The Toronto Star on Isobel and Emile

Isobel and Emile marks Montrealer Alan Reed’s transition from poet to novelist, but only just.

The book tells the simple story of a young couple whose relationship has just ended. No explanation is given for the break-up, but a town mouse/country mouse scenario seems to be a factor. The two have been living in less-than-glamorous circumstances above a grocery store in the small town. But Emile is from the city, and he moves back there to make a film about his passion: puppeteering.

Following Emile doesn’t appear to be an option for Isobel. Judging by her mother’s reaction to her having left home, she also seems to be younger than he is. After Emile leaves, Isobel continues to live above the grocery store. Despite her waifishness, she takes a job unloading the store’s delivery truck.

A glum Emile moves in with his city bartender friend, Nicolas. Occasionally he drinks wine with the flame-haired, potentially rapacious Agatha, who lends Emile a camera and encourages him to show his puppet film at a festival she is organizing.

The novel exudes a baleful melancholy and romantic otherworldliness heightened by a series of anachronisms: all the characters smoke, indoors and out. They travel from small towns to big cities on trains (which perhaps more than anything rules out the possibility of a present-day Canadian setting).

What makes Isobel and Emile unusual, however, is its deconstructed, repetitive, almost incantatory prose. There’s no risk of comma splices here. Reed’s manuscript must have been mercifully free of his auto grammar’s squiggly green lines. He sticks with the simple formula of subject/verb/object/period, building mood and plot through the overlap of words between sentences: “They were not wearing clothes. They were naked. They had been naked when they went to bed the night before. It had not troubled them. It had been dark.”

Reed also avoids contractions, leaving his characters to speak formally, as when Emile announces: “I do not know what I am going to do.” ...

Any author who puts style front and centre to such a degree must be prepared for the inevitable questions this raises in the mind of the reader. My own sense is that Reed is echoing the way we rebuild ourselves after emotional trauma — the measured process of trying to get a grip, as it were ...

There’s ... a purity to the writing that does manage to strike, if sometimes only fleetingly, at the heart of matters of the heart. At those times, what emerges is unexpectedly, idiosyncratically beautiful.