Canadian Heighton is already an acclaimed short story writer, and
his first full-length novel is an absorbing meditation on the
romantic soul in the cynical modern world. Sevigne Torrins is a
boxer, a dreamer and wannabe poet, growing up on the edge of icy
Lake Superior. His father is a cook on the massive freighters that
trawl across the landlocked sea. Frustrated in this backwater, Sev
heads for the big city lights in Toronto's bohemian quarter in
search of truth, art and love, only to find that his most desperate
test lies much nearer to home. Heighton invokes obvious robust
forebears - Conrad, Hemingway, Coleridge, as well as Tom Waits and
Bruce Springsteen - but he's also a superb dissecter of the
fringe-literary world, of readings in dark bars by bitter
unpublished novelists and overblown poets. The colourful cast, Ray
the doomed biker who writes rubbish novels, Eddy launching his
high-brow magazine, Una the seductress and Ike the ageing bar-room
singer, are thoroughly likeable, vivid, funny and lost. It's
Heighton's great strength that he can portray this amoral milieu
with the same care and affection as he conjures up the natural
world of the Great Lakes. Unwisely, Heighton interrupts the story
with Sev's own novel in progress. We know that Sev's quest is for a
lost father, and a lost home; his real life, not his imaginary one,
is the fascination here. That's especially true when he retreats
from urban alienation to the naturally inhospitable Rye Island, and
its gripping climax ensures this novel stays the right side of
self-indulgence. (Kirkus UK)
Part poet, part pugilist, Sevigne soon finds himself penning
advertising jingles and hundred word plot summaries of classic
novels instead of writing his own. Attracted and repelled by the
bright lights of literary fame and the vicissitudes of love he
seeks sanctuary from the city's destructive forcefield on an island
in Lake Superior.
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