Toronto Star roots for The Milk Chicken Bomb
A lonely schoolyard prince plots some choice revenge
Calgary rocker debuts with a 10-year-old hero who remains as nameless as his unspoken fear, but we cheer the kid on in the end
June 17, 2007
Nancy Wigston
by Andrew Wedderburn
Coach House, 291 pages, $21.95
This odd, mysterious first novel is narrated by a 10-year-old boy living in the fictional town of Marvin, outside Calgary. Possessed of wonderful powers of observation, our narrator tells it like he sees it: a townscape where adults are, to say the least, unusual.
There's the congenial Russians who brew homemade mustard to mark the year's first snowfall, play fiercely competitive curling against the Pentecostals and argue among themselves about dictatorships back in Petersburg. There's Deke, a chronic but likeable loser, a child-man who seeks a loan from the credit union for a surplus submarine he knows about from his trip to Uzbekistan. Refused the money, he digs a hole to divert the river and flood the credit union building.
Rock musician Andrew Wedderburn smudges the edges between the world of children and adults, adding large doses of the macabre to the mix, such as the suspicious death of a meat plant worker in a rendering vat. A child gets struck by lightning, but, disappointingly, does not develop the superpowers that would benefit him in a comic book.
Jenny Tierney, unchallenged dictator of the playground, possesses mysterious powers. Her equal and opposite is Paul Grand, archetype of graceful boyhood, who skateboards down icy streets without falling off, "like he wouldn't even know how."
Whoever this child-narrator is, he tells an excellent story. A gaping hole, however, occupies its middle. The narrator is up and on the streets at all hours. He is addressed as "kid." His one friend at school, Mullen, is the instigator of the mischief they get into and spends numerous hours in detention.
Mullen, though, has a dad, a former geologist who works chopping ice at the meat plant with the Russians. There's mystery here too, but of the more banal sort. This is the only work Mullen's dad – having lost his job and his reputation – can find and the only town he can find it in.
When our narrator is on his own, he practises various tricks to erase the world and the "Dead Kids," his schoolyard enemies. Clues accumulate about his parents, his house, but not from him. Mullen, with whom our narrator begins every day selling lemonade – all winter long – bursts out that he is poor but his friend is just stubborn.
Never once do we enter the narrator's house, and can only surmise what is happening there, what drives him to fantasy or to actual escape. In the opening scene he has made it as far the truck stop outside town, only to be spotted and gently returned by Mullen's dad. Another time a kind waitress drives him back. The word "home" is avoided.
Whatever occupies this hole – the fear of a menacing, breathing dark waiting for him – also drives him to revenge fantasies touching on the bomb of the title. Wedderburn tells us a lot – like how the kid trades a store-bought pizza sub for another kid's homemade sandwich – without revealing the immediate context that would have it make sense.
There is an exception. By the time the kid is hiding out in a basement during the Christmas holidays, we do know. By not telling us, or telling us so indirectly, Wedderburn makes us strangely complicit in a child's unnamed fear.
"By indirection find direction out" – this is the Hamlet-like route we take with our lonely prince of the playground, and by novel's end, we wish him every success with his milk chicken bomb. Go get 'em, kid.
