Still

Neil Querengesser taught in the Department of English, University of Calgary, Alberta.

Still is the winner of the fifth International 3-Day Novel-Writing Contest. The author of the martyrology has proven himself to be an accomplished novelist, although Still is in many ways a poetic tour de force.

Four words from its text best describe this unusual novel: “a perfect still life.” No explicit action takes place within the pages of Still; instead, the entire novel is based upon counterpoised dialogue and description. The focal point of the descriptive chapters is an old farmhouse situated in the middle of a highly stylized and symbolic landscape, which stretches to the mountains on one side and to the sea on the other. The lawn in front of the house, the brick-lined path which leads to the river which leads to the sea, and the various other elements of the landscape are described from several different perspectives, as nichol reinforces these images in the reader’s mind. Similarly, the unpeopled rooms of the house are presented in meticulous detail, until a complete picture of the house is made visible, from the upstairs balcony to the empty, dirt-floored basement.

Set within these vivid descriptions are passages of dialogue, the voices of a couple attempting a reconciliation of their relationship. Throughout the novel, there are no explicit connections between the voices and the descriptions, so the reader is forced to create human speakers for the voices and to locate them somewhere within the farmhouse. It is the deliberate separation of the human and the non-human elements and the natural inclination to connect the two which make this such a compelling and haunting novel.