Rebecca Campbell, The Paradise Engine

Rebecca Campbell's debut novel, The Paradise Engine, is all about missed opportunities, misperceptions, misconceptions, and outright mistakes. This conveniently lines up with my own missed opportunity and/or mistake, because as it happens, this debut novel appeared in 2013 from NeWest Press (from their Nunatak First Fiction Series). Once again, I'm unaccountably late to the party, and this was a party I really wish I'd attended all along. Overall I found it a deliberately mystifying and therefore delightfully satisfying novel, even if I'm disappointed that I don't get to read all the other novels that its pages imply might also exist.

The Paradise Engine is a deeply West Coast novel, jumping back and forth between two timelines: one organized around Liam Manley in the 1920s and 1930s, a tenor who'd been wounded in the Great War and ekes out the rest of his life singing with increasingly small-time vaudeville-like troupes, and the other organized around Anthea, a 2000s grad student who has somehow been assigned the job of interpreting a small archival collection in which Manley plays a small role. Each of them separately bumps mostly unknowing into occult circles, which means that their lives reverberate slightly with each other, but only slightly.

Fiction with parallel timelines will often take you to a relatively obvious overlap, to a degree that I'll invariably find disappointing. I'm therefore always worried about that when I read a novel like The Paradise Engine, but Campbell does really well to sustain that possibility of recursive overlap (a possibility which, I grudgingly confess, provides a lot of novels with genuine narrative energy), while refusing to be obvious about it, and in the end declining to help you understand whatever overlaps there may or may not be. As I say, it's a novel of misperceptions and missed opportunities, and that's an experience that its readers should share with its characters.

For example, the majority of the book presents one Mrs. Kilgour (Liam's patron, and the source of the archive Anthea's working on) as a terrible singer. Her voice and her coal-mining money and her fake baronial manor Craiglockhart Castle--basically Craigdarroch, in our world: it's all gauche, provincial, embarrassing, and we know the type, don't we? We readers have taste, so we know whose side to be on, and Mrs. Kilgour is ... well, until a 2000s singer late in the book says that maybe Mrs. Kilgour was a visionary. (This is, in the near term, because of chicanery with the recordings, chicanery that's known only to a very few people in the 1920s timeline and possibly by no one in the 2000s timeline.) But what, you may ask, does that say about all our assumptions so far, about our own sense of taste, about the characters and our feelings about them?

Exactly. The Paradise Engine makes you keep questioning and recalibrating your perspectives and assumptions, thus making it an impressively active reading experience. That's a tricky thing to accomplish, so full marks to Rebecca Campbell for pulling that off, along with everything else readers have appreciated about this novel!

My one complaint about the novel is a purely personal one, which is simply that Duncan doesn't seem to be on Vancouver Island. There's water to the east of Duncan, or "Duncan's Crossing" in the novel, so that's accurate to Vancouver Island ("reality"), but the big city that Liam arrives in by train is two hours south of there, making it Victoria, which is of course a ferry trip away from Vancouver. But that's just realism, so it's a bourgeois complaint (I think I'm using that term correctly: I avoid all such terms). As I've said many times, this area is my whole world, so I'm always keen to see it in fictional form, even if I then quibble with its fictionalizing.

Campbell has kept live a really useful post about the book, including its back-cover blurb, over at her Where Is Here? site. Among other things, she offers a few hints about things that her editor or publisher helped her to cut, but that she'd thought of as part of the book's deeper fabric. At heart, in her view, it's about people living their lives just off the edges of a Lovecraftian, theosophical canvas depicting the eternal struggle between good and evil. Meaning flits into and out of the material world presented within the book's adjacent frame, in that sense, from this larger non-material conflict whose effects influence the novel's main characters mostly without their knowledge.

Worlds within worlds, as it were.

As Campbell puts it, "Like most of us, my characters are just trying to figure out what’s going on in front of them, and the larger context of their lives & experience remains outside their grasp." When I said in the first paragraph, above, that I regret not being able to read a whole suite of related novels, this is what I'm talking about. The characters and events of The Paradise Engine clearly occur in relation to all kinds of other characters and events, with their own arcs and relations and meanings, so as happy as I am with this one novel, at heart I want into that whole universe.

I'm going to leave out a great deal that's worth saying about this book, because time and energy and and and. If you want to know more about the novel's details, let me point you to some people who wrote about it at the time:

• Laura Frey (who's fortunate enough to have done a short Q&A with Campbell), who wrote this: "If you like stories with a clear resolution, this book may frustrate you. This one’s all about the build up, with multiple perspectives weaving in and out and around each other and almost converging. That’s not a criticism; it’s what makes the book brilliant. The Paradise Engine takes place in a world with two possibilities: either everything in life is a coincidence, or nothing is. And both possibilities are terrifying."
• Rebecca Quist at The Rusty Toque, who wrote this: "[F]or readers with a stomach for uncertainty and an appetite for beautiful, provocative writing the book is amply rewarding. Campbell’s prose is insightful and illuminated by wonderfully fine detail. The novel’s narrative voices focus with neurotic fretfulness on small but oddly compelling points."
• Kerry Riley, offering the most detailed review at Kerry on CanLit, who wrote this: "Campbell’s greatest triumph in this story is, however, her manipulation of atmosphere.  The past is omnipresent in this work, pervasive, and intrusive, the decaying substrata upon which a thin veneer of the present operates.  The past haunts the present rather than informing it, and the sense of invisible, observant, probably malign forces, often invoked through smell, is very convincingly achieved."

This is my third read of a Rebecca Campbell novel, all of them well worth my time and yours, the first two being The Talosite and Arboreality. I'm excited to be teaching her third, Arboreality, with a number of my environmental humanities colleagues at UVic as our inaugural book of the year, and though I don't think I can drag much from The Paradise Engine into those conversations, I'll see what I can do!