The Fearsome Particles
Description
$32.99
ISBN 0-7710-2260-3
DDC C813'.6
Author
Publisher
Year
Contributor
Ronald Charles Epstein is a Toronto-based freelance writer and published poet.
Review
Trevor Cole’s previous work, Norman Bray in the Performance of His
Life, won nominations for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the
International IMPAC Dublin literary awards.
In The Fearsome Particles, Cole follows the Woodlores, an
upper-middle-class Toronto family who have to deal with various
work-related crises. Gerald, the Chief Operations Officer of Spent
Materials Inc., belatedly discovers that his window-fittings firm is
almost in last place. Wife Vicki, the owner of a company that prepares
luxury houses for prospective buyers, has started to become too
emotionally involved with her craft. Their son, Kyle, a former
water-purification technician under contract to the Canadian Armed
Forces in Afghanistan, is now a haunted compulsive gambler. This change
is attributed to a traumatic “off-camp event.” The reader follows
the interactions of three troubled people who cope with personal
challenges.
Cole resorts to the usual tricks that ground his story in contemporary
Canada. “Rumsfeld” is the name of “the cat that Vicki had taken in
without consultation ... a rogue presence.” Gerald listens to “the
reliable cycle of NEW news and NEW sports and...”—a reference to
CFRB, the Toronto all-news station. But the author is not satisfied with
mere touches of topicality. A significant part of the novel deals with
Kyle’s Afghan adventures. He gives up his Christmas leave in order to
undertake a fateful humanitarian mission. That subplot places Canada’s
overseas mission in our literary imagination.
Cole courageously assumes that his readers are willing to face our
foreign-policy realities. Failure places his book in limbo, along with
other unwanted novels about the post 9/11 world.