STEP CLOSER by Tessa McWatt (HarperCollins), 340 pages, $32.99 cloth. Rating: NNNN
Normally, my eyes roll when an author creates a character who’s trying to write a story. Is there a more tediously self-referential literary strategy?
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But Tessa McWatt deploys it in Step Closer in a way that totally works. Galvanized by the 2004 tsunami, Canadian expat Emily, now living in Spain with her virologist boyfriend, tries through writing to understand what happened five years earlier to her then roommate Marcus.
Emily’s discovery unfolds like a mystery, alternating with episodes in her present-day life. As she describes the strange tensions between Marcus and Gavin, his schoolmate in Scotland who suddenly appears on her doorstep, things get weird between her and her boyfriend. What’s going on?
Our desire to find out makes this a powerful page-turner. It helps, too, that McWatt’s prose is pristine and demonstrates a fierce intelligence. Sections describing the action of viruses seem like diversions until their connection to the narrative emerges. A PETA demonstration against the running of the bulls in Pamplona packs a political punch.
McWatt’s sense of place is impressive. Small Spanish villages come to life when Marcus’s spiritual trek on the Camino de Santiago is described with geographical precision.
The distressed and traumatized characters are the novel’s key assets.
You get so interested in what could have happened at that Scottish private school that you don’t even mind when Emily says things like, “But back to Marcus and Gavin.”
susanc@nowtoronto.com
