A Review of Helen Humphreys’ “Rabbit Foot Bill”
The Town Eccentric
Every small town has an eccentric. I grew up in a small village in Canada, so I know firsthand. Let me tell you about the one who lived in the place where I came of age: His name was Tony the Torch. He apparently got that name because, when he was a teenager, he tried to burn down the local elementary school. I don’t know how much of what follows is bullshit from what’s real, but the legend had it that — after being released from reform school or wherever they sent juvenile offenders in the days before the Young Offenders Act — Tony lived in a small tent outside of town and would do something relatively illegal each fall to get himself into a warm jail cell for the winter months. The story also goes that if you didn’t lock your doors before going to church on a Sunday morning, Tony the Torch was liable to be sitting at your kitchen table eating a bowl of cereal by the time you got back. And speaking of the aforementioned tent, Tony the Torch had a flagpole on his property where he kept a dirty pair of underwear at the top. That part might be bullshit, though.
Speaking of such weirdos, Canadian author Helene Humphreys’ new novel is about a town eccentric from the past, too. This is a book that is based on a true story, but how much of this is real and how much of it is made up (and how much of it is a legend) is up for grabs. Rabbit Foot Bill is about the titular person, a tramp who lives in a “house” burrowed into the side of a hill in small-town Saskatchewan in 1947 and catches rabbits to make lucky charms. A young boy named Leonard Flint befriends Bill, but soon enough Bill murders a boy who has been bullying Leonard with a pair of garden shears. Flash forward 12 years, and Leonard is now a psychiatrist at a mental health facility in Weyburn, Saskatchewan — a place where LSD is being experimented as a drug treatment among some of the patients. Leonard discovers that Bill is a resident of the facility, living in a horses’ stable, and, as the two struggle to reacquaint themselves, Leonard finds himself drowning in a morass of trouble — the least of his problems being that he’s sleeping with his boss’s wife!
In the end, though, Rabbit Foot Bill is a book about the bond between man and boy, if not doctor and patient. It is — without giving very much away — a tragic novel in many respects. It’s a short read — you’ll probably get through its roughly 200 pages in a sitting or two — but, as a result of its brevity, you may find that you will struggle to learn about the main characters. We’re not given a lot of information up front as to why Bill and Leonard have forged a friendship in the small town when the latter is a youth and why that relationship is maintained later on in life, and the reason is that the author is holding a lot of cards close to her chest to have a big reveal or turn of plot at the end of the book. However, it must be said that the “surprise” is not too surprising at all, even though Bill’s ultimate background is a little interesting, if underdeveloped. At the end of the day, because of the uneven and disjointed structure of the book, Rabbit Foot Bill comes across as a mediocre read. This is a novel built on the foundations of characterisations, but the only reward on this front comes when the book is almost over.
To wit, I’m not sure if there’s much more to be said about Rabbit Foot Bill. It is a literary exercise, but it is only half-heartedly written — there are too many secondary characters in the mental facility portion of the book and, resultingly, the book feels as though it is half complete. I wanted to know more about the relationship between Bill and Leonard, and what caused them to bond so much — for instance, is their appreciation for one another sexual in any way? — but because the author is being coy for the sake of drama, the pair are not given a whole heck of a lot to do in the narrative. The result is almost disastrous for the book — though the use of LSD as a means of being a medical treatment is good enough reason to be interested in the plot. However, the LSD angle doesn’t come up much in Bill and Leonard’s relationship — if I can give that much away — so one wonders why it is there at all.
Basically, the end takeaway is that Rabbit Foot Bill is interesting, but nothing more or less. It’s as though the author was caged in by the factual account of the story — even going so far as to paraphrase from the preliminary hearings of a real-life court trial — and didn’t know where else to go with it. This means that, by the end of the book, while we may know why Bill may have homicidal tendencies that need to be kept in a cage, we don’t know what makes Leonard tick — probably because the person this character is based on is still seemingly alive (according to the author’s note at the end of the novel) and, of course, there is the fear of libeling someone still living and who was cooperative with the author. We, too. aren’t given much of a view of the small town Bill and Leonard inhabit, and that would have been helpful because we don’t know how the people of the town feel about Bill — or even how they register him at all.
All in all, Rabbit Foot Bill is a failed experiment and a missed opportunity — but that doesn’t make it a bad read. As aforementioned, you might find something interesting in the telling of this tale, even though it might be deficient in some areas, because town eccentrics always make for interesting tales to be weaved around. However, the novel demands something more — a longer narrative, a bigger focus on the duo’s backstory earlier on in the exposition — and that makes for a novel without much of a beating heart. It’s all too bad because I get the feeling that Bill was an interesting guy, interesting in ways that a Tony the Torch can relate to. All this means is that a better novel is waiting to be written about town eccentrics. Rabbit Foot Bill only fulfills about half of the promise of its intriguing premise.
Helen Humphreys’ Rabbit Foot Bill was published by HarperCollins Publishers on August 18, 2020.
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Get in touch: zacharyhoule@rogers.com
