Humphreys

When I was in Canada a couple of years ago, I was on the hunt for Canadian writers – but with the proviso that I wanted them to be writing about Canada. On the plane on the way home, I read one of my new purchases: Helen Humphreys’ brilliant memoir about her late brother, Nocturne. But I wasn’t particularly interested in reading her best-known novels, as they were set in the UK, and that wouldn’t quite scratch my Canadophile itch.

Thankfully, Debra very kindly stepped up! She posted Rabbit Foot Bill (2020) across the ocean to me – a novel by Humphreys that is firmly placed in Canada. Saskatchewan, to be precise.

The novel opens in 1947. The narrator is 12-year-old Leonard Flint – a misfit in his community, bullied at school and without any friends. Except for one: Rabbit Foot Bill.

The reasons why people don’t like my being friends with Bill are these: first, because he is a man and I am a twelve-year-old boy; and second, because he is a man who is not like other men. He doesn’t talk much. He doesn’t live in a house. He doesn’t have a real job. He doesn’t have a family. People say he’s slow, but as I’ve already said, I have to run to keep up with him.

Rabbit Foot Bill has his nickname from one of his ways of earning money: he kills and cleans rabbits, then sells their feet for good luck. Leonard has amassed six of them from his friend, for free. There is a real friendship between the two of them, though it is unusual – more a sympathy of souls than anything based on conversation or even shared activities. Somehow, proximity between them is enough. There is no suggestion of anything sordid. They simply enliven each other, in a calm, undemonstrative way.

This all changes one day when there is a shocking, sudden murder. And there ends the first section.

We fast forward to 1959 and Leonard is now a young doctor, starting working at a psychiatric hospital. Many of the patients have lived there for decades, and some have even been born in this place. One of the staff estimates that half of the patients (who are more or less inmates) have no real mental health problems, but have become so conditioned by their surroundings that they would struggle to survive outside of the hospital anyway. Leonard’s job is to help the men get work and get used to the outside world, as well as monitoring them from a medical perspective.

And who should one of the patients be, but… Rabbit Foot Bill. Leonard is shocked, but perhaps the reader isn’t. They stumble back towards a form of friendship. Bill doesn’t seem to remember much of his life before penitentiary, which has clearly been torture, often literally. Leonard doesn’t quite know how to relate to this man who is his patient but was also a sort of silent mentor. Humphreys does this beautifully. She is so good at the strange nuances of their relationship, often deeply moving even when you aren’t exactly sure why.

I think there are moments when the human soul is visible, and what I was seeing when I looked over the side of the bed at Bill curled up on the floor, was a glimpse of his soul. And what is a soul? Something between the inherent nature of an individual, and their desires – a tangible truth and a reaching, all bound up together. Like the movement of the rabbit in flight, how it runs so fast that its feet don’t touch the ground.

You can see that Leonard is not your stereotypical doctor. And, indeed, he struggles in his role. There is little guidance and he is left to his own devices – and his own devices repeatedly take him back to Rabbit Foot Bill. It means that he scarcely gets to know the other patients, and he feels like an inconvenience whenever he does approach them. Humphreys is very good at conveying the feeling of being useless and unsure in a workplace, which perhaps many of us have experienced in different workplaces. She is great at uncertainty in general.

Uncertainty develops more and more, particularly as Leonard revisits the unhappiness of his childhood. There is no rug-pulled-out-from-under-our-feet moment – simply the gradual unravelling of a complex life, without the chance of firm conclusions. It’s all written in spare prose that felt tonally very different from Nocturne, and initially I wasn’t sure what I thought of it – but it wasn’t long until I was totally captivated. Humphreys doesn’t put a foot wrong in character, tone or style.

There are a couple of sub-plots I haven’t mentioned – one is Leonard’s affair with his boss’s wife (the unforgivably named Agatha Christiansen); the other, more substantial, is experiments with LSD as an attempt to cure patients. The doctors dose themselves to a lesser amount, in the name of science, and this was an interesting element of the novel – Humphreys does the near-impossible of narrating a drug trip without becoming tedious – though I’m not sure it entirely cohered with the main story.

What makes Rabbit Foot Bill succeed so well is Humphreys’ control of voice and the restraint she shows in almost everything – it’s a subtle novel, even with its shocking moments, and she keeps steady reins on everything she includes. It will stay with me, and I’d love to know if any other of her novels are set in Canada. I’d snap them up.

One of the authors I’d been advised to look out for in Canada was Helen Humphreys. I did find a few of her novels, but they were almost all set in England, and I’d much rather read a Canadian writer writing about Canada. So I decided to buy some of her non-fiction instead – Nocturne (2013) from ABC Book Store in Toronto, which looked a little unpromising from the outside but had an amazing stock inside. The book itself is beautiful – a lovely covered, and deckled edges. It is just under 200 pages, and something rather special.

The subtitle tells you what the book is going to be about – ‘on the life and death of my brother’. I’m not going to write a very long review, but I do want to communicated what a wonderfully written book Nocturne is – both as a tribute to a brother and best friend, and as an examination of love and loss that perfectly combines the poetic and the grounded.

Fairly late in the book, Humphreys shares the short obituary she wrote for her brother, Martin – saying she never chose words more carefully. And it is evident from the writing in Nocturne that choosing words carefully is at the core of her being. I’m quoting the obituary first because it really tells you who Martin was, and what happened to him:

Brilliant, talented, passionate and compassionate, kind, handsome, disciplined, elusive, and stubborn, Martin loved music, art, new places and experiences, his friends, the West Coast, connecting with life in all its forms, having a beer, and watching the Maple Leafs (even this season). He hated cruelty, intolerance, stupidity, and Toronto winters.

He died too soon, from pancreatic cancer, and is deeply missed by his parents, Frances and Anthony; his sisters, Helen and Cathy; his many friends in Vancouver, Toronto, England, and Paris. We are lost without his beautiful spirit.

Through Nocturne, Humphreys moves between present and various pasts. She tells us about Martin’s life and his illness – the talent he had for music from an early age, and his triumphs and limits as a composer. His friendships, and his movements around the world, and his flawed relationships. And then his diagnosis and the cruelties of cancer. And, winding through it all, the grief and shock of losing your brother and closest ally. I think what I found most moving in Nocturne is the portrait of how you can know someone deeply and still not know everything about them. How you can live in different parts of the world and be deeply close, and be in the same room and not know how to communicate. But what comes across most is the great depths of love Humphreys has for her brother. Not enough fiction and non-fiction talks about this bond between siblings, and Humphreys honours it so beautifully.

And, my goodness, this woman can write. I’m keener than ever to read her fiction, particularly the one or two that are set in Canada. I noted this down on p.8, but there are so many examples of the same exceptional, reflective writing:

I come to the cemetery in a kind of ad hoc fashion. Sometimes I pick up a coffee and drink it out there, standing with my back to your gravestone. I like how the sun warms the stone and how the stone keeps the heat a little way into the evening, keeps it longer than the air. It’s strange, but when you died and the heat started leaking from your body, it left you at exactly the pace that a stone cools after being in the sun all day. It makes me think that we are made of the natural world after all, attached to it more securely than I had realized.

I am often drawn to books about grief – perhaps because they are the purest way of describing love. Nocturne is up there among the best I’ve read.