by Patrick Horner
UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY PRESS
2022/$24.99/136 pp.
If the novel Galápagos by Kurt Vonnegut, the poetry collection Otolith by Emily Nilsen and the ecological travel narrative The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions by David Quammen all raised a child together, that bookchild might grow up to be Calgary author Patrick Horner’s debut, Refugia.
In this epistolary prose-poem novel, two evolutionary biologists are doing fieldwork on a series of unnamed islands somewhere on the BC coast. And it’s a mystery novel! At least, that’s how it initially appears. The book begins with a letter that hints something is amiss with the researchers. The letter’s recipient is one Dr. Moriarty, and if that’s not an allusion to classic mystery stories, I don’t know what is. But the detective genre that seems to be invoked early on is never really revisited. I kept expecting a specific response to the original letter, but maybe that would have been too easy.
The story does take some mysterious and unexpected turns, however. For one thing, throughout the book, the language of scientific research is juxtaposed with ghostly voices and non-empirical phenomena. And the biologists, who have come to study the effects of isolation on the evolution of other species—the refugia theory—find themselves affected by the same isolation.
We are given glimpses into the possible formations of new species and even new landscapes. A felled tree reaches out like an arm, supporting various life-forms even as it dies; a box of books was accidentally capsized and the books “floated like islands, an archipelago stretching out towards the horizon.” Entire islands are “slowly inhaled and exhaled by the sea.” Are these simply imaginative musings? Are they nothing more than personification? Or is this a new species of creation story?
The scientists also seem to be undergoing their own metamorphoses, and although they may not be aware of their own (possibly) changing bodies and habits, they observe these effects in one another. And the biologists are also observed—ironically, because they’re the ones who are supposed to be recording data—by other inhabitants of the islands.
If you’re familiar with the Vonnegut title mentioned above, where people are stranded on an island after a global crisis and slowly evolve into a new species, you might have some idea of what they’re experiencing. But (not that Galápagos is simple) it’s not quite as simple as that. Horner’s book will keep you guessing, and after a few reads you just might start to notice something. Have you solved the puzzle? Have you started receiving letters from unusual senders?
Kelly Shepherd is the author of Insomnia Bird (Thistledown).
_______________________________________
