Facing The Future
A book review
The future ain’t what it used to be.
Yogi Berra, the late great quipster of pithy witticisms, could have added The Future ain’t what it was cracked up to be either.
Catherine Leroux novel, translated from her 2020 L’avenir which achieved widespread fame and acclaim this year when it was named CBC Books’ Canada Reads winner, certainly came with promise. Despite its dystopian plot and premise, and having read a few other novels recently that made me want to turn on the news for cheery relief from their grim fictional outcomes, I could not resist diving headlong into The Future.
It’s based in Detroit, across the border from my hometown of Windsor, Ontario. It was published by Biblioasis, an award-winning brand in my city whose collection of titles is first-rate.
And the setup is irresistible: an alternate history of the Motor City where Fort Détroit was never surrendered by the U.S. in the 1783 Treaty of Paris and remained a Canadian territory. That’s as it should be — at least from the perspective of geography. (Windsorites like to remind people, especially Americans, that Detroit is actually north of us. Remember the Journey song “Don’t Stop Believin’?” When Steve Perry sang of the city boy “born and raised in South Detroit” he was talking about a dude from Windsor.)
Leroux’s narrative does make you face The Future with all the anticipation and satisfaction of a work of great literary fiction. At least for the first 96 pages.
The main character, Gloria, is looking for answers following the horrific death of her daughter Judith and wants to find her granddaughters Cassandra and Mathilda who have disappeared.
Leroux skillfully draws you into her small universe of characters and their circumstances: From the opening sentence, Gloria is shocked by the hit-and-run death of a neighbour shortly after moving to her new street and she befriends the victim’s daughter Eunice. We also meet Solomon, a wonderfully wrought character whose wisdom and knowledge of history and how it shaped Fort Détroit brings perspective.
He is also a seer into the future, a former jazz pianist and someone who’s literally well-grounded: he grows crops.
Here is one passage where he reads Gloria’s fortunes:
“Next Solomon’s hand stops above the Moon card. ‘The Moon is a Major Arcana. That means it’s powerful, defining a whole period. In this case, it’s about the present. About instability, isolation. Emotions have taken over. What we see is an illusion, and whatever we don’t see is vast. The Moon tells us to follow our instincts and find ourselves again.’”
And again:
“‘The Ten of Cups is a great card to end with. It shows a positive force in the future, a collective force. The feeling of being at home with others and with one’s self. This is all good. Very good.’”
Even a mouse that Gloria finds in Judith’s home draws you into the story.
And Leroux’s description of Fort Détroit, even in translation, is well done.
“At that time, the porch looked over a row of decrepit yet still-standing buildings. Abandoned, burnt, they have since collapsed, and the earth is busy grinding down their remains.”
The reader then comes to the proverbial fork in the road of The Future and, to use another Yogism, takes it.
Beginning on page 99, Leroux ditches Gloria and her quest for her grandchildren and answers about what happened to her daughter. She introduces the reader to a new collection of characters and setting in the woods of Parc Rouge.
It’s a large and motley group of children, with their own unique way of speaking, and animals. The shift in plot and setting is jarring and Leroux doesn’t reintroduce Gloria until page 179. Meanwhile, the reader tries to sift through the likes of this new disparate cast of young characters with strange names like Lego, Adidas, Wolfpup, Pretty and Tick-Tock. They blend into each other and the reader has trouble deciphering who’s who.
It’s a dangerous gambit for an author and I was tempted to give up on The Future.
The narrative does pick up again when Gloria returns and we learn about what happened to her daughter and granddaughters and get re-acquainted with Eunice and Solomon.
But then I stumbled on some odd passages. Perhaps, they were lost in translation from the French by Susan Ourio, but a few pages clanged with clunky phrases. Such as:
“The ground is an unstable place, especially with summer’s approach when heat causes the red of the river to rise and the camp turns into a wasp’s nest where blows rain down and teeth bite out of the blue.”
And this one on the next page:
“…on Riviere Detroit, cargo boats disappearing down the elbows of a river as leaden as a dead snake, as deep as the tomb of a cyclops.”
I also picked up on what appears to be an obsession with feet and food in some of Leroux’s writing. For instance, we have this description of Eunice:
“Her foot is bothering her. Lately, her diabetes has turned into an unpredictable matter: elusive mercury. One day, she feels light and could dance the Charleston; the next, she feels as if the ground has turned to dough. Eunice has learned to judge the state of her condition by averaging out her days. All in all, she manages to stay on course; even today, with her feet in marshmallow filling, she fares all right handling a rosary of plates that are dirtied as fast as she can clean them.”
If marshmallow filling wasn’t bad enough, Eunice steps into another food source in this passage where Leroux mixes metaphors and the tired cliché of a ball and chain:
“Thunder booms at the gates of the city as she starts up Avenue Leblond; the wind brings a chill. She tries to hurry, but something is slowing her down — confusion, a lack of closure, a weight she’s dragging behind her like a ball and chain; it’s as though her feet are mired in a too-thick soup.”
I’m not sure if these lapses are evident in Leroux’s original French version of L’avenir but they appear comically irrelevant on the English page.
There is certainly promise in The Future and lots to love about this book. After reading other apocalyptic novels including a couple of fellow Canadian novelists such as Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, and fellow Montrealer Saleema Nawaz’s Songs for the End of the World, Leroux seemed to carve out her own distinct dystopia in a future that feels like today.
This is no Cormac McCarthy’s The Road end-of-the-world novel. Bronwyn Averett points out:
“Leroux brings believability, poetry, and hopefulness to the dystopian narrative of Fort Détroit by steering clear of the many pitfalls of end-times novels, which include overdramatic collapses, real-life characters put into speculative, fictional roles, and often a general preachiness.”
The author does an admirable job of infusing hope into her narrative by creating a world where rebirth is possible and houses rise phoenix-like from the ashes.
“This place isn’t made for disappearing, it’s a place for resurrection,” Solomon’s friend Ulysses says at one point.
But a reader shouldn’t feel like he has to die to get to that place!
Claudio D'Andrea 2024
Claudio D’Andrea has been writing and editing for newspapers, magazines and online publications for more than 30 years. Visit him at claudiodandrea.ca or read his stuff on LinkedIn and Medium.com and follow him on Twitter (now X).
