Restlessness

Sarah Robertson is the trade, scholarly, and reference editor of the
Canadian Book Review Annual.

Restlessness begins with the arresting statement “I am alone in a room
with the man who has agreed to kill me.” As the venue for her
“planned and chosen oblivion,” the narrator has booked a room at the
Palliser Hotel in Calgary. Its Chicago-style wings allow her to observe
the movements of a fellow hotel guest, a woman whose restlessness
mirrors her own.

Through her work as a globe-trotting courier, the narrator has devoted
her life to travel, which she describes as “an uninhibited
restlessness, a terrible convulsion of some subject searching for a way
to inhabit a moment, to declare having been at some somewhere.”
Unfulfilled in her search, the narrator has resolved to “finish [her]
spate of restless breathing and settle toward earth.”

Her contracted assassin, a Quaker from Winnipeg, is melancholy but
soothing, a good listener who gently probes into the causes of her
malaise. He demurs when she accuses him of trying to talk her out of
their agreement. They dine at a nearby restaurant, take a leisurely
stroll, and head back to the hotel for a nightcap. Their return to the
narrator’s room is preceded by two unexpected encounters—the first
with the narrator’s aunt, the second with the (other) restless female
guest. Whether or not the narrator will be dissuaded from her
self-destructive course is of less consequence than her encounter with
the assassin. Gradually emerging as an anti-Scheherazade, she talks
about the cities she has visited, about love and death, about lovers
past (“unprofessional assassins”) and present (“my dear one”).

Like the film My Dinner with André, this impersonal but oddly
compelling novel is driven by dialogue rather than action (it could be
produced for the stage with minimal effort). Besides acute observations,
it offers crisp, evocative prose and lushly morbid descriptions.
Cerebral and dispassionate, Restlessness thoroughly engages the mind, if
not the heart.