George Fetherling, Jericho

Sometimes I have to remind myself that George Bowering and George Fetherling are different, in much the same way that sometimes Billy Joel and Elton John combine at times in my memory: little in common beyond accidents of alphabet and artistry (loosely speaking), but somehow that's enough for my small brain.

I'm not sure that I've read Fetherling's fiction before; I've read some of his poetry, but not as much as his Wikipedia page ("one of the most prolific figures in Canadian letters") implies that I should have. To be honest, I don't know that I have an opinion about that, even though professionally it's the kind of thing I should be able to conjure up.

In any case, I'm still mulling over his second novel, Jericho, which came out in 2005. It's not at all what I expected, but it makes sense that there'd be misdirection as well as stylistic prickliness enough to leave me uncertain whether in my doubts to blame myself (he's a poet! What do I know?) or to blame Fetherling (I read a lot, after all).

Jericho is the story of three ill-fitting fellow travellers who come together in Vancouver, not one of whom really understands the bonds between them, and who mostly don't understand themselves or each other, either. There's Beth, a transplant from Alberta: mostly a normal person, except that she has accidentally stumbled into a career as a mortician's assistant. There's Theresa, a social worker and lesbian from Vancouver Island with Dutch parents: determinedly idiosyncratic in how she uses language. And there's Bishop, who'd like to think of himself as uncategorizable: creating himself through story and scheme, compelled to maintain and renew his self-creation. Theresa has a crush on Beth, and hates Bishop; Beth and Bishop are briefly an item, but off-stage so to speak, and not for long nor for clear reasons; Bishop admires Beth but doesn't know what to do about it, and hates Theresa.

After a certain amount of chaos, fumbling, and wandering in Vancouver, the three of them end up in a stolen vehicle leaving town. They're heading for Jericho, from the book's title, which turns out not to be Jericho Beach but a crumbling version of the biblical Jericho which stands inexplicably in the BC Interior (turn west at Williams Lake, then turn north at some point before Bella Coola, maybe around Chilanko Forks). The place was Bishop's dream, for some reason, and he's spent years building and maintaining it, but we never really learn why that is.

Things all goes to hell there, in the end, and the book rumbles to a close with arrests and court proceedings and "where are they now" sections. At the last minute, there's an ironic twist (not realized by the characters) that their grandfathers knew each other ... and that blood was spilled, unforgivably but seemingly forgotten. Something about how the details of history fade? How story doesn't survive after all?

It's not for me, Jericho, but it'll work for some readers. Alan Twigg wasn't entirely convinced, but he found it a very funny novel (though I didn't), and John Burns appreciated how very Vancouver it was (true), and it was reviewed well enough to get a clutch of blurbs both positive and reasonable. Certainly it's a detailed portrait of Vancouver at the turn of the 21st century, or at least of particular characters who might be not unrepresentative of Vancouverites of the time.