Hard Target

R.G. Moyles is a professor of English at the University of Alberta,
co-author of Imperial Dreams and Colonial Realities: British Views of
Canada, 1880-1914, and co-editor of The Collected Works of E.J. Pratt.

“O, what a tangled web we weave. . . .” You know the rest. And you
probably know as well the truth of the maxim. But never, I suspect, have
you seen the web of deception spun with such hilarious results as in
this outrageously funny novel. Set in Newfoundland amid the frenzy of
the off-shore oil explorations (and the onshore speculation resulting
from them), it features an unlikely group of bunglers—an undercover
security man from Houston, a cia agent posing as a fundamentalist
preacher, several thwarted-though-ambitious rcmp officers, a left-wing
Roman Catholic priest, a Japanese sea-captain, and many ill-assorted
though typical Newfoundlanders. For various opposing reasons, these
characters are nearly all after one thing: an important secret document
inadvertently sent through the mail to the residents of the Hard Shore.
Naturally, and unnaturally, they all come together. The consequences are
as bizarre and ludicrous as any found in a Tom Sharpe story—utterly
confusing and superbly funny.

Beahan (possibly a pseudonym) knows the oil business, knows
Newfoundlanders, and darn well knows how to write. The humor here ranges
from the burlesque (in which the contents of a Newfie pot of stew are
dumped on the antihero) to the gently satirical (when it lampoons the
efforts of frustrated mounted police), but it is rarely caustic and
never scatalogical. The plot is magnificently complicated and
ingeniously resolved. This is a novel well worth reading, though one
hopes (a faint hope, of course) that none of it is based on reality.