Gilmour spins tale with wit, economy of phrase

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 25/11/2001 (9009 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

By David Gilmour

Random House, 217 pages, $33

Reviewed by Dave Williamson

PRIOR to Sparrow Nights, Toronto broadcaster-turned-novelist David Gilmour had published four novels that he claimed were autobiographical.

This latest would appear to be mostly the product of research and imagination, but it’s made as engaging as anything he’s written by the first-person narrative voice of Darius Halloway, a Toronto-based, middle-aged professor of French literature.

English author Anthony Powell once said that one technical difficulty in using a middle-aged man as a first-person narrator is that middle-aged men don’t discuss their sexual relationships.

David Gilmour — or at least his protagonist, Halloway — would no doubt disagree. Halloway even says at one point, “I took him to dinner afterwards and we consumed a number of bottles of wine, after which the conversation turned, of course, to women. It still strikes me as curious that men talk of virtually nothing else.”

Indeed, Halloway’s narrative is almost entirely about his romantic exploits. It features his obsession with one young woman named Emma Carpenter, who haunts him long after the three years they spent together.

“Her lovemaking — and don’t worry, I’m not going to embarrass either of us here — was a sort of schizophrenic experience. An authentically transforming event. Really, she carried on like a mad woman. She whispered, she swore, she blasphemed, she made demonic requests in a voice that was not her own.”

Halloway drops some of Emma’s colourful language into the text at appropriate intervals, to rich comic effect.

While he seems to get by in his job, teaching the required classes and writing research papers on Rimbaud and the like, Halloway finds life alone less than tranquil. A neighbour’s dogs’ barking sets him scheming to poison the animals. He spends many a night dining out and drinking too much, too often running into former students or former lovers.

He makes frequent trips to the local massage parlor and, when he invites one of the young women to his home, the consequences are harrowing and then downright macabre.

“Sparrow nights,” Halloway explains, refers to a Russian expression that describes nights of dementia and torment. While Halloway’s nocturnal adventures may well be classified that way, his droll sense of humour, his politically incorrect viewpoints, and his penchant for clear, concise language win the reader’s attention.

He doesn’t spare us too many details. Gilmour is not one to shrink from the sordid aspects of sex and death, and that he can spin such a tale with wit and economy of phrase is a tribute to his storytelling skill.

Dave Williamson is a Winnipeg writer and educator.