In the Place of Last Things

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

Somewhere near the end of Michael Helm’s second novel (his first, The
Projectionist, was published in 1996) a character says: “You might
think I’m just transferring my own needs from one person to another,
but it’s all I can do. So be it. I’m not hurting anyone, am I?”
Russell Littlebury, Helm’s hero, has nursed his born-again father
until his death, and the experience has strengthened his resolve to seek
support only in himself. After his father dies, Russ agrees to help a
friend track down his daughter, who has run away with a con man, and his
search takes him through Canada, the American West, and into Juarez,
Mexico.

In the Place of Last Things is a road novel in the usual sense, but
there is emotional movement as well, as integral to both character and
narrative as the progression through provinces and states.
Littlebury’s world is visceral and immediate, but there is a vein
running through it that is reflective, philosophical. He spends a year
at a small Toronto college teaching literature. He meets Tara Harding, a
co-worker, who threatens his emotional self-sufficiency. “The thought
of being truly alone with her chilled him. He saw himself falling into a
silence, unable to get out on his own.”

Helm’s writing is strong and sure, his descriptions and dialogue
remarkable for a young writer. It gathers strength, page after page,
moving from insight to action and back again as Littlebury engages his
considerable demons. “There flying along the highway,” Helms writes,
“he recovered the orders of memory. From Augustine to neuroscience,
memory was thought to have many forms, but in Russ’s understanding
there was simply the kind of memory people possessed, and the kind that
possessed them. The first held what we liked to think were certainties.
The second, mysteries ….There were mistakes in his life he attributed
now to his not having accounted for the second kind of memory.”

This is a passionate novel, masculine in its certainties, gentler in
its doubts. Highly recommended.