THE MANY REVENGES OF KIP FLYNN by Sean Dixon (Coach House), 221 pages, $22.95 paper. Rating: NNN. Dixon launches The Many Revenges Of Kip Flynn at the Boat on Wednesday (May 11). See listing Rating: NNN
Sean Dixon loses hold of the narrative but not his vision in his strange and entertaining novel The Many Revenges Of Kip Flynn.
Kip lives in a small illegal apartment in Kensington Market with her über-radical friend Nancy and another tenant they almost never see. The area is under siege by venal developers who are tearing down buildings one by one, sending Nancy into a fury and radicalizing Kip.
While Kip and her boyfriend, Mani, are breaking into the house of one of the villainous builders, Mani is killed. In the aftermath of the shooting, Kip can’t seem to shake Pat, the big, bad developer’s son, who’s drawn to her for reasons he can’t fathom and starts following her all over the Market.
To get away from him, Kip runs away to live on the street but re-emerges when she sees Mani’s ghost, only to discover that her apartment’s gone, her father’s dead, and Pat’s having a powerful crisis of conscience.
Dixon creates some great characters, especially Kip, who uses her entrepreneurial instincts in fascinating ways poor little rich boy Pat and big-hearted Chinese gangster Joseph. He does, however, come perilously close to demonizing obsessed politico Nancy, as if radicals were almost as much of problem for the city as profit-seeking developers.
And when the novel takes a hallucinatory turn as Kip plans the ultimate spectacle in the massive pit of a construction site, the narrative goes off the rails. Dixon makes this apocalyptic event his climax, rather than keeping the focus on the personal revelations that really drive the story – a mistake, I think.
But in this weird novel full of dreams and ghosts, Toronto is very vivid, from the Market to Koreatown to the Junction and back downtown to the bank towers.
Flawed, but big fun.
