Michael Christie
THE BEGGAR'S GARDEN
By Michael Christie
HarperCollins, 279 pages, $24.99
REVIEWED BY
JIM BARTLEY
Michael Christie opens his story collection with a lonely woman who phones 911 as if ordering emotional pizza. Desperate for connection, Maya works the health-care system with touching ineptness. She'll claim chest pains, then turn suicidal as option two when it looks like they doubt her.
Alternatively, she'll offer treats: "After he checked me out I made him green Kool-Aid in the plastic jug, stirring it with my wooden spoon that's stained green from all the times I've used it." Christie's choices lift the scene from the page. You hear wood wetly thunking against cheap plastic, scent the fake-lime tang of desire. Maya's voice is candid on her girlish romantic obsessions, aptly evasive on the fakery of her methods. Christie burrows into Maya's troubled psyche bit by bit, prepping us for a final integrating scene.
Discard presents the recently widowed father of a family in tatters. Earl secretly leaves gifts of food and clothing in the Vancouver dumpsters frequented by his homeless grandson. The tale feels both cautionary and an unchallengeable thesis that some patterns of behaviour (here patterns of dissolution) are beyond understanding. Tenderly, avoiding both voyeurism and sentiment, Christie unblinkingly follows Earl's decades-long accretion of despair.
With Goodbye Porkpie Hat, we move to ways of fending off despair. Crack sustains Hank, eating up his welfare cheque and requiring impulse thieving. H-bomb scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer performs a whimsical cameo here - a ghostly proxy for Hank's missing cerebral clarity. Christie evokes a world where every locale and event are merely raw input for the surreal reality in Hank's head.
The Queen of Cans and Jars portrays a woman defined by her ambivalent sense of mission in a Vancouver thrift shop. This entry has a purposeful vibe - instructive rather than illuminating - and closes with a weightily symbolic building demolition attended by crowds implausibly within range of flying masonry. Much better is The Extra, unfolding in the ingenuous first-person voice of a young, mentally disabled man cared for by his best friend, both on a welfare treadmill. They luck into some film work as extras and things look up - but Christie is not one to coddle us with easy redemption.
Dog stories run the risk of subordinating human players. In An Ideal Companion, Buddy the wolfhound and his furry pal Jo supply just enough goofy charm, finally emerging as symbols for the sublimated and mismanaged affections of humans. Heavy on exposition and back story, this one ultimately slides home.
Reliable artistry vaults abruptly to flashing brilliance with King Me. Christie's riveting creation of a contemporary Bedlam breathes an authenticity raising echoes of Kesey's Cuckoo's Nest. Without preamble, we're in the mind of patient Saul, eating lunchtime tuna and watching "the stout Assassin feed Georgina - a stunted, moaning woman to whom God had accidentally issued a mollusk instead of a brain."
Saul is smart. Christie makes sure we see this before admitting us to the miasma of delusion that led him to this slow decay among people madder and sadder than he. There is no facile plucking of heartstrings here, either for the disabled or their embattled caregivers. Amid the rages and mop-ups there are crazy-funny turns; you may begin to feel a bit crazed yourself. It's part of the tale's sly magic: linking our own mental glitches and the convolutions of true madness.
Then comes another flash, a small, polished gem of narrative flame: The Quiet, about a tag-team of teenage brothers, parentless, who steal cars in Vancouver. Finch, just 14, is the deputy thief, and he wants out. Half-conscious of his motives, he makes a break for it, purring down a midnight highway in a pristine Benz. He is so deeply, so sweetly touching that I hardly know what else to say.
The book's title story rounds off the collection. A marriage gone wrong precipitates husband Sam's skewed friendship with a down-and-out stranger who shows the way to start over. Christie's prose here is like clear water, transparent yet dense with understanding, never swanning on lyricism when lucidity will do.
Jim Bartley is The Globe and Mail's first-fiction reviewer.
MEET MICHAEL CHRISTIE
The Basics
A former professional skateboarder, has also done outreach work with the homeless and the mentally ill in Vancouver. Resides on Galiano Island, B.C.
The Credentials
Graduate of the University of British Columbia's MFA Creative Writing program.
The Work
Currently a senior writer for Color Magazine, an award-winning skateboarding/art publication.