by Andrew Wedderburn
Coach House Press
2021/$21.95/272 pp.
The Crash Palace reads like a greatest hits album of Alberta in the 2000s. Although the novel is short, Andrew Wedderburn takes us on a long journey across the province, from rough work camps in the oil patch to gleaming office towers in corporate Calgary. We visit Edmonton dive bars, get immersed in Rocky Mountain party culture and travel along miles and miles of windblown prairie highway.
Wedderburn introduces a fresh take on these familiar tracks through his distinctive protagonist, Audrey Cole, a 20-year-old from Canmore who loves to drive. She goes to work in Fort McMurray to save up for a car, a 1996 Mitsubishi Lancer which she will use to win rally races. Her plans break down after a few weeks of working in the patch driving crews of roughnecks to and from drilling sites. She quits her job, meets a band of aging wannabe rock stars on the side of a highway, and ends up becoming their chauffeur instead—leading her to the mythical venue of the title, “A huge, incomprehensible building, alone on the lakeside, nowhere near anything, like a turn-of-the-century Canadian Pacific hotel that had wandered off and gotten lost in the distant wilderness.”
The novel ping-pongs between past (2005) and present (2009), as Audrey lives a formative six months at the Crash Palace and then visits the abandoned structure again four years later. As such, the book flip-flops genres between a scrappy coming-of-age story and a reflective drama (it’s easy to forget that older Audrey is only 24, since the present-day storyline feels more like a mid-life-crisis tale). Frustratingly, only one of these storylines gets a resolution.
Similarly, most of the characters apart from Audrey are drawn in brushstrokes a little too broad to leave much of an impression. This makes it hard to care about the fates of any of the secondary characters, but it also effectively produces a feeling of alienation shared by our protagonist. Throughout the novel, Audrey moves through male-dominated spaces, observing masculine peacocking and anger and self-destructive pride from a deliberate, self-imposed distance.
Despite these bumps, the novel generally provides a satisfying ride, and especially comes alive in its conjuring of small, meaningful details: an unexpected orange kitten offering companionship in a storm, a Pinocchio pinball machine becoming a point of fixation and refuge in a tense environment. Its greatest success is its carefully rendered, fully realized protagonist, and though the ending was somewhat abrupt and ambiguous, I would happily read another 250 pages about Audrey Cole’s adventures driving across Alberta.
Bruce Cinnamon is the author of The Melting Queen.
