A friend from rural Vermont recently berated me for thinking I could ever find warmth or friendliness in a big city. “You can’t smile at anyone,” he claimed, “because they’ll shoot you!”
Unfortunately, my friend’s prejudice against cities is reflected in a broad trend in contemporary urban literature. Our literary cities seethe with iniquity. One wrong step and you could find yourself shot, stabbed or entangled in some kind of fraud or drug deal. Recent works by young authors Eden Robinson (Blood Sports) and Gautam Malkani (Londonstani) are some of the higher-profile exemplars of this attitude. Vancouverite and first-time novelist Ranj Dhaliwal’s Daaku could be placed in this boat as well, as it chronicles the life of the fictitious gangster Ruby Pandher from Surrey, British Columbia.
“Daaku” is the Punjabi word for outlaw, and Ruby is destined to oppose law from the beginning. Because Dhaliwal seems most concerned with...
Tomasz Mrozewski is assistant librarian at Laurentian University in Sudbury and a freelance writer, editor and podcast fiction narrator. Find him at tmorz.ca.
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