Late Nights on Air, by Elizabeth Hay
Here is book review #2 in this series of reading from a writer’s perspective. And I need to start it off with an admission: this is going to be at least as much about me as it is about the book — maybe more than usual.
I have never been to the North, although I have worked in radio — which is probably why people have been recommending this book to me for years.
And more than that, I love radio. There is something magic about it, and emotional — faraway people going straight into your ear in a way that feels like what you’re hearing somehow belongs to you and only you. (Ira Glass said it much better: “I think that radio is a machine for empathy and intimacy… and not seeing the person actually makes it more intense. Like you’re on the phone in the dark with someone you love.” From a 2014 interview in Vogue Magazine.)
Also, there is my own experience working in radio, for many years as a volunteer at my university station, and then a little bit at the CBC — although in a very small and part-time way. All those hours in front of a microphone and a mixing board were magic too — even the smell of the acoustic tiles and decaying album covers in dimly lit studios was intoxicating. And I experienced or at least saw many of the same things in the hallways of those radio stations that happen in the book: the disconnect between the complicated physical people and their beautiful voices, the built-in and inescapable technical and time constraints, the fiefdoms and politics (even feuds), the rigid separations between the different roles.
(Note to self: Should we have more books set in radio stations? Radio has all the ingredients of successful literature: strong personalities, and strong emotions, and beauty, and illusion. I’m going to give this more thought.)
And now on to Late Nights on Air — and thank you for your patience.
This novel isn’t just a way to experience the North, or personalities in a radio station, although it is definitely those things too. Elizabeth Hay brings a tonne of research and life experience to the book, and on top of that she is also a masterful writer.
The canoe trip, closer to the end of the book, is an extended polished gem, full of beauty and exquisite observations, as well as echoes of history.
There are also tragedies here, some more low-key and subtle than others, some foreshadowed well in advance and inevitable-feeling, but not all.
And there are complicated characters, mostly people from elsewhere in Canada who have arrived in Yellowknife for their own complicated reasons, including for the Berger Commission, about the possible building of a pipeline. (This ends up being a triumph but in a way is another tragedy — if we knew the true costs of pipelines in the 1970s, why did Kate Beaton have to write (the brilliant) Ducks almost 50 years later?)
And yet I almost didn’t read this book. At least three times I picked it up and started, but on page 2 was so angry at Harry, one of the main characters, that I put it down again. Finally I set the book aside for a while and picked up where I left off — after that scene that upset me so much, and putting it out of my mind — and then finally I felt the way about the characters that I think I was supposed to.
In the end, after I finished the book I went back to the beginning and checked in on all the seeds that Hay had so carefully planted in the first few pages: once I knew what would happen, it was so impressive to see how she had laid so many details in place almost from the start.
As for Harry, he had won me over by the last page, but I was still enraged all over again when I came across that scene at the beginning. Once again I thought that I would never have forgiven him, and I couldn’t see how anyone would want to be friendly with him.
But that was my present self talking.
What about my long-ago radio self? Would the old me have forgiven him? One thing I know for sure, from all these years later: my old radio friends and colleagues forgave bratty clueless me for a lot.
Maybe I could be a little easier on Harry.