Gaspé gang’s woes monstrously marvellous

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This article was published 25/05/2024 (500 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There’s something wild and woolly going on in the Gaspé.

Christophe Bernard’s The Hollow Beast was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction in French and winner of a number of prestigious regional literary prizes when it was first published in 2018. Now, this rambling, boozy, intergenerational epic concerning revenge and (dis)honour has been faithfully translated into English by Lazer Lederhendler.

Monti Bouge is an orphan in the small town of Saint-Lancelot-de-la-Frayère in Quebec’s Gaspé Peninsula in the early days of the 20th century. Following a questionable call that decides the championship game of a local pond hockey tournament in the opposing town’s favour, Monti cultivates an unsquashable beef against the ref and local mailman Victor Bradley that comes to shape both their lives, as well as the fortunes of the town itself, down through generations.

The narrative jumps back and forth through time, following both Monti’s early escapades both in town and seeking his fortune in northern Ontario, which he mistakes for the Yukon, as well as those of his grandson François, a failed academic whose stalled magnum opus is a history of his erstwhile hometown.

“The Bouges’ decline, all of La Frayère’s decline, was a story of revenge for the murder of someone it was best not to name offhand,” François explains at one point, during a frantic cab ride from Montreal out to the Gaspé during a blizzard of epic proportions. “The guys told him the curse was more likely to be dispelled in an AA meeting than with a book that had been stalled for the last ten years.”

We also spend some time with François’s older brother Yannick and his gang of lads as they spend a debauched weekend in a cottage up the mountain. While Yannick’s sidequest’s importance may not be immediately clear, it all comes together in the end, providing some nauseating laughs en route.

All three timelines are haunted by a spectral beast, which Monti first conjures into being during a poker game wherein he wins a tidy, though cursed, sum. Just what the titular “hollow beast” represents — be it alcoholism, shame, dishonesty, expectation, or some chimera thereof — is never made quite clear, being part and parcel to the sprawling tall tale itself. But each in the line of Bouge men must grapple with it in turn.

“When I drink, oh boy. I’m a saint,” François raves to his parents, the beleaguered Henri and Liette. “When I’m drunk, I have substance. Otherwise, transparency takes over… The problem is nothing gets me drunk anymore.”

Later, Monti, in his dotage, echoes the sentiment: “You drink to exist,” he tells his reflection in the rearview mirror during a purposeless late-night booze cruise.

While The Hollow Beast itself is a beast of a novel, despite its hefty page count it moves along at a leisurely clip, as though the reader is hearing the tall tale around the table at the local pub or late at night in the kitchen during a house party, with the lilt and cadence of an eloquent and well-soused Francophone, peppered throughout with allusions to Quebec history, Metallica’s Kill ‘Em All and the Montreal Canadiens, among others.

And though the main characters may be less than kind, to themselves and others, readers may still find themselves rooting for each of them to pull it together, to slay the beast that haunts them, to make something out of the mess of their lives. Whether or not they do — whether or not any of us do — is another thing altogether.

Sheldon Birnie is a Winnipeg writer and journalist whose latest book is Where the Pavement Turns to Sand, a collection of short fiction.