Blood Sports.
Description
$32.99
ISBN 978-0-7710-7604-5
DDC C813'.54
Author
Publisher
Year
Contributor
Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.
Review
Robinson’s first book was a collection of short stories, Traplines, published in 1996 when she was a student in UBC’s creative writing program. The longest and most realized story in that book, “Contact Sports,” introduced the characters of Tom Bauer and his cousin, Jeremy Rieger. Blood Sports both restates the love-hate dichotomy that helped to define their relationship in the earlier story, and expands it, largely through the introduction of additional characters. Tom now has a wife, Paulie, and a baby daughter, Melody.
Robinson opens her novel with a kind of prologue—a letter from Tom to his daughter. “If you’re not eighteen yet,” he writes, “I want you to put this letter down right now, Okay? There’s a whole bunch of shit you don’t need to deal with until you’re ready.” The shit that happens, or that (by inference) has already happened, takes place in and near the seamy streets of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, the same milieu in which Robinson set the scene in her earlier story. Her writing is gritty and unsparing. There is some sidestepping into time sequences and narrative lines that could have been made more clear. Much, for example, is made of a series of videotapes Jeremy has made of Tom, some of them sadistic, some pornographic, some a combination of both. Robinson hints at the importance of the tapes but their existence does not move the plot as much as introduce a voyeur side of Jeremy and other characters. There are hints of blackmail. There are episodes in the novel that portray torture, but these strengthen and validate the story; nowhere is the violence gratuitous.
Robinson’s first novel, Monkey Beach, was nominated both for a Giller Prize and a Governor General’s Award in 2000. A Haisla woman, she lives in Kitamaat Village in Northern B.C.