In The Place Of Last Things

by Michael Helm

A finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book (Canada and Caribbean region), and a Globe and Mail Notable Book of the Year

After his father’s death, Russ Littlebury inherits the task of driving his aunt to her winter home in Arizona. While in Montana, he promises the daughter of a family friend that he will search for her absconded boyfriend, Jack Marks — a man Russ will discover is manipulative, charismatic, and brutal. As Russ travels from the American Southwest to the underworlds of Juarez, Mexico, and back in time from Toronto to Saskatchewan, he confronts his last months with his father and his affair with an open-hearted woman whose convictions entangled them in a small deception, with unforeseen consequences. Fuelled by a sense of responsibility and a growing fascination with the elusive Marks, Russ finds himself unexpectedly face to face with his own past. Michael Helm’s highly acclaimed second novel takes the reader on a breathtaking journey that explores violence, conversion, and loss, and the uneasy consolations we sometimes find in faith and love.

344 pages, Paperback

First published September 14, 2004

Reviews

[Glen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I struggled over whether to give this book three or four stars (ideally, I would have done 3 and a half) but opted for the lower rating because, while I admired the ambition of the novel, I felt it was lacking something in execution. The protagonist, Russ Littlebury, is an interesting character--part scholar, part Saskatchewan farm boy, part hockey enforcer and all-around tough guy--but his pursuit of the con-man whom he thinks has impregnated a young girl, his sudden abandonment of his academic career and his rather torrid but gratifying affair with a colleague to be at the side of his dying father all seem like the acts of a man who has lost track of himself somewhere along the line. His conceit of using quotations from antiquity is at first idiosyncratic, then annoying, but then it essentially goes by the boards when he pursues his quarry into Mexico. Lots of loose ends are left for the reader to tie up with a minimum of thread, not the least of which are Russ's relationship with his father and the real reasons for his sojourn south, and while that could be construed as a complement to the reader (not telling everything to allow readerly room to interpret), it came across more as a narrative that had run a little out of control along the way.

[Bagpipe]

After his Fathers death, a man drives his Aunt from the Canadian prairies to Tucson. Don't think I finished this one.

[Marni Lee · Rating 3 out of 5]

The story is good. Prose is strong. Unfortunately the writer goes blathering off on philosophical tangents. I read this book first and hoped that since it was early perhaps he outgrew this annoying tic but alas, he's love of his own intellect only got worse.

[YYCanuck · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hard to put down!

Hunting for that other one...