
plot
resolution help to keep you on track in Coyote?
BRIAN BRETT: It's
amusing
you would mention The Blind Assassin. Coyote originally started out as
a 100-
page "symposium," a Platonic-style debate between the eco-terrorist
and the serial killer. It took 10 years to discover the plot and that
was only
after Atwood, who was writing The Blind Assassin at the time,
practically had
me by the throat on my deck [They have known each other since the early
'70s -
ed.], insisting I tell her what the story was. To which I replied
cheekily,
'Life isn't a story,' and said it was about the complicated,
interweaving
quality of life -- all the thousands of stories continuously happening.
Then
she got the brilliant idea of asking, 'If it isn't a story in the way
we think
of a story, then who is it for? Who is the audience?' What popped out
of my
mouth was, 'The boy, of course. The mutant boy.' That stunned both of
us. It
had all fallen into place for the next rewrite.
JM: Did the conventions
of the
mystery genre sometimes constrain you, make you feel your shorts were
too
tight?
BB: I had great
angst over even calling it a mystery on the
cover. The
mystery, of course, is a triple pun: a play on the Catholic 'mystery,'
the
mystery of how we live morally in the world, and the more common
mystery of who
kills who. I decided I had to take my chances that it might be mistaken
for
your standard murder mystery. If it goes to the usual mystery-genre
reviewer,
they're going to have some mighty trouble with a deconstructed mystery
like
this, romping across the genres. One publisher in
JM: What if
Canadian literature doesn't want to
include
direct challenges to the ethical and moral positions most of its
readers accept
as certainties?
BB: I've always
believed that good writing does not
have to be
boring and that philosopy is part of the boil of life from which it
erupts. I
wanted to take ideas into dangerous territory with Coyote, to
illustrate how
expectations and results diverge so madly [and], mostly, to examine the
fallacy
of the logic of vigilante action and terrorism for a cause, any
cause.... Most
importantly, I was trying to explore the very human drive to find
absolute
solutions to moral issues for which there are no solutions. The need
for
absolute answers resembles 'closure,' our modern mythical answer to
pain. Well,
there ain't no closure.