Angie Abdou’s novel The Canterbury Trail (Brindle & Glass, 2011) has already received some attention on fadedpaperproject for a relatively unfair review it received at the hands of Leslie Anthony. The problem with Anthony’s review, as you’ll be able to tell by checking out my old post and the comments below it, is that it doesn’t exactly approach the book on its own terms. The Canterbury Trail exists in intertext with Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. While I’m no Chaucer expert, I feel that Abdou’s novel should be critiqued according with this in mind, so I’ll do my best for what will be my first public book review.

Abdou's writing is clear and sharp, easy to read in most parts but poetic in others. While not the most groundbreaking novel in terms of language use, The Canterbury Trail is intriguing because of its intertextual nature. The characters in this novel are modern-day, skiing versions of Chaucer's caricature-like pilgrims, characters who set out on a quest for one thing (Chaucer: religion, Abdou: sick powder) and instead end up engaging in debauchery of all kinds. The ironic juxtaposition that Chaucer negotiates in his works remains intact in The Canterbury Trail, in that the stated journey is a pilgrimage (albeit for skiing, rather than religious purposes), but the implied journey is for something else. In Tales, that something else is mostly romance, while things are a bit more complex in Trail. SOR, for example, wants an excuse to smoke weed and hang with his buddies, but he also wants to feel alive. Urbanite journalist Alison is not only working on an article for The Globe and Mail, but is believed to be "here for the dick," as is hottest-chick-in-town Shanny. And every character abandons his or her personal pilgrimage in one night of drinking, smoking, and garbled attempts to have a storytelling contest. In the words of the maternal character, Janet, they're all "pretend[ing] to love it all," when in fact these characters are searching for something other than the skiing tradition almost necessitated by living in Coalton.

But all of this would be futile without strong characters to carry the story. Abdou's characters are clichés, caricatures of small-town ski-bum communities. Carrying on the Chaucerean tradition, these pilgrims are hyperbolic representations of their place in Coalton's microcosmic society. Everyone knows everyone in this town, as Rad Chick Shanny remarks, and characters are constantly branding themselves and others. This does not go unnoticed by la Canadienne Claudette, who remarks of Coalton, "People were quick to label others here, and the labels stuck." We see this process of labelling in action as the characters come together in a tiny hut named Camelot:

They'd be camping out with a bunch of dropout, ski-bum punks. Perfect. The hippies were arriving any second, and the ski bums had already got here. Remembering the snow machine outside, he added redneck to the list. Why not throw everybody into [the] mix? Some lazy, stoned ski-bums, some flakey, tarot-card waving hippies, and some rye-huzzling, oil-burning rednecks. Add Michael—ski bum turned hardcore greedy developer guy—and you had a complete cross-section of Coalton society.

Of course, the reason over-the-top characters often fall flat is because the author sketches them on a two-dimensional plane. While some of Trail's characters are underdeveloped, most of them are three-dimensional; they extend deeper than their labels. Abdou spends a considerable amount of time building these people, giving each individual his or her own internal dialect and backstory-driven motives for embarking on this pilgrimage. And many of them change in their night together in Camelot, discovering things about themselves and each other that change their perception of community and invidualism. Shanny, for example, undergoes a unexpected change in her sexuality when she spends time with Ella and Cosmos. We learn that Kevin, who is probably the least immediately-likeable character in the mix, is plagued by such inner turmoil and guilt over his father's condition that we begin to understand his hotheadedness and desire to lash out at other characters. But there are fourteen characters here (not including the dogs), and 277 pages seems like less time than needed to have time to connect with them. Abdou pulls it off, for the most part, through excellent dialogue, but one of my main gripes about this novel was actually that I wanted to know even more about these people, especially Heinz the Hermit, the character who frames (and is possibly imagining) the whole story.

And holy hell, what an ending.

The Canterbury Trail impressed me with strong character development spread across fourteen pilgrims, and was a highly entertaining read. A must-read for anyone interested in Chaucer, winter sports, or solid culture-focused writing.