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The operating mode of author Kevin Hardcastle’s latest novel, County Road Six, is tension. From the grim prologue to nearly its final pages, there is the feeling that some elemental darkness is drifting through the forest toward the remaining women of the O’Hare family, but also the region itself. Sometimes that tension breaks into otherworldly and apocalyptic destruction or ferocious physical altercation. But even in the wake of the release, the feeling simply begins bubbling up again.
Over the phone from his home in Toronto’s Annex neighbourhood, Hardcastle explains why he was the person to write this book.
“I’ve earned this with blood, you know?” Hardcastle says. “It’s all over the street up there. I lost my parents up there. Essentially our entire family imploded in that place. It took its pound of flesh from us.”
By “up there” he means Midland, Ont., and more broadly the north end of Simcoe County around the Georgian Bay. Hardcastle grew up working class in Midland, born into an anti-monarchy family with roots in Liverpool and Northern Ireland. He’s wise to his hometown’s class discrepancies: “There are people with boats and there are people without boats, you know? Midland is peak cottage country, and has been since I was a young person, and is much crazier now.”
County Road Six takes place in a thinly veiled, fictionalized version of Simcoe County. It focuses on the aforementioned O’Hare sisters – Beth and Mara, in their early 30s, and 18-year-old Emma – after Beth finds their father Arthur’s body in a chicken barn. Mara returns from working out west to their massive property, more than 400 acres and now valued at a staggering amount, to be with her sisters in the aftermath. Arthur’s reputation for unpredictability and viciousness, a disposition exacerbated by terrible loss, follows the sisters: What cycles of vengeance might Arthur have stirred up in the far reaches and seedy parts of the county?
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Thanks to Arthur’s behaviour, the family is well-known for miles. So is the value of their land. But the power and aggression of parties interested in apprehending that land, and how dangerous they may be, is not. Greedy developers certainly want to get at it, but there is a more sinister figure circling as well.
This sets up what may be the primary source of tension in the book – that the past is never really past. It is a sentiment that runs throughout the book, revealing itself in social discrimination against the O’Hare women; relationships between the Ojibwe people and settlers (Beth and Mara’s mother was born on the local First Nation; Emma’s was not); strain between locals, tourists and the rich buying up property; and the history of resource extraction in the area, which has poisoned and destroyed natural ecosystems. The past, in County Road Six, is inescapable.
“It’s always changing, but there are iterations of these towns that have these kinds of things in the blood, this legacy of violence and chaos that are in the bones of the place,” Hardcastle says. “But every single person has a different life there. Every single person has a different version of the town.”
The novel took Hardcastle six or seven years to write, and that process took an unfamiliar shape. As someone used to having an entire story plotted out with guideposts and a destination, his approach to County Road Six – to simply write, and see what happens – was foreign, and sprawling. The much longer story was pared down to its current version, which may explain its sense of epic-in-miniature. Hardcastle deals with those macro-perspective historical themes through the subtleties, and sometimes not-so-subtleties, of the ways his characters interact with one another.
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Those characters are on the edge. They are frayed by their personal histories and the histories of their communities. It is a very short road from the build-up of that tension to destruction wrought upon all the other tense people. The stark reality of a changing climate – “The seasons don’t make sense anymore, the bay doesn’t freeze the way it used to,” Hardcastle says about Midland – boils beneath it all. If this is indeed going on in small towns all over the country, doesn’t something have to give?
Hardcastle’s intimate acquaintance with the backstory of his home region, its characters and its communities informs County Road Six‘s vivid portrait of place. He is an admirer of other writers, such as Waubgeshig Rice and Cherie Dimaline, who work to illuminate the places lingering in the shadows of Canada’s consciousness and reveal something essential about the people who live here. He’s also adamant that so many of the places around Canada that might locate a kinship in the setting of his novel have been ignored in terms of their significance to the country. The tensions that pull taut the threads of County Road Six are ones the nation will have to continue to reckon with.
“I’ve always said, you can know a lot about Canada by its cities, because a lot of people live there,” Hardcastle says. “But if you really want to know it, you’ve got to get to these small towns and see how people are living, what their politics are and what they’re up against. Then you get a real gauge of what’s going on in the country – what’s failing, who’s in need and what will happen if we don’t fix it.”