"I should have factored in the general atmosphere of being in a country that looked like the set for a zombie remake of the Shackleton voyage."
Elizabeth Hand's Available Dark is a return to her Cass Neary character from the dark and devastating Generation Loss. Cass, a one time photography wunderkid lives with an epic level of depression and anger that colors every aspect of her existence. She eeks out a living mostly on small jobs due to her past fame and gets through the day with a variety of alcohol and prescription medication. She is leather jacket and boots toughness, a Patti Smith who never found the love of Fred Smith. Cass lives in dark places - she revels in dark places - and Liz Hand not only embraces these aspects of her character, she delights in them. Generation Loss took Cass to Maine and a run-in with a serial killer, in Available Dark she travels first to Helsinki and then Iceland where she finds more death, more depravity and yet ultimately a wee bit of redemption.
But don't worry, little fuzzy bunny moments are nowhere in sight.
Lots of folks (especially crime writers) are reviewing Available Dark quite highly (it received a star from Booklist) but what I wanted to write about was how well Liz captures winter in a northern place. This is not an easy thing to do, not without getting romantic and cozy. I don't want to suggest that we don't enjoy our sledding and hot chocolate moments in the north but in the far north, in places where winter means not just cold and ice and snow but months of grayness punctuated only with complete darkness, winter is a whole other beast. There is a reason that Alaska leads the country in (per capita) suicide, rape, alcoholism and domestic violence. Long cold winters make people crazy and when you are miles from the world - thousands of miles in fact - then the crazy can get pretty damn hard to escape from.
In Available Dark, Cass finds not only the long winter in Iceland but also a crippling depression brought on by the nation's economic collapse. This has removed all the cheer from the region - all the hopefulness that usually gets people through the winter. In Fairbanks we have lots of festivals and bazaars and sporting events - something is pretty much always happening in the winter - but the best way to really overcome the winter is to have a job waiting for you everyday. It might be dark out when you get there and dark when you leave but the job is still the same, summer or winter, and so work goes a long way toward keeping you going. Losing the jobs, well that leaves a whole lot of hours in the day to fill and when it is 30 and 40 below you are not going to fill them outside.
That's when four walls will overwhelm you and many bad things can happen.
Available Dark reminded me of Smilla's Sense of Snow, which I read years ago in college as part of a "Literature of the North" course. (For all the kinky macabre of Available Dark, where collecting photos of dead people plays a big part of the plot, it would have fit perfectly in that course.) There is a similar sense of hopelessness that permeates the narrative; a bleakness that makes the text so brittle that readers get the feeling it could fall to pieces in an instant. Winter in the Far North is so harsh - so unbelievable cruel - that standing in it you feel as if you could shatter. I know that sounds like hyperbole but it is true. Wicked things live in that kind of cold and dark, wicked things call it home. For all that you still shop at Safeway and go to the post office and pick up the kids from school, there are moments in that winter where you find yourself surrounded by a silence and a cold that comes through to the bone. It's not beautiful, it just is and you survive only if you are very careful every single minute.
In Available Dark Cass finds herself at the center of a bad and bloody business, an innocent (which is shocking because there is nothing innocent about her), and a very potential victim. There are so many different kinds of darkness bearing down on her, so many ways in which it wants to eat her alive. And even though Cass and I are not at all alike and even though I have never been to Iceland or immersed myself in the murderous subculture she discovers, I feel that I know her story well. It is not pretty and it is not sweet, but still, what a powerful thing it is - what a pure and truly powerful thing is this literary winter.
[Post pic: Another day on the job in AK - at 2:30 in the AFTERNOON!!] [Post title is a line from "Available Dark".]
