A REVIEW OF REBECCA CAMPBELL'S
THE PARADISE ENGINE
BY JENNIFER QUIST

The Rusty Toque | Reviews | Issue 5 | November 15, 2013
 PictureThe Paradise Engine
by Rebecca Campbell
NeWest Press, 2013
Nights must have been little darker in the 1980s for Cold War kids tucked into bed with rumors of wars. On the east coast of Canada, I would lie in bed imagining the tidal wave–the one they promised would come flooding out of the deep, deep Halifax Harbour to drown us in seawater and sewage when all the missiles were finally detonated at the end of the world.  They said death by drowning would be a mercy. At the same time, “They” were also talking to Rebecca Campbell–another little girl, under another blanket, on the west coast of the same country, contemplating a long walk on burned, bare feet fleeing from the coast to the mountains without much chance of survival.

And on the evening when I heard Campbell reading into a microphone from her debut novel, The Paradise Engine, when we were both grown up girls gathered in a hot, crowded coffee shop in downtown Edmonton, I knew I had to read her book. Her childhood monster was my childhood monster–mine and all the other kids’ who ever sat up in bed while our parents stood crooning groovy platitudes in our doorways, black silhouettes against yellow hallway lights, with nothing to offer us.

The grown up, over-educated Cold War girl in The Paradise Engine is Anthea, a lackluster junior archivist cataloging fussy domestic records amassed by a wealthy 1920s socialite. Anthea is stalled and stunted, stuck in a sequence of flashbacks and false starts. Maybe it’s a relic of her Cold War childhood–a time when girls like her learned helplessness, when standing still was a necessary virtue during a crisis. In that era, it seemed like the best future anyone could hope for was one where the global inertia that kept our surly peace was left undisturbed. 

Early in her life, Anthea becomes haunted by a vision of a radiation-scarred woman “that walked along an empty road out of the city, one that passed between ashy mountains.” Later, the phantom woman on the road materializes in real life as Anthea’s friend, Jasmine, who disappears while following a young street preacher into the wilderness. Finally, Anthea is haunted by a very different personage–a man with “a voice that had the texture of a shellac 78 on an old turntable.” The voice belongs to Liam Manley, a person who dies decades before Anthea is born. He is wounded in a gas attack during the First World War and returns to Canada barely fit enough to make a poor living singing on the fading vaudeville circuit, a tenor wheezing through the scar tissue in his lungs.

While Anthea’s approach to her environment may be an after-effect of the static, rhetorical Cold War, Liam’s stalled and stunted worldview has its roots in the trauma of active combat. Along with the physical damage he sustained in his war, he suffers from the same kind of myopic outlook that sabotages Anthea.

In many ways, Anthea and Liam are the same character. But they aren’t made that way simply by invoking hackneyed twentieth century concepts of the “Hero with a Thousand Faces.” The novel even makes an explicit eye-roll in Joseph Campbell’s direction, calling him out by name.  However, populating a story meant to have apocalyptic proportions with characters who fall far short of the grand scale of their struggle isn’t merely cynical. Liam and Anthea are deliberately cast life-sized rather than larger-than-life. On her blog, Rebecca Campbell explains, 
Just outside the confines of the novel there’s an Epic Battle Between Good and Evil going on– but since the novel isn’t about epic characters, you only see glimpses of that other, far more important story.  Like most of us, my characters are just trying to figure out what’s going on in front of them, and the larger context of their lives & experience remains outside their grasp.
This lack of panoramic vision might be frustrating for readers desperate to isolate a tight plotline and finish the book with a tidy ending. All the story’s vignettes end with a measure of uncertainty, with characters who recoil or are swept aside exactly at the point where the reader feels something clear and definitive might be revealed. Narrative closure is not the kind of satisfaction this book offers.

But for readers with a stomach for uncertainty and an appetite for beautiful, provocative writing the book is amply rewarding. Campbell’s prose is insightful and illuminated by wonderfully fine detail. The novel’s narrative voices focus with neurotic fretfulness on small but oddly compelling points. In an early scene where Anthea works cataloguing the contents of a box, she makes sure to list all of the articles inside it including “Three (3) black beetles, dead” reasoning that “they might be pre-war.” 

Much later in the book, Liam’s distraction with detail is discussed more explicitly:
For the first time that day, he realized that he saw everything with the excruciating clarity of fever…that he saw every luminous shape multiplied in the mirrors of the department store, and the polished glass doors, and the marked in detail the motions of a woman’s hands as she wrapped tissue paper around a box.  Everything about him was distant and tiny and perfect … In his ears the sounds of the street became a slurry, no words he knew, though in it he heard, unexpected, a through-line, like a motif, like a message.
When they can’t tell what’s important, the characters react by attending to everything just in case it’s something in the blend of the surrounding minutia that turns out to be the vital element they’re lacking.

The book’s tandem narrative voices may be the greatest technical accomplishment of the novel–and it’s a rare one. The voice telling Anthea’s part of the story is subtly but significantly different from the one telling Liam’s story. Anthea’s narrator has a contemporary voice. It’s loose and slang-filled, speaking in long but simple sentences with clauses that echo each other, almost like incantations. Anthea’s dialogue is painful and often pointless but necessarily so. Her speech gets mired in sound rather than meaning. At one turning point, she’s falls into a loop repeating, “The thing of it is. The thing of it is … The thing of it is.” 

Liam’s narrator is more deliberate and formal. The sentences are still long but no longer simple. Liam’s sections are complex, elaborate, and strike only glancing blows against the action of the story. It’s probably not a coincidence the name “Virginia Woolf” is dropped in passing. Though different, the book’s narrative voices are complementary. For instance, Liam is troubled with incantations too–flashbacks of marching soldiers singing, “We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because …”

The novel might give a reader the impression that all the explosions–the real, plot-propelling fireworks–are happening off-stage. It may leave this impression even though it’s not the case. The explosions are part of the text but they’re relayed from the perspectives of characters who don’t fully understand what they’re witnessing. The fireworks are described by disoriented observers who stumble upon them by chance, not knowing their contexts or the significance they hold.  Liam is part of a crowd during one of the most violent scenes of the book. but he doesn’t properly understand the situation until he receives a secondhand account of it. His own eye-witness testimony is focused on tiny, dreamy details. It’s confusing even for him. As a reader, I had to pause and re-read the passage.  Looking at it through Liam’s eyes, I failed at first to see what had happened myself.

All of this strictly peripheral vision highlights Liam and Anthea’s alienation from the “Epic Battle” they can sense but not comprehend. This kind of story-telling shifts the Epic Battle itself into a curious new light. It questions whether there is anything truly epic about humanity’s pushing and shoving and posturing. It suggests that maybe even the end of the world is something rather ordinary and easy to miss.

Along with Liam and Anthea, there are two other sets of twin characters living in different times. The second pair are women who become lost. For Anthea, this is her missing friend. Jasmine is frustrated by Anthea’s lack of forward motion just as Anthea is frustrated by Jasmine’s naive willingness to accept and pursue meaning in everything. In the inter-war period, the role of the lost woman is played by Hazel. Where Jasmine looks to New Age occult to find meaning, Hazel turns to the magic of her day: the new, big screen Hollywood movies that are snuffing out Liam’s living. 

Both of the women mime the magic in their surroundings. Liam claims he can identify the leading lady of the movie Hazel has seen most recently simply by observing her behavior. “Perhaps this one was Bette Davis.”  With equal cynicism, Anthea makes a numbered, alphabetical list of Jasmine’s pet New Age movements. Liam and Anthea perceive their companions’ earnest impressionability as flaky superficiality.

Anthea warns Jasmine about it:
That was the problem with omens, [Anthea] had once tried to explain to Jasmine when they were drunk, you never know when they stop or start, and once you accept the premise, the whole universe has suddenly become a message.
The third pair of twin characters are the prophets of doom. They’re ambivalent figures who simultaneously attract and repulse Liam and Anthea.  In Liam’s time, the prophet is a wealthy man with the resources to found a commune and begin assembling an “engine” that will bring about the end of “the material world.”  His counterpart in Anthea’s timeline is the young street preacher out to lay his hands on humanity, one by one, and thrust us beyond the material world.

The specifics of the spiritual philosophies of the prophets are never put forward. They’re beside the point. The paradise engine itself is only described in terms of small parts and never as a whole. There’s an extensive catalogue–one not altogether unlike the lists Anthea makes as an archivist – of the fine materials and expensive components that make the engine but we never see it fully and grandly unveiled.

Hazel is the only character to live in both of the novel’s timelines. She is not only involved with Liam as a young person. Later, she becomes Anthea’s troubled grandmother. Some reviewers have questioned why Anthea would be drawn to someone as difficult as Jasmine. In many ways, Jasmine is Anthea’s opportunity to interact with Hazel as a peer–to step in and save her from her attempts to escape the material world. Anthea’s sense of grief and guilt over Jasmine is indivisible from her complicated feelings for her grandmother.

The book’s ending is sunlit and stimulating but also it's uncertain and difficult. Maybe it’s a Cold War ending. The high crisis is past–the haunting ought to be over–but what’s left in its place isn’t a victory parade but something “clean and yellowish and skeletal.”  The material world did not end in a Soviet air-strike. We are still here because we are still here because ...  Maybe we’ll be here forever. What The Paradise Engine invites us to consider is the form, the meaning, and the price of going on.  Immortality, the story warns us, always demands a sacrifice.
JENNIFER QUIST's debut novel, Love Letters of the Angels of Death, was released in 2013 by Linda Leith Publishing. Based in central Alberta, she's a writer, poet, speaker, lapsed sociologist, and raiser of boys.