Northern Comfort

Nicholas Pashley was a bookseller and a freelance writer and editor in Toronto.

A week after Frank Miller’s becoming leader of the Ontario Conservatives, Oberon Press ran an advertisement for Martin Avery’s Northern Comfort, with the teaser, “Inside Miller’s Muskoka!” Avery’s Muskoka, one feels, is a long way from Miller’s. The Muskoka portrayed in this set of three stories and one novella is the birthplace of Norman Bethune, now the home of the Nuclear Police, a new-wave band led by Buddy Useless and the Kelly Twins, Petra and Karin (we should presumably not regard as coincidence that the West German Green Party activist’s name is Petra Karin Kelly). Buddy winds up behind the Iron Curtain while the Kellys become anti-nuke terrorists. This is clearly not Frank Miller’s Muskoka.

Martin Avery’s small-town Ontario is a zany, off-beat place the author attempts to endow with a larger-than-life quality. His stories steadfastly disdain conventional form and development, but they frequently fail to bring character, story, or setting to life. The writing is lively and the humour often infectious, but there is too much here that doesn’t  work.

The title story, the longest in the collection, deals with a plot to spring a young prisoner from a minimum security prison, although the tale is told in such a rambling fashion that this is not evident for much of the story. If the humour had been more consistently successful, the story would have been a better one. Martin Avery is unquestionably an able writer, but the stories in this, his third collection, lack focus. It is not enough to be off-beat. His refusal to play the traditional game of plot and character in the short story demands better, more creative writing than is on display here.