IDAHO WINTER
By Tony Burgess
Tony Burgess is one of Canadian fiction's most distinctive
voices, with a penchant for pushing envelopes and going to uncomfortable
extremes. It's a reputation that Idaho Winter will do nothing to change,
being a short novel about a short novel that goes off the rails when its
eponymous hero decides to overthrow the tyrannical author that has been
tormenting him.
The setting is Burgess' usual stomping ground of semi-rural
hicktown Ontario. The grim opening pages introduce us to "poor pathetic
Idaho Winter," a young boy living a life that is a grotesque parody of
poverty and squalor (he even eats maggoty roadkill for breakfast). From such
dismal beginnings things remarkably proceed to go downhill, as we see the
townspeople - possessed of the instinctual cruelty and homicidal fury that
Burgess sees as being an essential part of the human condition - going after
poor Idaho with everything but torches and pitchforks.
A third of the way through the book, however, Idaho is
introduced to the author (who becomes the book's first-person narrator), and
realizes that he (Idaho) can write his own story. This the young Frankenstein
proceeds to do, composing a mash-up of dinosaurs, old movies, and the rock band
Green Day while disappearing from the text himself. All of which leaves the
author to navigate a surreal landscape, "exposed to the violence of the
narrative" and trying to fix his own creation while serving up a stream of
metafictional asides addressed to the reader.
Idaho Winter is Burgess's third book to be published in less
than a year (the others were Ravenna
Gets and People
Live Still at Cashtown Corners), and gives the impression of having been
written in haste. It's full of the upsetting and extreme imagery we've come to
expect, but none of the poetry. The conceit behind it isn't that original, and
is incapable of resolution even with the assistance of an Editor who drops in to
let us know that the book "does not have the resources required to solve
its own problems" (surely a foreseeable system failure). What we're left
with reads like a dream diary haunted by a whole suite of conventional authorial
anxieties. As such it provides an interesting snapshot of where Burgess' head is
at, but still feels like one of his slighter efforts.
Notes:
Review first published in Quill & Quire, May 2011.
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