Humphreys

When I was in Canada, one of the books I was looking out for was Wild Dogs (2004) by Helen Humphreys. I believe she has only written two novels set in contemporary Canada, and that was precisely the sort of novel I was on the hunt for. Having really admired her memoir Nocturne and novel Rabbit Foot Bill, I was keen to complete a trio. Even better, the copy I found in the basement of a bookshop in Inglewood, Calgary, was signed! I got to reading it pretty quickly, drawn in by these excellent opening paragraphs:

The wild dogs roam the summer fields just outside of town. Their eyes flash, bright stars in the woods at night and they weave like fire through the dry grass towards the edge of the city, looking for something to kill and eat.

Love is like those wild dogs. If it hunts you down, it will not let you go. And what you can never know from the beginning is how hard or how long you’ll love something; how even when it has gone the love you felt will still chase you down, loping like dark flame through your blood.

The wild dogs are real. They are out there, beyond the safety of the streets and houses, beyond the lights of the city. And one of those wild dogs is mine.

Alice’s dog is one of several in the neighbourhood who has turned wild, with surprising rapidity. Every night, she and five other people congregate at the edge of the forest, trying to call their dogs home. They proffer toys, food, affection – and every night, they are rejected. Or perhaps they don’t even see the dogs in the distance.

It is a brilliantly arresting image for a novel to open with, and apparently based loosely on a real event. It also gives Humphreys a ready-made community of unlikely companions, which is an excellent way to organise an intriguing novel. There is a man called Malcolm who lives with his mother – perhaps. A teenager, Jamie, who avoids home because of an angry stepfather. Lily, in her 20s, who has suffered brain damage. Walter, an older man whose Jack Russell terrier has somehow joined the pack of larger dogs. And there is the person that the narrator addresses as ‘you’, with whom (as we learn in a narrative that gently plays outside of time) Alice has had a love affair. That is, it happens after the events being narrated, and has ended by the time the narrator is looking back.

Another dimension to the novel: most of these dogs have not escaped. In almost every case, there is someone who has deliberately taken the dog to the forest’s edge and let it loose – whether as punishment, or because they don’t want a dog near their baby, or they don’t think the owner is capable of having a dog. In Alice’s case, it is her boyfriend who abandoned her dog there – from a mix of anger of hopelessness. Somehow, this is not the immediate death knell to their relationship – though it comes pretty soon. And so the book charts the bonding of these disparate people, their shared and yet separate hopes, and the evolution of Alice’s affections for the mysterious ‘you’.

I think it’s a very clever arrangement for a novel. The only bit that felt heavy-handedly ‘novelistic’ was when they take turns walking the usual dog-walk routes of each dog – supposedly to feel closer to the dogs, but really a slightly clumsy way of taking the six to different places together. And I wondered quite where the novel could go, formally – and I was surprised when Alice’s narrative ended. And, instead, we turn to Jamie’s perspective, about halfway through the novel. It gives Humphreys an opportunity to write a really moving, sharp, uncomfortable account of what it’s like to live with somebody violent. Somebody unpredictable, and yet somebody you have to desperately try to predict.

It’s fifteen steps from the back door to the fridge. If I pull the fridge door back against the hinge, it will open without a sound. The bread wrapper will crinkle. Yogurt makes that suction scoop when you pull the foil top off. The cheese drawer sticks on its runners. Peanut butter will be all right. I can twist the plastic cap off slowly and it won’t make any noise. I can stand here at the fridge and shove my fingers into the jar instead of risking the rustle of the cutlery drawer.

It’s not the final shift in narrator – and, as well as various members of our six, we spend time with another character who is involved in the novel’s shocking, and yet somehow inevitable, twist.

In another Humphreys book I bought and read in Canada – And A Dog Called Fig,her memoir of writing and dogs – she writes about the genesis of Wild Dogs:

When I was thinking up my next novel, Wild Dogs, I decided to structure it after the way that a dog turns and turns before settling to sleep. I wanted the story to turn like that, to circle back on itself and then continue before coming to rest. The novel is about dogs, or rather it is about our relationship with dogs, about wildness and domesticity and belonging.

I don’t think I would have ever have guessed that was the origin, but I can definitely see what she means. When the perspective shifts, it doesn’t go back to the beginning of the story – but it does take a few steps back. And it does come to a sort of rest – though I must warn sensitive readers that not all the dogs in the novel survive.

In those opening paragraphs that struck me so much, I did have some qualms that the metaphors would be too strident and the comparison between human relationships and wild dogs a little too pointed. Thankfully, that wasn’t the case. Humphreys is a subtle writer for the most part, and manages to swerve anything too heavy-handed. And yet it is, as she says, a novel about wildness and domesticity and belonging. It also does that very hard thing: taking a striking opening scenario, and making the rest of the novel equally compelling. The energy doesn’t fizzle out, but it becomes something more immersive, more telling. Yes, even this cat person loved it.

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.