Reviewed by Amy Reiswig

The epigraph to Part 1 of Steve Zipp’s novel Yellowknife sets the book’s tone: from Bulgakov, readers will no doubt recognize the masterful line, "Ooow-ow-ooow-owow!" The effect was that this reader laughed, then thought, "wait a sec…did Bulgakov really write that?" And I was hooked (which, given Zipp’s recurring fishing motif, is an appropriate response): hooked by the smart destabilization in that gutsy boiling-down of a literary icon to an animal cry.

Zipp’s deliberate disrupting of expectations is part of his digging through the concept of how absurd it is to have preconceptions at all, when the human and natural worlds are both so full of mystery. Notions of certainty and knowledge are at the core of this novel set in the mining-obsessed northern town of the book’s title. People—both in our world and in Zipp’s fictional one--seem drawn to the north for many different reasons, and with such different predetermined ideas of what they’ll find: natural beauty and purity, easy money, anonymity, peace, spirituality, bugs, a raw lawless pioneer holdover. As a reader who’s never been farther north in Canada than Thunder Bay, I can’t evaluate the reality of his portrayal. And that’s probably for the best, because Zipp doesn’t seem to believe that reality can be encompassed by realism.

It would be impossible to try and summarize the plot of this book. Set in YK just before Y2K, part of the story is about disposing of a missile found in a tree; part is about love and broken love; part is about the corrupting influence of diamond mine speculators; part is about hockey; part is about Franklin’s legacy of getting lost; part is about scientists and the dumb government bureaucrats who stifle them. And there’s a lake monster and some talking animals near the end. Many times I brought my head up out of the pages wondering, "Is this part true?? Who cares! Keep reading…" I felt grabbed and dragged through a bumpy, beautiful reality where, to mix my metaphors, the true and the fabular were equally balanced wings lifting the same tricky raven. How birds fly isn’t usually our first question--we just like to watch them go.

There’s an "anything’s possible in the north" notion that Zipp plays with and which opens the door for the book’s humour, legend, exaggeration, imagination, and boundary-breaking. As the narrator says in the very first line, "the border gave Danny a start." Appropriate that the word for a beginning and for a fright are one and the same. This idea of frightening yet journey-initiating borders—between provinces, people, species, centuries—clearly gave Zipp his creative start for the book too. Whether it’s through physical details (like the church of Our Lady of the Lake Trout, where Mary wears a parka and cradles a purple fish) or through language, Zipp’s not afraid to say, "hell no, I won’t stop here: I want to go to the other side." Guys in grungy cable sweaters in the Border Café talk, as if in tongues, about chrome diopside, pyropes and ilmenites. (Dictionary please!) The reader can feel drowned in the technical mining lingo, but then is given more accessible hard-boiled nuggets: "The coffee tasted as though it had been brewed in a crankcase"; "among Donna’s undies there was a rubber dildo. ‘Well, well,’ he said, ‘a private dick.’" I kept writing "Ha!" in the margins as I read.

But before I could start to worry that the book might rely too much on (admittedly funny) macho-cliché (which it does, occasionally), up sprang sharp sensory details like a bird’s "feet curled up like tiny fists"; the sound of a guy cracking his frozen mitts "like eggshells on the porch railing"; someone admiring the way a tiered tackle box "opened like a tiny stadium."

Characters in the book are at once insightful perceivers and confused seeming "losers." But again, chuck the expectations of what such definitions mean. The recurring motifs that stand as metaphors for our endearingly disoriented human state are mining, fishing, and Franklin’s doomed Arctic mission. These all involve people exploring, getting lost, casting lines into dark into unknown realms…hoping. Which echoes classical epics where the knowledge of the unknown (often the underworld) is essential--not always immediately understandable, not always pleasant, but as much a source of insight into our mystery as one can find anywhere else. Yellowknife’s reference to Archimedes and allusions to the Fisher King myth remind us that meaning is where you see it…and where you usually forget to look.

It’s no surprise, then, that one of Steve Zipp’s other art forms is visual: on his blog you can see pictures of computers he has completely transformed sculpturally. Funny, weird, oddly beautiful at times…his vision of what to do with the things in his path is again one of possibility. Zipp, as mysterious and playful creator in both his chosen art forms (plus his pseudonym), seems to really enjoy taking part in his own statement about the world: "Every being was a chimera. At heart the universe was a mystery".

In 2003, Yellowknife won the H.R (Bill) Percy Prize for best unpublished novel (awarded by the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia).

Amy Reiswig is an editor, freelance writer and recovering college teacher who is coming back to life in Victoria, BC. She has published non-fiction in The Walrus, The Utne Reader and right here in The Danforth Review.