Having strong Vancouver connections I am always on the lookout for fiction or poetry based around my second city. So when I got an email from Parthian books and noticed that the banner ad was for something called Burrard Inlet by Tyler Keevil, I just had to take a look.
This imposing waterway divides downtown Vancouver from the North Shore; the seabuses plough across it, Lion’s Gate bridge spans it, seaplanes use it as take-off and landing strip, cruise ships like mobile blocks of flats come and go. It runs far inland beyond the city to quiet coves and sleepy towns. The inlet has many moods, from bustling and workaday to festive or melancholic, and they’re echoed here.
Keevil’s short stories have already been garlanded with prizes and praise. The collection was longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize and shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year (Keevil now lives in Wales). Adulatory jacket quotes come from such luminaries as Miriam Toews, Carys Bray and Niall Griffiths. Despite the big build up, the stories don’t disappoint.
With titles such as ‘Snares’, ‘Fishhook’ and ‘Scrap Iron’ we’re firmly in rugged masculine territory, but there’s an intriguing interplay between the manly pursuits described and the antennae-quiveringly alert sensibility of each narrator. Many of the stories balance on the knife-edge of awe and danger familiar to any traveller in BC, where wild natural beauty combines with so many dumb ways to die (and some smart ones too). If what haunts the British imagination is the slow death of creeping bourgeois comfort, its Canadian counterpart is the altogether more intense fear of encountering something seriously nasty in the wilderness.
‘Tokes From the Wild’ sees a city-boy set off for Prince George to go tree-planting with a scant acquaintance, Kurt. Only once he’s up there, treated with suspicion and derision by the locals, the relationship sours and group dynamics begin to bite. Telling details include the rent charged by Kurt’s parents for sleeping in a tent on their lawn. ‘I’m not used to paying to stay at a friend’s house, but Kurt’s not quite my friend, and the fee includes food, so I guess that makes it fair.’
Each fellow tree-planter is vividly realised in just a few phrases. Boss-man Clayton is instantly recognisable: ‘Clayton’s wearing an Oiler’s hat and has a can of Molson in his hand.’ Yes, it’s breakfast time, and he’s driving. But characters have the additional dimension of onion-skin layers, gradually revealed. The unease of the back-country weighing down on someone who has never thought of himself as a city slicker is brilliantly evoked. The narrator makes it back to his home turf: ‘I stretch out in the park at Main and Terminal with the rest of the drug addicts that so terrified Clayton…’, realising that one person’s comfort zone is another’s nightmare.
My standout story here is ‘Carving Through Woods on a Snowy Evening’. Rescue team member Mark is at a Christmas party when the call comes through: ‘We’ve got one up on Seymour. This snowboarder – he has gone missing. We think he was riding out of bounds.’ Minutes later he’s in the helicopter, floating over a deadly winter wonderland. Nowhere is youth, skill and joy so fused with horror and chill death. This is a remarkable collection; Keevil’s also the author of a novel, Fireball, which I’ll embark on in due course.
Burrard Inlet by Tyler Keevil, Parthian £7.99