Date: November 27, 2006
Source: The Edmonton Journal




Cole fascinated by earnest man as tragic figure

By Richard Helm


EDMONTON - Deep in the sands of time, Trevor Cole and I once crossed paths as competing Canadian TV writers in the heart of Hollywood, the two of us wandering a bit starry-eyed through one of those glitzy network publicity junkets.

Cole fondly recalls getting 15 minutes alone with Nastassja Kinski; I remember testing the springs of Ally McBeal's bed on the set of her hit series.

Cole got past the Cat People thing and now writes books for a living. I got past the wacky bulimic thing and now read books for a living. In a way I should hate him, I suppose, but that's hard to do, given the funny and profound novels he keeps producing.

Cole and I chatted over breakfast at the Hotel Macdonald last week on the very same morning the winners of the Governor General's literary awards were announced in Ottawa and Montreal. Cole had made the GG shortlist with his second novel, The Fearsome Particles (McClelland & Stewart, 342 pages, $32.99), but was supremely indifferent to the just-released list of winners clutched in my hand. He already knew he hadn't won, having spent an agonizing day willing his home phone to ring a couple of weeks back when the fortunate few were notified of their coming laurels.

"It's a cliche, but it's true that I was delighted to just be on the list because it means the book is less likely to be forgotten," Cole said, struggling manfully to make the best of things. "Although I have to admit that because I had already had the lovely experience, I was hoping a little more urgently this time that I would win."

Cole's first novel, Norman Bray in the Performance of His Life, also made the Governor General's shortlist in 2004, losing out to A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews. This year, his sophomore novel was an also-ran to The Law of Dreams by Peter Behrens. I confess I haven't read Behrens's book yet but I have read Cole's and it's a small wonder.

Like this year's Giller Prize winner, Vincent Lam's Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures, The Fearsome Particles is one of those novels that is difficult to put down once you start -- an easy, elegant read that just races to the finish.

In cinematic terms, it's possible to see a little of American Beauty and Ordinary People reflected in the pages of The Fearsome Particles and its delicate, pitch-perfect depiction of an average family slowly coming unglued. The central character, Gerald Woodlore, is a window-screen executive, plagued by a floundering company, a failing marriage and sneak attacks by the neighbour's psychopathic cat. Vicki, Gerald's wife of 21 years, is losing focus on her own rather ridiculous profession -- she's one of those "stagers" who devote themselves to furnishing and decorating houses for luxury realtors. And Kyle, their 20-year-old son, is just back from a civilian gig in Afghanistan that's left him shell-shocked with an "infection of anguish" triggered by some horrendous experience there. All the fearsome particles fly about, spreading chaos in the buttoned-down life of the Woodlore clan, and Gerald the control freak encounters something monumentally beyond his control.

The 46-year-old Cole, who describes himself as "buttoned-down and anal," knows this territory well. With his impeccably trimmed goatee, his black leather jacket over a black T-shirt, he looks a bit like British actor Alan Rickman and, in fact, claims some theatrical bloodlines. His father Bill was an actor (and the model for Norman Bray); his grandmother was one of Canada's first TV talk show hosts.

He's been a full-time journalist for nearly a quarter of a century, including some early days writing radio ad spots, and a long run with the Globe and Mail's magazine division. After he quit the Globe in 2000 to write freelance and devote himself more to his fiction career, he helped make ends meet with a fortnightly satirical column for Canadian Business which managed to irritate countless of Canada's business leaders. Nowadays, he writes sporadically for Toronto Life and Report on Business magazine, picking assignments that seem likely to supply grist for his novels.

The Fearsome Particles may be the first novel to deal with the Canadian experience in Afghanistan. Cole had originally set that action in Bosnia, after spending two weeks there on a magazine assignment in 2003, but moved the setting to Afghanistan after that military theatre took centre stage for Canadian troops. His deft eye for the rather obscure details of real estate "stagers" is drawn from another assignment that saw him following around a Toronto woman who charges $50,000 a month for the service of filling vacant houses with her own antiques. "She was a rather supercilious woman," Cole confided, perhaps stating the obvious.

Cole also comes by the terrors of fading parental control honestly, as he's raising a 13-year-old daughter with his wife, Krista Foss, back in Hamilton.

After two acclaimed books -- Norman Bray was also a finalist for the prestigious IMPAC Dublin award -- Cole isn't certain where he'll go with his third novel.

"I'm fascinated by what I call the earnest man as a central figure, believing in something in the face of tall odds," he said. "I think there's something inherently tragic about somebody trying to hold onto a belief -- tragic and noble."