Crime thriller not novel enough

Page 13

Review

At the Edge of All Things:

In search of Labrador

By Rick Hornung

203 pages, Stoddart

Rick Hornung was a Village Voice columnist who covered the Mohawk uprisings in 1989-90. He was originally commissioned to write a book on Davis Inlet after a Valentine Day's fire claimed the lives of six children there in 1992. He intended to research and document the disputes over mines, fisheries, land rights and NATO bases that had been and were still ripping across Labrador, to detail the conflict between Aboriginal peoples and the Canadian government that left the Innu of Davis Inlet in a hell of poverty and despair.

That was the book Hornung set out to write, but it's not the book he finally produced. During his two years in Labrador, he decided instead to tell the story of Martin Rouleau, a Montagnais-Naskapi smuggler and hunter, who shipped black-market cigarettes and liquor from Montreal to the barren outback of Labrador. Abandoning front-page headlines, he instead focused on the world of gray-legal trade in which many Aboriginals in Labrador were forced to work to survive.

Essentially, the book became a crime thriller. Rouleau and his half-Innu girlfriend Catherine spend half of each year in Montreal, gathering supplies from their Corsican mob contacts, the other half in the forests and on the tundra of Labrador, trading the black-market cigarettes and liquor, until one morning Martin returns from chopping wood to find that unknown attackers have torched his cabin. The two of them flee, trying to elude their assailants and police, while piecing together the reasons for the attack.

It's a great idea. The trials of the first inhabitants of the land, their way of life shattered by government intrusion, come to life in his accounts of shady transactions and small-time swindles.

Living between the cracks, breaking the invisible lines drawn across the map by the white government, is for Martin the only way to fight back. As the reasons for the attack become clearer, though, he slowly realizes that his shadowy trade offers no real freedom, but only shackles him to different masters.

But, while Hornung has a journalist's eye for detail, he unfortunately hasn't picked up the novelist's knack of knowing what to leave out. While it's fascinating to learn the nuts and bolts of cigarette smuggling, he doesn't know when to stop, subscribing to the school of exhaustive realism that dictates including every tiny detail down to the brand name of the hero's snow pants.

It's too bad the book gets mired in sludge like this, and that Hornung has a tin ear when it comes to dialogue, because when it's firing on all cylinders, At the Edge of All Things shows how non-fiction books can be exciting.