Homage to a Magic Medium

Years ago, in an earlier life, I spent a couple of days driving the late Peter Gzowski from point to point in eastern Ontario on a publicity tour for The New Morningside Papers. “It’s so weird,” I told him, “hearing your voice from here”—I waved my hand beside my right ear—“rather than there”—and I gestured toward the car radio.

“What would you like me to do?” he replied. “Stick my head under the dashboard?”

What I had wanted to convey was how important that voice had become to me; how Gzowski’s daily conversations with anglophone Canada provided sustenance for the journey as I rattled from town to town in a company car, flogging books for the same publisher that has just published Elizabeth Hay’s third novel, Late Nights on Air. Radio talk makes people and ideas and possibilities seem within plausible reach, the way a highway map makes long distances look easy. Radio is a comforting medium for travellers, and people in remote places. It holds the listener close.

Elizabeth Hay’s professional experience in radio informs her latest novel, whose central characters work in a small CBC radio station in Yellowknife. Gwen, the rookie, has driven 3,000 miles solo just to see the North; the “unreasonably beautiful” Dido ravishes every listener with her voice; evasive Eddy, the technician, is “the kind of guy who could be running guns for Angola or writing odes to his mistress.” Live-wire Teresa broadcasts the news in Dogrib, while calm and clever Eleanor reads Milton between phone calls, keeping an eye on Ralph, the “tobacco-stained bibliophile.” And then there is Harry, acting station manager, an “honest shambles of a man” for whom radio is an outpost of civility, “more flexible, more forward-thinking, far cheaper than television, and a natural home for northerners.” It is the summer of 1975, and Justice Thomas Berger is in town, conducting hearings for the Mackenzie pipeline inquiry. The Great Listener, Gwen calls him during one magical broadcast when he calls her late-night show and agrees to go on air.

In this novel, sympathy is the reigning emotion of radio, that intimate medium through which speaker and listener converge in the illusion of a shared space. Harry plays opera at midnight for the hairdresser who keeps turning up at the station, pleading for classical music. Gwen learns how to cross “the wide desert of late-night radio” unafraid, imagining Justice Berger “listening as sympathetically to her as he listened to the witnesses in small settlements who were speaking for the first time into a microphone.” Things are less peaceful outside the sound booth, given office politics, rivalries, foolish love and dark eros, not to mention Berger’s sad catalogue of northern ills. Readers who know Hay’s earlier novels will find familiar the melancholic traits evident here—along with her adroit arrangement of personalities who rub against one another with their neediness, self-doubt and mixed motives.

In one passage Gwen is taught how to edit tape, making undetectable cuts in a manner so favourable to the speaker that it feels “like kindness and a form of magic.” This echoes an observation made in “The Snow Line,” a short piece from Hay’s first published collection of narratives: “Edits are perfect sheddings—a breath from one sentence is joined to a word in another sentence, the cut is indecipherable, nothing is missed.” This would do nicely as a description of Hay’s skill with dialogue: economical, punchy and lucid, it rarely sounds tampered with, as if broadcast straight to air. From the vantage point of the present book, “The Snow Line” has proved to be an early sketch whose details—a canoe dragged across ice, temper flaring in an unremitting wind, an orange pip on a rock, a sound like a banging door—are elaborated on the wide canvas of Late Nights on Air. For that matter, a cluster of preoccupations recurs throughout Hay’s fiction: northern exploration, sexual ambivalence, influential fathers, restlessness and its shadow, loneliness. Running throughout is a fascination with polarity: south and north, heat and cold, fur and snow. In Harry’s mind, a wildlife preserve takes on “the shape … of a garden”; for Gwen, “the North [is] the tropics made simple and cool.”

Also striking is the degree to which friendship and the pleasures of likemindedness are serious and meticulously rendered subjects in Hay’s fiction. In Hay’s Garbo Laughs an obsession with old movies is her characters’ premise for companionship. Similarly, in Late Nights on Air an archival radio drama becomes a test of compatibility. Only Gwen, Eleanor, Harry and Ralph—“old-fashioned, colonized Canadians” in Dido’s European estimation—are inspired by the story of John Hornby, an English-born adventurer who perished in the Barren Lands in 1927. Hay’s little band is attracted to the idea of spartan adventure, sensing the ancient potential for spiritual refreshment by dint of physical ordeal. But they are also moved by a fable of forgiveness, the extraordinary grace shown by Hornby’s two companions while they starved to death on account of his mistake. And so begins an 800-kilometre canoe journey from the east arm of Great Slave Lake, following a traditional aboriginal route into caribou migratory lands, then paddling north on the Thelon River to the site of Hornby’s grave. Along with their salami, chocolate, flour and lard, they bring more soulful nourishment: Hornby’s biography, Farley Mowat’s Tundra, a bible, William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, and botany and Shakespeare, both known by heart.

The Thelon River journey is a stunning set piece, with one peculiar tic: the overuse of explicit foreshadowing that intrudes on the fine tension of Hay’s prose. Her sensory evocation of land, water, scent and sound is perfectly convincing, as is the physical and emotional rhythm— “the pain of portaging and the bliss of lying in the evening sun”—captured in her account of events. The journey answers a question that Hay posed in “New Orleans,” the second piece in Crossing the Snow Line: “I also wondered about dramatic tension—whether it exists in Yellowknife, and if so what produces it. It would have to be a tension between less and less rather than more and more.” In Late Nights on Air, Ralph’s musing on the Celtic belief in “‘thin places’ where we’re closer to the unseen world” seems apposite. Hay’s characters are chastened not only by the vastness of the North, but also by its fragility—which mirrors, of course, their own. But the thin places they encounter also involve, as in Hay’s earlier fiction, a painful nexus between desire and self-examination. For Eleanor, an optimistic sensuality stirs even as she reads the biographies of ascetics; meanwhile, Gwen ponders the “utter loneliness and tenderness” of “the physical side of life.” Although loneliness is unresolved in this novel, Hay’s insights into tenderness prevent the effect from becoming unbearably bleak.