British Columbia canneries give Alissa York’s new book ‘Far Cry’ a remote backdrop for mysterious characters

“Far Cry,” the dazzling and brilliant new novel from Toronto writer Alissa York, begins in the wake of a death. It’s 1922 and Frank Starratt, the longtime winter watchman at the Far Cry cannery at Rivers Inlet, on British Columbia’s north coast, has been found dead, floating between the dock and his boat.

The circumstances of his death are unclear, but it’s easy to make assumptions: Frank was a heavy drinker, a PTSD-afflicted veteran of the Great War and suffering in the loss of his wife, Bobbie, who ran away with the Chinese camp cook.

Suicide or accident, Frank has left only two people to really mourn him: Kit, his daughter, who was born and raised in the camp, and her Uncle Anders (not a biological relation), the only other year-round resident of Far Cry, who fled Norway as a young man, and drifted across oceans and the continent to wind up behind the counter at the camp store.

From the focal incident of Frank’s death, “Far Cry” unfolds forward and backward in time, building and continuing the story, guided by these two powerful, vividly human characters. Kit takes to a company skiff, joining the fleet for the salmon run, struggling to make a place of her own in Far Cry, under the watchful, lecherous eye of Knox, the cannery manager, whose wife has remained in Vancouver for this season. Anders, meanwhile, attempts to make sense of his own life, his relationships (especially with the vanished Bobbie) and his own place in the world, in a letter for Kit that forms the majority of the novel’s text.

The result is a transfixing, glorious novel.

York has long been one of our most impressive and skilled writers. While her 2007 novel “Effigy” was shortlisted for the Giller Prize and nominated for the IMPAC Dublin award, and she won the Bronwen Wallace Award and the Journey Prize for her short fiction, she has seemed to fly just slightly under the radar of the CanLit mainstream, a situation that “Far Cry” will remedy if there is any justice.

As we have come to expect, in “Far Cry” York writes compellingly of multiple worlds. Her sense of place is absorbing, from the crowded cannery floor and the rickety decks and stairs of the camp to the bioluminescence in a remote cove and the “yards of shithouse drift” polluting the water near the camp. Her descriptions of the workings of the fishery, in particular Kit’s work on her skiff, sing with a verisimilitude that reads like lengthy experience and gives no sense of the voluminous research she has obviously undertaken.

Nowhere are York’s skills more in evidence, however, than in her handling of “Far Cry’s” characters. Anders and Kit are two of the most powerfully drawn characters in recent CanLit memory, their realism coming not from the reader knowing everything about them, but from York’s comfort with the mystery at their hearts. They reveal themselves slowly, naturally, through actions that they themselves are incapable of fully understanding. It’s typical — and correct — to say that characters come to life in a well-written book (and this is certainly the case for Frank and Bobbie), but Anders and Kit are so well-drawn, so complex and layered, it is difficult to think they are merely the stuff of fiction.

Which makes the final 10 pages of the book all the more powerful, a reading experience of aching and rewarding catharsis.

With “Far Cry,” Alissa York has written what is surely one of the finest novels of the year, an astonishing and immersive journey that will leave its readers reeling, and raving to anyone who will listen.

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