Credit: Diane Nathercott

Chasing A Tale

Poet Patrick Lane’s fictional debut

On the eve of his book launch here in Victoria, Patrick Lane will find out if his novel, Red Dog, Red Dog, made the leap from the long to the shortlist for the Giller Prize. But while the acclaimed Victoria poet is flattered by the acknowledgment for the $50,000 literary prize, he’s not holding his breath.

“There’s a long step between a longlist and a shortlist, but being on the longlist is great,” he says of the nod. “There’s a long month before the official award is given. That’s definitely going down a road I’ve been down before and I don’t like thinking about it. I’ve sat at those tables and generated a smile as they mention somebody else’s name.”

A quick look at Lane’s literary CV shows this is indeed true; he’s taken home a Governor General’s Award and a Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, but he’s been passed over for both on several occasions. Regardless of whether or not he takes home the Giller, Red Dog, Red Dog is a big achievement for Lane; it is, after all, the first novel he’s penned, 42 years after his debut poetry collection, Letters from the Savage Mind, was published.

“Well, I thought it was about time; I’m almost 70. Surely, a guy can write at least one novel in his life,” Lane jokes. It was after his 2004 memoir, There is a Season, that he decided to tackle a novel—and not for the first time. “I’d started two or three novels in my life that I’d never finished for a variety of reasons, things to do with my various addictions at the time and distractions. So when I finished the memoir, I sat down and said, ‘Now I’ll write a novel and then I’ll write a play and I’ll have covered all the genres in literature.’ My thought was when this novel was finished, I’d go write a play, but now I’m starting another novel.”

The novel, set in the Okanagan Valley in the 1950s, tells the story of a fragmented family: father Elmer, a violent alcoholic; mother Lillian, an eccentric, withdrawn woman; sons Eddy and Tom, the former a reckless drug addict forever changed by a stint in juvenile detention, the latter a lost boy trying to piece together his family’s life. For Lane, who grew up in Vernon, the story was his take on the old adage of “write what you know.”

“People usually think that means you write about something you personally, physically experienced. That isn’t true. To write about what you know, you write about everything you’ve read and done and everything you’ve experienced and everything everyone else has experienced,” he says—hence the decision to set it where he grew up. “The locale, the animals, the plants, the desert country of the Okanagan has always had a deep and profound effect upon my life. No matter what I write, even when I write a poem, I connect with the objects and the places and the themes of that place. That seems to be a kind of wellspring of knowledge for me, so it seemed like a natural place to put it.”

The time, says Lane, also seemed a natural fit, not just because it was when he was the same age as Tom and Eddy, but because it’s an era oft-overlooked in Canada’s literary landscape.

“We all think of the 1950s as this dead, conservative time like Father Knows Best on television. We don’t really talk about it at all, or the characters that inhabited it,” he says. “It was actually not a modest, conservative, happy place; it was desperate, it was violent, it was a frightening world to grow up in because there was this façade of safety and conservativism and behind this façade was another world entirely.”

Red Dog lets us into that world, which was inhabited by drugs, suicide, murder, love, depression and desperation. But while Lane does paint a picture of a very specific time and place, he’s also careful to enforce that this story is universal.

“The themes that I talk about in the novel, the experiences that people go through, are not unique to that period,” says Lane. “We see them all the time: the violence that takes place, the brutality, the desperate need for acceptance and the desire to discover who you are inside of a family—which is Tom’s dream, to understand who he is and where he is and why he’s there in that profoundly dysfunctional world. What kid doesn’t ask these questions?”

Another thing that strikes about Red Dog is its density (“It’s not an escape novel, let’s put it that way,” quips Lane). It might only clock in at under 350 pages, but the thickness of the language makes it a book you have to savour—and one definitely written by a poet. Lane says the experience of switching formats has given him a lot more respect for the longer form.

“I always used to tease novelists because they always groaned and suffered so much. Now I have nothing but the deepest respect for them, because it’s a hard slog,” he says, noting that while his memoir took him two years to write, Red Dog took him more than four. “I went through 19 different versions before I settled on the one that’s in the book and many of them were spent just working with the individual sentences, trying to get it right.”

If Lane’s first-ever novel is getting a Giller nod before it’s even officially released, I’d venture a guess that the hard work has paid off, regardless of whether or not his name is called at that gala dinner.

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Patrick Lane
7:30pm Wednesday, October 8
Alix Goolden Hall, 907 Pandora
Tickets $5 • 250-382-2464