The Fearsome Particles Hardback - 2006

Excerpt

1

An animal that small, that dextrous, could be anywhere. An animal that silent. There was no defining its limits. What troubled Gerald was not the threat of the threat per se, but his sense of helplessness in the face of it.

In his imagination, in those thoughts that lay just beyond his control, the cat he called Rumsfeld was stalking him. It was an absurd idea, but as he stood in his slippers at the foot of the bed, with the new light of April stealing across a floor of cinnamon cabreuva, Gerald could not quite reach the absurdity and smother it. So he was forced, in the sense that addicts are forced by their addictions, or invalids by their infirmities, to picture the cat mincing through the cavities and recesses (what interior design people liked to call “dead spaces”) of the sprawling turreted house on Breere Crescent. He was obliged to see in his mind’s eye its white whiskery face peering around the pants press and shoe trees of his closet, looking more resolute, more purposeful, than a cat’s face should be capable of looking. He was compelled to imagine it — ludicrous as it might sound to the great majority of people who ­weren’t him and ­didn’t live at 93 Breere — planning.

All Gerald Woodlore could do, and so did with conviction, was curse himself for thinking about the cat. Because this was not the time to be getting cat-­fixated; this morning there were other things of far greater importance to be addressing, mentally. His son, Kyle, was returning home from a hostile territory with an uncertain injury. His wife, Vicki, was edging toward madness. Work entailed its own many, many challenges. For these reasons there was no force in the world worthier of invocation, in Gerald’s view, than the will to ignore the cat’s presence in their lives. And if there had been a way to call forth the will, and impose it on his thoughts the way he imposed plastic wrap on a freshly lopped lemon, to keep its spiky lemoniness contained, of course he would have. But Gerald had to acknowledge, unhappily, that he ­wasn’t built to ignore sneaking threats to normalcy, to order, to the way things were supposed to be. He was much too conscious; he was conscious to the point of affliction. And so to him, the black-­and-­white cat, which a neighbour named Lorie Campeau had brought to the door in a wild panic three weeks before —

LORIE CAMPEAU: It’s my mother. They’ve taken her to the hospital. She fell. She lives in Vancouver and she fell! So I have to fly there today, and of course I have to take my daughter, Jewels. But we just got her this cat. Literally just got it. And we ­can’t give it back because Jewels is completely in love. And I ­don’t know what to do. We haven’t even named it!

— the cat that Vicki had taken in without consultation though he, Gerald, was in the nearby den, listening and perfectly consultable, was a threat. It was a rogue presence. It was their own small, fluffy insurgency.

Media reviews

“Trevor Cole has written an Ordinary People for the 21st century.”
— Maclean’s

“Cole’s writing is reminiscent of that of Carol Shields: he can be hilariously funny and profoundly serious at the same time. . . . He not only cares about what’s right in front of him, he makes his readers care too.”
— Montreal Gazette

“Impressive — funny, absorbing. . . . beautifully authentic.”
— Winnipeg Free Press

“The Fearsome Particles is a workplace comedy enveloped by human tragedy, a sympathetic study of postwar trauma played to the laugh track of finely observed farce. . . . Pitch-perfect.”
— John Allemang

“Humour that comes froma deeper, more satisfying place . . . . The book soars.” — Quill & Quire

“The novel is well-plotted, smart and perceptive, and very funny much in the same way that Kingsley Amis’s mature work was darkly humorous even at its most mordant . . . . Cole is one of the best young novelists in this country.”
— Globe and Mail

“With writing like this, Trevor Cole is quickly gaining a reputation as a major talent, deservedly so.”
— Edmonton Journal

“Trevor Cole is emerging as a master of obsessive-delusional-neurotic-tragicomic fiction. His two novels, Norman Bray in the Performance of His Life (which was shortlisted for a 2004 Governor General's Award for Fiction) and his latest, The Fearsome Particles, both told from the points of view of obsessive and delusional people, are distressing and sometimes cringe-making funny, their humour akin to that of David Brent trying to assert his power in the BBC TV series The Office. Cole's skill at evoking this humour suggests that he himself is quiveringly attuned to the tiny shudders–say, an inexplicable bid in a game of cards–that suggest the life-threatening fault lines in people's lives. And Cole's prose is so confident, compassionate and clear that it draws out that neurotic admission: I wish I'd written that.”
— Literary Review of Canada

"Good writing declares itself immediately. How comforting for a reader to know — after only a few pages in Mr. Cole's company — that he is in such safe hands."
—Governor General’s Award winner David Gilmour

"Cole belongs to the Truman Capote school of stylists; his prose is clear as a mountain stream."
— Toronto Star

"Trevor Cole knows how to tell a story of the I-couldn’t-put-it-down variety. . . . Just delicious!"
— Globe and Mail