David Slaney escapes from prison in Nova Scotia (where he was incarcerated for drug smuggling) and makes his way across Canada to reconnect with Brian Hearn, his childhood friend and partner-in-crime who had escaped imprisonment, to embark on another adventure to smuggle tons of marijuana by boat from Columbia. Slaney realizes the mistakes he and Hearn made and is convinced that this time will be different: “This time they would do it right. He could feel luck like an animal presence, feral and watchful. He would have to coax it into the open.”

Moore excels at description. She has the ability to choose small but precise details which have strong sensory appeal. For example, a few sentences can appeal to all five senses: “Carter was below deck frying the fish he’d caught that afternoon. They could smell the onions. Slaney heard the suntan lotion. She had suntan lotion that squirted and spat from a brown plastic bottle that was warm to the touch and the cream came out in a warm squiggle and oil seeped away from the cream on the palm of her hand. “ At other times the details create mood and develop characters. For instance, Slaney chances to talk to a bride just before her wedding: “The heat of the bride’s hotel room was muddling Slaney. A bewilderment of heat and heady scent and the weird material she was wearing that must be made of some reconstituted petroleum product. It had a shine that seeped and crept like a living thing over the ultra-white folds and wrinkles. . . . She twisted a little travelling alarm clock so it faced her. I got a full hour of freedom left, she said. Then she folded the clock under the lid of the little black case to which it was attached and clicked it shut. . . . I’m afraid I’m going to tear [the fabric], he said. Is [the zipper] not moving at all? she asked. It’s still stuck, he said. . . . That’s a loop, she said, for you to hang [the wedding dress] up in the back of the closet where you leave it for the rest of your life until maybe your own poor daughter grows up and makes the mistake of looking sideways at a man during the wrong time of the month. . . . She had raised one arm and she was poking the ribbon under with her finger and there was a faint shadow where she had shaved under her arm. Tiny black dots, like a sprinkle of pepper. Her underarm looked naked and grey-white next to the impossible white of the dress and it was secret-looking. . . . The next morning Slaney could hear the bride and groom through the wall. The rhythm of their conversation had a stilted formality . . . forlorn and stoic.” The stifling atmosphere and the many details leave no mystery as to the type of marriage that awaits this woman.

David is a likeable protagonist. Despite his criminality, he seems like a decent person. When describing the crime for which he was given a prison sentence, he says, “I never hurt a soul.” He is kind; when staying in a bedsit, he buys cigarettes each morning for the old woman who lives across the hall and gives her a present before he leaves. He is unfailingly polite; when he meets Lefevre, an investor in the second drug-smuggling scheme, David calls him “sir” at least five times. “He didn’t make judgements: ugly, fat, short, stupid, sick. He saw dignity, for lack of a better word.” He sees “glimpses of dignity in everyone.” The reader cannot help but hope that, against all odds, he will not be caught and subjected to more years of “the deepest kind of solitude and sorrow and boredom.”

Slaney is not perfect, however. He is a keen observer; he notices the minutest details, but he doesn’t always analyze what he sees. He notices that Hearn’s girlfriend has a new investor “backed into the leaves of a banana tree” and has “her hand pressed flat against [his] chest, as if to keep him from getting away” and keeps him “pinned with her hand,” yet Dave doesn’t stop to think what her gestures signify about her thoughts about this man. His other flaw is his trust in other people. He claims, “Trust was just another form of laziness and he would not give in to it. He would do what Hearn told him to do for now because he had no choice. But he would not call it trust.” Then, however, he contradicts himself: “Slaney had to believe there was a connection between people. He had to believe trust was pure too. It was worth fighting for. He trusted Hearn. . . . Trust lit up on its own sometimes without cause, and there was no way to extinguish that kind of trust.” Even though he is warned that Hearn may not be trustworthy, he continues to trust him. Even when he discovers Hearn kept some things from him, he still trusts him; it’s as if Slaney is modelling himself after his mother whose trust “was a magnetic force field.” Only towards the end does he feel himself “dropping from trust to doubt.”

One of the major themes is obviously that of trust. Slaney takes pride in having “a capacity for trust. He thought of trust . . . as his special skill. His strength,” although he admits that his trust, like “a vestigial organ, near his liver, swollen, threatening to burst, . . . [might] poison him.” On the other hand, Patterson, the policeman in charge of pursuing Slaney, sees trust as “predicated on a flimsy belief system. Trust was an unwillingness to think things through. It was a collapse in the ability to reason, an intoxicating sentimentality. The ornate work of giving in.”

Another theme is that of freedom. “Prison had introduced [Slaney] to the notion of a consequence for every action, and he understood that freedom was the opposite of all that.” Slaney does experience freedom; he describes the exhilaration of being out on the open water in a speeding boat: “What he felt was freedom. It was more potent than he had ever imagined or remembered while he was in jail.” But when he feels freedom “running in his blood . . . [a] part of him,” he realizes he must also be careful: “But freedom required a constant watch.” In his travels across Canada, Slaney meets people, many of whom are caught in metaphorical prisons such as unsatisfying jobs and unhappy marriages, and it becomes obvious that he is under almost constant surveillance. In the end, he ponders whether it is possible to be free: “What he had felt as freedom had not been freedom at all. The wind and the water and the stars. None of that. He had not been free. Slaney had always been caught. He had never escaped. He’d just been on a long chain.”

This book was shortlisted for the 2013 Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and rightfully so.

Note: I received a copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley.

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