“The Man Game” by Lee Henderson

Henderson’s first novel is a big, bold book. Physically it is large (over 500 pages), but it is large in ambition, too, capacious in its language, and brave in its frankness. Most of the narrative takes place during the early years of Vancouver. It depicts a brawling, violent world, full of crudities and greed. But it is also a city on the verge of becoming civil, even as its residents resent the carpetbagging easterners who show up to sniff out financial opportunities. The city itself, based in logging and on Chinese slave labour, is beset with corruption and bigotry of the most virulent sort. The novel faces those conditions with a directness that is at times shocking. It includes, for instance, a long account of the rounding up and deporting of Chinese residents. The enterprise is unblushingly racist and unabashedly violent, Henderson’s prose depicting events in a convincing and powerful manner.

The violence, though occasioned often by the explosive passions of the frontier men, at times is accidental. One description of the ravages of syphilis would leave no one unhorrified. Nor would the narrative of what happens when one of the characters, Pisk, has frozen his feet: “The heels, ankles, and patches on top were hot pink. The knuckles were a molten shade of red surrounded by the blackened silicated crust.” What follows, the amputation of Pisk’s toes, is even more horrific. With only a few ounces of rum in Pisk, he submits to the operation: “The doctor lopped off the big toe in a swift two-fisted jab with the large chisel, and said: Bring it.” At this point Pisk’s buddy “opened the door to the stove and pulled out the wood-handled iron pick well-reddened like a cigarette, and applied it gingerly to the wound. A noxious cooking smell arose from the hissing flesh and blood. Hold still, said Litz. It really fucking hurts now, said Pisk.” Henderson writes with comparable power across the text, and it would be hard to imagine anyone rendering those scenes more successfully.

The novel opens with a scene that erupts on our awareness, a tour de force account of the great fire of Vancouver, though Henderson handles it in such a dexterous way, withholding virtually all contextual information, that the passage suggests an apocalyptic sci-fi drama and takes some time for readers to realize what they have just read.

The style in The Man Game widely observes what is evident in the above passage—the elimination of quotation marks—with the result that the reader runs headfirst into the dialogue with no forewarning. The effect is appropriate, part of a writing that shoves readers face-first into the tumultuous and high-speed world that Henderson creates and that we must immediately negotiate.

The narrative develops around a character called Molly Erwagen who once was a dancer in Europe and who, when she arrives in rough-and-tumble Vancouver with her recently paralyzed husband, moves undaunted through that world. “Sammy, I love the Canadian spirit. I want to be a Canadian, Sammy. I want to look Canadian, I want the philosophy, the suspicions, the credibility, the voice,” she professes soon after their arrival. The forthright declaration is meant to explain why she throws herself so stalwartly into coaching two dodgy loggers in a game of wrestling, “the man game.” It becomes her purpose, apparently, to coach the ruffians out of their old ways and into a gaming of far greater skill and satisfaction, one that she names as “theatre” and as “sport,” though “the man game” is itself very brutal. Evidently Molly’s experience as a dancer enables her to nudge the rough men into intricate moves. What makes Molly’s role as instigator and mentor in those matches a strain on our credulity is the fact that she herself figures across the book as woman of beauty and grace. Again and again she is softness and flirtation: “her poise was musical and persuasive, her skin a translucent white”; Molly slept “like a pool of cream in bed beside him, rippling in the breeze”; “she tilted her head down so the brim of her straw hat covered her tender blued lids of her eyes as they closed.” The novel construes the loggers as stricken with her beauty and grace, but that alone seems hardly to explain their ready acquiescence to her direction.

The language of the novel is bold and it reaches for newness, often in hyperbolic sallies. Molly at one point recoils from a dog, “seeing that fleas bounced and popped off him like little cannons in all directions.” On other occasions the verbal performance seems to reach too far for the unusual word. When we read a long description of Molly in her hat and pleated skirt, fur-trimmed coat, leather boots and bare legs, the terms are convincing and in keeping with the world the novel creates. She is said to be “a dainty creature made of silk and honey” and wearing “kid gloves whiter than snow on her almond arms, the fragile plumskin of her lips.” Her remarkable green eyes and “the slipperiness of her licorice hair” effectively name her as romantic and erotic. Those eyes are not just “green eyes,” however; they are “visculent green eyes.” If such moments were rare, they perhaps would be no cause for comment, but the novel is given to the misfitted word. Take “vomitous spittle” for example; or “he watched her subsume into the terminality of 1886.” Or what of these entries: “The blackness was bubonic and utter and wet”; “regularly occurring anomalous gymnastic miracles”; “a grey squirrel … ejaculated a vowelful squeak, and ramped the post on a spiralling path.” At times, though the passages are in keeping with the extremity of Henderson’s fictional world, they seem to have been composed with a thesaurus too easily at hand.

The book is daring, too, in its use of a present frame and its incorporation of line drawings. In keeping with such a knowing violation of the continuous text, the novel oscillates between accounts of early Vancouver and reports from contemporary Vancouver, into which “the man game” obtrudes because of a discovery of old tunnels and records that still remain in shabby neglect beneath the streets of the modern city. The drawings come at first with some surprise, as the narrator in what we might call a postmodern move chooses not to explain their presence. In both cases, the novel deliberately disturbs any illusion that we are simply getting an accurate narrative of the past and gives us, instead, a venturesome gallop into the postmodern.

Whatever small reservations we might have about The Man Game, it is a visceral, memorable book, a startling piece of writing, and it marks the start of an auspicious career. ❚

The Man Game, Lee Henderson, Viking Canada, 2008, hardback, 304 pp, $32.00.

Dennis Cooley is a Winnipeg poet. His newest book is correction line.