by JULIET WATERS

The opening chapter of Eden Robinson’s second novel, Blood Sports, is full of promise and doom. Reading Tom Bauer’s letter to his baby daughter, Mel, it’s impossible not to root for him and Mel’s ex-junkie mother, Paulie. Tom describes the hospital birth surrounded by nervous staff, their first days as parents armed with a “six-pack of supplement” and the struggle of staying sober: “... it takes time to realize how deep the hooks go. You never believe how hard they’ve sunk in until you try pulling them out.”

Fans of Robinson’s will know Tom already as a character from a novella in Traplines, the short story collection that put her on the literary map in Canada and elsewhere. Full of sociopaths, addicts, narcissists and their emotional victims, Traplines’ mixture of social realism and gothic storylines made it a New York Times notable book for 1996. Robinson’s first novel, Monkey Beach, drew on her experience growing up on the Haisla Nation Kitamaat Reserve, 500 miles north of Vancouver. Blood Sports, however, returns her fiction to the mean streets of East Vancouver and deeper into the story of Tom and his dealer/pimp cousin, Jeremy.

At the heart of Blood Sports is a mystery set in 1998, a few years after Traplines came out. On a surface level, it’s the mystery of what information Jeremy has on Tom that compels his loyalty, and what information Tom has on Jeremy that would explain why he’s been kidnapped by sadistic thugs who believe, inexplicably, that Jeremy might care enough about Tom to give them money. On a deeper level, it’s the mystery of family and its power to save or destroy.

The son of an alcoholic mother addicted to gambling, Tom has all the weaknesses and strengths of someone who’s had to fend for himself. What draws the reader to him initially, however, isn’t his character but his voice. His gallows street humour, his tenderness towards his child and her mother, his cynicism about promises that he recognizes as “sugar-covered shit” mixed with his obvious desperation to love and be loved is a powerful introduction.

Sadly, his voice is soon cut off by the kind of generic narrator more appropriate for an efficient thriller. Some readers may find themselves swept up by the battle of East Vancouver sociopaths over Tom’s mind and body. Those more compelled by the subtler themes, the battle to survive as a parent when you’ve never really known one, the risks involved in loving someone whose character is wildly unpredictable, is more likely to find the pulp fiction storyline a little numbing.

There’s a lot of magic in this novel, details, scenes and dialogue that will lure readers back to the story just at the point when they’ve lost faith. And there are a lot of tricks that might work fine for Robinson when she gets some kind of grant to turn this into a screenplay, but in a novel they’re more obvious as tricks. Stories told through a stash of videos, a dizzying array of flashbacks. And then there’s the torture. The physical torture of Tom, the torture of not knowing what’s going to happen to him, Paulie and the baby, and the torture of not being sure whether we’re really going to care by the time it all winds up. Ultimately, sticking with this story feels more like an act of will than love.

But what is love without commitment? The problems in this book stem mostly from the confusion around what kind of writer Robinson wants to be. Hopefully she’ll have that figured out by the time she gets to the sequel. Tom’s letter to Mel is written in 1998. He tells her not to read it until she’s 18. Do the math and it’s a good guess we’ll be reading about a much more contemporary version of East Van not too long from now.

Blood Sports by Eden Robinson,
McClelland & Stewart, hc, 280pp, $32.99