I read this because I'd read a CBC piece that Alan Hawco was going to make this into a TV show. The language was amazing, making it a picture perfect read. I can really see a fast paced show being made out of this great novel.

He hadn’t looked down on her, though she was trying with all her might to smash him to bits. She was looking for the button that would blow him sky high, but she couldn’t get at it.

He once told her he would do it again if he got the chance.

I’m shocked, she’d said.

I see the whole picture, he said. But what he meant was they had not broken him. They could forget about breaking him. He didn’t judge people. That was what he had that they didn’t have.

There’s something I’d like to ask, she said. What makes you believe you wouldn’t get caught again?

Her earnestness nearly broke him. She was so sincere it almost made him doubt. He would have told her he believed and that was all there was to it.

Believing is believing is believing is believing.

There’s no reason to it. It just is, he would have told her that. But they had run out of time.

***

June 14, 1978: a young man from Newfoundland named David Slaney escapes from prison in Nova Scotia. Slaney’s young, about to turn twenty-five, and has just served four years and two days of a prison term as a direct result of the biggest pot bust in Canadian history—two tons and over a million dollars in Colombian weed. He and his accomplice Brian Hearn were busted coming into port. While Slaney went to prison, Hearn jumped bail, changed his name, and began a new life on the west coast.

With the help of a plan concocted by Hearn, Slaney’s sister, and a few assorted ne’er-do-wells, Slaney is making his way across the country, back to Hearn, then back to Colombia for another shot at glory. Because easy money is easy if you don’t cock it up. Along the way he’ll come into contact with more than a couple lost souls willing to give him a lift or show him some sympathy—because criminal or no, Slaney’s got a good heart, that much is clear—and take a short detour to visit his ex, Jennifer, whose life has gone on without him. Meanwhile, dogging Slaney every step of the way is Patterson, a staff sergeant with the Toronto Drug Section who’s hoping Slaney will lead them to Hearn.

Split into five parts, Lisa Moore’s Caught is a bit of an odd beast. It’s at once harrowing and mundane, trapped halfway between popcorn thriller and “literary” novel without ever confidently setting foot in either pool. The setup is great: we’ve got a prison break, investors in Montreal burned by the bust-gone-wrong from four years earlier, and the opportunity to make amends—to take, by force, the life Slaney feels he is owed. However, it’s in the execution of these ideas that Caught is found lacking, suffering a crisis of identity.

The novel works best in short bursts—vignettes—like with Slaney and the bride-to-be, or when he ducks down to Ottawa to visit Jennifer and the new life she’s won for herself. With Jennifer, we’re given a brief but effective glimpse into their shorthand connection developed in childhood. In fact, the quick detour Moore takes into Slaney and Jennifer’s time together as kids, when she busts him for cheating during a softball game, provides us with all we need to understand how and why they worked so well together in the past. It is the most in-depth and effective character work in the entire novel.

Which brings us to the novel’s downfall: that there really isn’t much of interest to the lives of Moore’s characters. We’re given some details here and there as to who they are and why and how they’re involved—like how Hearn’s actions impacted his father, for example—but for the most part the characters are detailed in unemotional strokes designed to differentiate them from one another by their backgrounds and not by how they are portrayed or what they say. The most troublesome for me was actually Patterson, who, according to his character’s past, has a lot to gain if he succeeds in bringing Slaney and the others to justice, yet seems entirely uninterested in the hunt. There’s no apparent drive or emotional core to any of these people—just actions and reactions to situations like they’re walking from point to point on a narrative line that’s already been sketched out for them. For however much Slaney and Jennifer’s connection worked, it’s such a small part of the overall book that it feels like an overburdened fulcrum on which too much emotional weight has been hung.

Beyond the lack of character, Moore’s writing simply never popped for me. It’s propulsive in terms of driving the plot, but it’s just… well, it’s not interesting—it gets the job done without ever really painting the scene. As a study in streamlining narrative construction, it has its merits—the initial reveal of Patterson’s duplicitous role would not have been so effective were it not for the matter-of-fact presentation of the scene—but as a result the novel lacked sensory and emotional appeal. Yes, like my last review, How to Get Along with Women, the decision to remove quotation marks for dialogue plays personally into this reaction; while it was easier to discern what was and what wasn’t dialogue here than in de Mariaffi’s title, I still felt as if I was being dictated to in a stark, monotone voice. This stylistic decision pushed me away from the story instead of drawing me in.

While the novel picks up emotionally in the final part, becoming somewhat stronger as a character piece as it deals with new themes of forgiveness and finding one’s place in the world, it was too little too late to make me feel what I’d hoped to feel for Slaney in the end; the starkness of everything that had come before robbed Caught’s conclusion of any sort of catharsis.

*While the star score reads three, I'd have preferred to give this 2.5 — split right down the middle. I appreciated it for the moments it worked and for the rhythm and flow of the narrative, but feel too much was compromised on the character front, so a 50/50 split.

Well written, although I found that sometimes, the back and forth between characters and story lines difficult to track. And you always knew it wouldn’t work the way they had planned....

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.

Please check out my reader's blog (http://schatjesshelves.blogspot.ca/) and follow me on Twitter (@DCYakabuski).

2013 Giller Prize Shortlist

It took me a minute to get into this, but once I discovered that this is a book that you need to spend some quality time with (not just on the morning commute) I was thoroughly hooked. Could have helped that midway through I attended an event and saw Lisa Moore speak; she's funny!

She did a wonderful job getting you to really root for Slaney and kept you on the edge of your seat for much of the book.

Really enjoyed this one!

I liked this but was disappointed mainly because I loved the CBC series but the book was almost nothing at all like it!

Excellent character development and an easy read I didn't want to put down.

2 Stars

Despite how long it took me to read, I really enjoyed this book. The plot grabbed me at page two and took me for quite an adventure. Lisa Moore is one of my favourite authors because she has a magical way to frame her characters around a sense of empathy from the reader. This book is being produced for TV and I expect it to be a strong fit for that medium. Can't wait.

Read this in advance of the CBC show and it is so good! There's a breezy drift to the narrative that makes it such a pleasurable read but the incredible writing and great characters mean I'll be getting to all her other books. So glad I finally checked it out.