sewn paper
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Fiction
Fall 2003
248 pages
ISBN 0-88984-231-0
$19.95
A Game to Play
on the Tracks
Lorna Jackson
A Game to Play on the Tracks is the story of booze-loose
and too-smart singer, Arden, and her failed return to the life of
country music and the British Columbia bar scene. She has a new
baby, some unhealed hurts, and a husband, Nichol, who is stuck in
boyhood and thinks and talks in bad poems. Arden doesn't survive
the road, and the story belongs then to Nichol and Roy the Boy,
those left behind to search the west coast for a good home, a
good life, a meaningful history. Without Arden, Nichol tries a
series of goofed-up love affairs and real estate blunders, and
Roy grows up questioning a fallen pastoral world that isn't
always kind to children, haunted by his long-gone mother and her
big-city tunes.
`Lorna Jackson is a Vancouver Island writer, critic, and teacher. Her most recent book
portrays the short life of Arden, bar singer and recent mother, who moves from gig to gig
in British Columbia's lumber and mining towns, unwilling and/or unable to conquer her drinking problem
and an emotional detachment from her Vancouver-based husband, Nichol.
Arden's world is edgy and gritty, but, in Jackson's words, also fluid with meaning.
``In Vancouver,'' she writes, describing one of Arden's jobs, ``this would be the bar of choice
for stockbrokers. On creosote stilts above high tide, windows and carpets grimy with salt
and algae and body fluids; out there the Johnstone Strait, waters that tag along
with hopeful currents to Japan, Russia; a fleet of fish boats, aluminum like bridge girders
or wooden-hulled, like artifacts.'' Arden's reality is raw and painful, and it leads,
halfway through the novel, to her suicide, leaving Nichol to involve himself
with a series of women, all of whom have some connection with Arden
(whose ghost continues to haunt her husband and son).
The book's conclusion belongs to the boy, Roy, an adolescent struggling to understand
his own realities. Jackson's female characters are all remarkable for their strengths
and weaknesses. They force Nichol to confront himself in different ways,
tasks for which he has little aptitude.' `Arden, raw, witty and dangerous, walks that brittle line between
compassion and dissolution. Her absence, when it comes, permeates those
closest to her like a West Coast chill: to the bone. Five other voices,
in first-person, parable-like chapters, unravel and knit together
Arden's story, which alternates between rough-and-ready New Westminster
and back-to-the-land Vancouver Island. ...
Jackson knows that rich character is the most compelling element in the
contemporary novel, and detail is the stuff from which complexity of
character is woven. From this tangled knot of a family, Jackson knits a
row of characters that would be awkward in the same room together, but
are as comfortable a fit as a favourite winter sweater that smells like
dog in rain." `Jackson is wryly funny and a gymnast of the alphabet, dextrous
with both language and meaning. We're in Lorrie Moore territory.'
`Arden is a musician, boozy, mouthy, a gambler with an eye too sharp and a
voice too shrill. She carries her own equipment, you better believe it, into
and out of motel bars up and down the province, existing on tips and taunts,
drifting further and further off course on white wine and old country songs. ...
`Jackson, a Metchosin writer and former bar singer, has a smart, taut style
that never stops. Reading this book was like eating blue cheese: creamy and salty,
veined with all the big blue themes of sex, death, memory. The density and richness
of the writing are a bit of an acquired taste, and readers may find a little
goes a long way. But persistence pays off: Jackson shifts style with every narrator,
ending with Roy, who melds his mother's acid sadness with a teenager's wistful
innocence. The result is worth savouring.' `Twice in this vivid, pyrotechnic novel, women walk into knitting shops
that are heaped and hung like Aladdin's cave with skeins -- brightly dyed,
flecked, handspun, synthetic. Proprietresses pull patterns from drawers,
dispense yarns and dreams. Lorna Jackson's first novel is like one of those
shops, packed with voice and story, images that catch the skin. ... Jackson's
nine years as a bass player and singer and her day job teaching writing
at the University of Victoria are equally in evidence here. Her prose rolls
and rollicks, smart and smart-alecky, often with a sting in its tail.' `Lorna Jackson's A Game to Play on the Tracks, her follow-up to the acclaimed short
story collection Dressing for Hope, is a country music song come to life. It's a
tale of barroom singers and small-town losers on the coast of British Columbia,
of broken hearts and even more broken dreams. But while the song may sound familiar,
the music certainly isn't. A Game to Play on the Tracks is a fusion of wild and
unpredictable narratives, shifting points of view, crazed characters, and unstable meaning,
as if Jackson's backup band consisted of John Zorn, Tom Waits, and P.J. Harvey.
-- Matt Hartman, Canadian Book Review Annual
- Vivian Moreau, the Globe and Mail
-- Zsu Zsi Gartner, Malahat Review
- Annabel Lyon, Georgia Straight
- Maureen Garvie, Quill & Quire
`The novel follows a series of characters, including Arden, an intellectual
singer stuck in the West Coast bar scene whose tale ends with inevitable
tragedy; her husband, Nichol, who drifts through a series of disastrous
love affairs; and their son, Roy, who meanders through a series of
meaningless experiences. The plot is loose at best, as the narrative
drifts in and out of the characters' lives, following emotional notes
more than story lines. The episodes are layered with subtext, and
there are entire life histories contained in asides. This isn't
the usual Can Lit multi-generational saga of domestic affairs
and quiet insights. A Game to Play on the Tracks is as brutally
violent as it is introspective, as critical of the domestic
life and its enforced passivity as it is of bar louts who want nothing
more than endless reruns of AC/DC hits. Rather than writing the
literary equivalent of a pop song with artificial and meaningless
romances, Jackson has instead embraced the emotion of an improv
jazz session, and crafted a tale of beautiful chaos.'
-- Peter Darbyshire, amazon.ca
`Rich characters also drive Lorna Jackson's new novel, A Game to Play on the Tracks to rather choice literary heights. Arden is a country singer with a poet-husband going nowhere. For survival's sake, she heads back to the B.C. bar scene, Roy the Boy in tow. Wyatt is at her best invoking the reek of cigarettes, stale beer, and forty songs a night. ... Arden "sets the Telecaster's knobs at sex, dampens the strings with the hardening heel of her hand, and thuds a crunchy rhythm. She coats her voice with fossil fuels." But she does not survive the road. Killing off the heroine early in a novel is usually not a good idea. This time, it works.
`The story now belongs to those Arden leaves
behind; her husband, her son. Nichol mismanages his love affairs
while Roy grows up haunted by his dead mother and her songs that
weren't afraid to ride or afraid to die. But the ensuing plot
is only secondary to the richness of Jackson's prose. She's
a gymnast with words and a juggler of phrases. At times the
novelist's language is so evocative, I found myself reading
passages aloud.'
-- Andrew Armitage, the Owen Sound Sun-Times
`I never thought it would happen -- somebody has attempted the
great Canadian C&W novel. Lorna Jackson's first full-length work of
fiction quickly introduces the reader to the doomed Arden, an aging
bar singer, her husband-poet Nichol, and their one child, Roy. The
foibles of these three ostensibly form the purpose of this book's
245 pages, but really the characters are mere vehicles for Jackson's
real concern: the sentence as burn-the-house-down performance. The
initial kick of her prose is explosive. Jackson has a hankering
for short, potent sentences that accumulate a staccato rhythm as
she places them in succession.... Thus this is a prototypically
Metcalfian book; one expects the fiction from the Porcupine's
Quill to excite and never, ever be dull. The prose is part of
an over-arching performance: what is attempted is not reducible
to questions of plot or character. Instead, style has supremacy,
and Jackson's is hard, angular, and kinetic. Her novel is
propelled by largely article- and conjunction-free style; it
hurtles.'
-- Shane Neilson, The Fiddlehead
`Everything connects in this novel, and it merits more than one
reading if you want to pick up all the significant asides, allusions
and nuances. If I have any complaint about A Game to Play on the Tracks,
it's that Lorna Jackson is just too damn smart and quick. But as
The Book of Wonder tells us, ``Quick is an old word which means
living, or moving.' Jackson's writing is alive, and it moves fast.'
-- Carol Matthews, event, Vol 33.3
`A Game To Play On The Tracks by Lorna Jackson begins with Arden, a mother who has some very serious problems with alcohol and self-absorption. Arden's struggle to resume her life of country music at the British Columbia bar scene but is faltering. Her husband has a Peter Pan complex and talks in bad poems. When Arden doesn't survive the road, both her husband and son are left behind to make sense of an often insane and unjust world. An engaging and thoughtful read, A Game To Play On The Tracks is a sophisticated, albeit moody, reflection on the inequalities and distant dreams of one human life.'
-- Midwest Book Review
