Bad Land is taut and tense and accomplished in a vividly-rendered, unforgiving region of hardship
Reviews and recommendations are unbiased and products are independently selected. Postmedia may earn an affiliate commission from purchases made through links on this page.
Bad Land
Corinna Chong | Arsenal Pulp Press
248pp | $24.95
A frequent presence on post-secondary CanLit reading lists since 1975, Robert Kroetsch’s novel Badlands gets a nod as an epigraph in Bad Land, Corinna Chong’s first novel since her debut, Belinda’s Rings, appeared in 2013.
Set primarily in 1913, Badlands tracks the fitful progress of a rafting expedition, where men vie for power and squabble as they hunt for dinosaur bones and fame. In a boozy road trip decades later, two women revisit the area to ponder the dubious accomplishments of these self-mythologizing explorers.
Though panicked and spontaneous journeys are built into the sturdy bones of Bad Land, Martin West’s collection, Cretacea & Other Stories from the Badlands often sprang to mind as I read Chong’s atmospherically charged novel.
West calls Alberta’s Badlands region a “mythic place in the Canadian psyche.” For him, like Chong, it’s a underworld myth — dark, obsessive, outburst-prone; drawn to violence, extremes, dissolution. West’s Badlands are striking though desolate, and the flawed human inhabitants there memorable for vices, bleak outlooks, troubled histories, and unreliable impulse control.
The opening pages of Bad Land survey Drumheller — the Never-Ending Summer of 2016, hills “crisped to kindling,” dormant roots “longing for a few drops of rain,” and characters, in the words of narrator Regina, “hovering on the edge of something none of us could yet name.” It’s remarkably portrayed: a tattered tourist trap with boarded-up shops, a graffitied dinosaur dressed as Batman, and, just off stage, “Ponoka. The mental hospital.”
In a “rotten” neighbourhood Regina, resides in her dingy childhood home, with its unfinished “tomblike” basement, drapes “wafting ancient cigarette smoke,” and contents that seem to rearrange themselves when she’s not looking. Beset by a terrible vision, Regina peers anxiously into her past. When Ricky, Regina’s estranged brother, shows up with Jez, his daughter, the siblings return to exhausted old patterns. Looking back at 2016, Regina understands that she was “determined to go on as if everything were fine.” Looking back, Regina remarks that she and her brother were still their childhood “selves underneath, both of us suspended in our little cubes of ice, unable to see how trapped we really were.”
Soon enough Ricky reveals the cause for his flight from his wife and Arizona. And soon enough, Regina realizes that “troubled” Jez, the focus of her parents’ concerns, needs protecting. As a caregiver, she’s notably ill-equipped.
In that sun-blasted August, Regina abandoned her job of 15 years — “There were essentially three phrases in my workday vocabulary: ‘Welcome to Fossil Lands Discovery Museum’; ‘That comes to’ (followed by total cost); and ‘Thank you, and enjoy your visit’”— and with a pet rabbit and Jez in hand, set off on an adventure.
Its destination? Initially, anywhere but Drumheller.
Marred by mishaps, the trip forward — which ultimately leads to northern B.C., where her singularly awful mother has begun a new life — turns out to be a trip backward too. Miserable childhoods — for Jez, Ricky, and Regina — dominate Regina’s recollections.
The journey eventually involved a smashed skull and smashed windows, as well as memories of other smashed bits. Healing fantasies — of air-clearing confrontation and satisfying closure — don’t quite become reality. Chong might be warily hopeful about personal evolution, but she’s not naive.
Spotting an adult having “some gut instinct of repellence” at Jez’s unusual behaviour, Regina — accustomed to it herself for both her ungainly size and failure to pick up on social cues — sees a younger version of herself that she can perhaps save. Despite setbacks, false starts, and dead ends, Regina breaks free from her stasis. An exhilarating quest that begins as a questionable fool’s errand, Bad Land is taut and tense and accomplished, an adroit tale of redemption in a vividly-rendered, unforgiving region of hardship and rare second chances.
Salt Spring Island resident Brett Josef Grubisic is the author of five novels, including My Two-Faced Luck and The Age of Cities.