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Fiction and Non-Fiction Review

The Cube People
by Christian McPherson
Gibson, BC: Nightwood Editions, 2010
271 pp.  $21.95

Colin Macdonald hates his job, his coworkers, and sometimes, himself. Like many of us, Colin feeds his soul with something that stops his government career from sucking the life out of him. Colin writes horror fiction, but more than this, he also puts himself at risk of constant rejection by trying to sell it. His life is a horror story that we can all relate to: the horrors of everyday life, humorously and thankfully tempered by the series of little blessings, and life-changing big ones, that make life ultimately more fun-house than haunted-house. As Colin begins his journey towards fatherhood, Macpherson’s novel tells the story of a man becoming, well, a better man, thanks to the absurdities, horrors, and joys of adult urban life.

Christian McPherson’s The Cube People is a cocktail of genre work that has something for every reader to enjoy. Though the novel follows in the footsteps of novelists interested in exploring the angst of white collar workers (the kind of novel now diligently studied in Am Lit graduate seminars), it also ventures into the campy worlds of science fiction, blood-and-guts schlock horror, and a certain kind of fantasy, all the while sustaining the episodic carnival with a sincerely touching family narrative that is honest, funny, relatable, and very loving.

One of the many pleasures to be gotten out of The Cube People is its simplicity, and out of this simplicity comes its best moments of humor. Mcpherson doesn’t need to work too hard to make you laugh, and indeed, is at his best when he doesn’t, because the story he’s telling is about laughing to stay sane when your world is crashing down around your ears. Local Ottawa readers will get an extra hit of pleasure in recognition, finally able to experience what our Toronto and Montreal compatriots feel when a novel takes them to their favorite restaurant or movie theatre. Indeed McPherson doesn’t shy away from the realities of downtown Ottawa at all, and as person who shares that space, I see myself and my neighbors reflected in his well-wrought episodes and minor characters. Perhaps more importantly, McPherson gives voice to an invisible but fundamental backbone of the national capital’s in-humor and main complaint: the federal government and its workers. Again, the representation of this absurdly inefficient body is not altogether unsympathetic, nor is it unkind, instead, it’s the representation that only one who has worked in, or tried desperately to work around, such a system can publicly give without insult or injury. Certainly, those who haven’t even worked for the government will recognize and echo the protagonist Colin Macdonald’s nearly hysterical if silent frustration, perhaps even getting some real life relief.

Clearly then, the important place of horror narrative in the novel is no accident, but McPherson’s real artful move is in resisting the temptation to drive home that connection too firmly, or too finally, instead allowing the underlying motif of violence and perversity to expand and color all aspects of the every-man embodied by Colin. From his family life to his friendships to his work and even his leisure, his frustration boils to a point of violent explosion, the energy of which is funneled directly into either the creation of his novels, or the more artful creation of his first person narration. There is a kind of heroism in the character’s triple-identities – the underwhelmed and underwhelming IT-taxes-guy, the truly sympathetic but terrified family man, and the frustrated artist who can’t seem to get a break – because Colin’s concern with his integrity and identity is one that is increasingly pertinent to a culture where a person’s 9-5 job is rarely what they truly consider to be their life’s work.

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