Sybilla Oritur

Lisa Moore, Alligator. Grove Press: 2006. 320 pgs.

My last BMV Books trip with Veronica included the purchasing of some Canadiana by Lisa Moore. I am usually opposed to buying something just because it is written by a Canadian author (and my strong dislike of Margaret Atwood and Alice Munroe continues this trend), but the cover was snazzy and it was on sale, so i thought it at least deserved my reading the back cover.

Alligator was a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Winner and a Globe and Mail Book of the Year. Two pretty prestigious accolades for something written about Newfoundland. i will admit, i had been meaning to get around to reading some of the great fiction about Newfoundland recommended to me over the years by my LAC colleagues. I was sold.

I had a hard time getting into Alligator - and i can’t decide if this is because i am finding it hard reading these days (i had the same problem with The Historian and The Eyre Affair, both of which i ended up liking immensely) or if it was because of the wide array of characters whose perspective was adopted in individual chapters. Furthermore, each character was, well, an extreme example of their “type.” Usually i am all for playing with stereotypes, but i couldn’t get myself to attach to either Colleen or Madeleine and their roles were substantial in the plot development.

Much like Middlemarch, by the end of the novel all the characters were connected, but unlike Middlemarch, i didn’t mourn every time the perspective was switched. My overall verdict was that this is an excellent light read, or beach reading for those of us who understand what that means (that’s for you Veronica). However, Lisa Moore is also the author of an award-winning short-story collection which i think i will check out in the near future… the book shows much promise. Maybe it just wasn’t my cup of tea. Some of the descriptions were stunning and the plot at times highly unexpected. I will be open-minded.

The back cover reads:
Moving with the swiftness of an alligator in attack mode, Lisa Moore’s award-winning first novel is a wickedly fresh introduction to St. John’s, Newfoundland. Its denizens jostle one another in uneasy arabesques of desire, greed, and ambition, juxtaposed with a yearning for purity, depth, and redemption. Colleen is a seventeen-year-old would-be ecoterrorist, drawn inexorably to the places where alligators thrive. Her mother, Beverly, is cloaked in grief after the death of her husband. Beverly’s sister, Madeleine, is a driven, aging filmmaker who obsesses over completing her magnum opus before she dies. And Frank, a young man whose life is a strange anthology of unpredictable dangers, is desperate to protect his hot-dog stand from sociopathic Russian sailor Valentin, whose predatory tendencies threaten everyone he encounters. Alligator is a remarkable book, a suspenseful, heartfelt, and sexy story that examines the ruthlessly reptilian and painfully human sides of all of us.