Toronto Star Sunday, March 16, 2008
It’s 1962, and Hicklin, one of The Hole Show’s main characters, is studying the Vancouver sky for black holes. Walking home from elementary school, he discovers a construction site that he soon claims as his own secret hollow, a place where he can make up stories and clutch a favourite yellow blanket — marred, of course, by an iron-shaped scorch hole.
Montreal author Maya Merrick’s hole imagery encompasses various body cavities, absences, longings and darkened crevices. By the end of the novel, having spent a decade observing and inhabiting hundreds more holes, Hicklin has created a series of boxes designed to function like miniature memory theatres.
Big enough to crawl into, the theatres exploit holes of light, mirrors and symbolic decorations to create a furtive panorama view. From inside his constructed hole he can watch a massive Halloween party he’s helped organize on Mount Royal with his Montreal friends Dolly (an albino with unusual violet eyes) and Beau (an androgynous teen who collects elaborate dresses).
With a connect-the-dots approach to plot, Merrick introduces Hicklin, Dolly and Beau to readers as odd, lonely children. Then, traveling back and forth in time through Alice-style rabbit burrows, she matches the confusion and disappointments of their upbringing with the corresponding chasms in their young adult selves.
Hicklin is bullied as a boy and later manipulated by girlfriends as a young adult. Dolly’s repressive upbringing and ghostly looks let her flicker between invisible and freakish — qualities she learns to use to her advantage in distributing herbal remedies and luring audiences to her performance art shows.
Beau, who is raised by his aunt and uncle until he runs away as a young teen, remains confused about the circumstances of his birth and identity. As a transgendered youth, he is angered by labels assigned to him by the medical establishment — "some days, I just want to wear pants and lipstick and not have to explain."
The three displaced teens find each other in Montreal, move into an apartment together and slowly begin to inhabit new identities. Then appears Luce, a dark-haired foil for Dolly’s lightness.
At first, Luce is a mere hanger-on — a younger teenager who sees the Montreal trio as something to attach herself to. Then she begins to earn unwarranted trust by buying a flashy new turntable to impress Beau and by seducing Hicklin. She has a harder time unlocking Dolly, the impenetrable ghost. When Dolly discovers Luce is keeping a diary of the trio’s stories in a way that could jeopardize everything they’ve created, she realizes they’re being sucked into something dark and malicious.
Throughout the novel Merrick shines a flashlight on Montreal, a city with "a bunch of streets where all the houses have their guts on the outside, their stairs spilling down to the sidewalks like big black metal tongues." Alleyway garbage is for harvesting: "Gowns and glass and wood and tile. A pile of mangy boas one lucky day, a scattering of sequins the next." And at an underground strip club, "spinning bodies eat each other under weird lights that glow without illuminating."
While mentions of bellbottoms, 25-cent coffee, Philip K. Dick’s replicants, Lou Reed and the FLQ provide appropriate texture for the ’60s and ’70s setting, there aren’t enough of these details to satisfy the contextual demands of historical fiction. Swap text messages for telegrams and iPods for eight-tracks, and this novel could easily take place in the present.
This isn’t the first time Merrick has presented an experimental novel that relies on overarching imagery. Cassie, the sole confused teen protagonist of Merrick's first novel, Sextant, spends most of that book drenched underwater — either at her job as a mermaid in a bar, or in the ocean where she feels safe.
The Hole Show, with its cast of complex characters, backflips through time and strange theme, is decidedly more ambitious. Merrick burrows into the emotional holes of an unusual collection of bohemians as she takes readers on a dark, suspenseful trip through the urban underground.