A Review of Iain Reid’s “Foe”
Friend or Foe?
Sometimes, the weather and climate provide all you need for a backdrop when reading a book. While Canadian author Iain Reid’s exquisite sophomore novel Foe is set during a long, hot summer (and was initially released during one), this is the kind of book that really works when the air is crisp, pumpkins are on the porch, leaves are falling and the nights are growing longer. It’s because Foe is a book that is genuinely creepy and paranoid. The season really brings out the thrills and chills of this read, so if you’re looking for a book that will freak you out in the Halloween season, this is the book you absolutely need to pick up, now. Foe is an unsettling novel, and I’m confident that it won’t leave my memory easily. It’s so good, I have to ask — why wasn’t this shortlisted for the Giller? It’s miles ahead of An Ocean of Minutes in terms of being compulsively readable, for one thing, and for another thing, it’s quite well written.
The novel is about a rural couple named Junior and Hen who, one evening, get a visit from a stranger from a big city corporation. The man is named Terrance, and he comes bearing news that Junior has been longlisted for space exploration, meaning that he’ll be one of the first people to temporarily live in the Installation — a kind of space station set up by the private corporation Terrance works for. As it would turn out, Junior does eventually get selected — but where does that leave Hen? Well, thankfully, Terrance has a replacement Junior for her that acts, talks and thinks just as the real Junior does. And, that, my friends, is where the goings get freaky. Hen gets more and more reserved and standoff-ish as Junior prepares for his day in the sun, and pretty soon the duo is fighting just without resorting to throwing things at each other.
The thing that works about Foe is that this is a psychological book. Most of the action takes place in the mind, and, in a deft twist, Reid makes a stylistic choice — one that has meaning at the book’s conclusion — of not putting Junior’s words into quotation marks, whereas Terrance and Hen do speak in quotes. It’s almost a feminist touch: here’s a guy who’s out to go on a big adventure while the woman stays at home, holding down the fort, so why wouldn’t he be a bit self-absorbed and not need quotation marks around the things he says? However, the true meaning behind this move is revealed in a shocking twist I didn’t see coming, and then there’s a double twist that just puts the screws into the read. This is a measured, nuanced book where things are not quite what they seem and even a seemingly ordinary beetle that appears over the course of the novel from time to time can have a meaning and purpose to it. Not a word is wasted in terms of ratcheting up the mind-games tension between Junior and Henrietta, and everything has a place and a reason.
You might think that a novel of this sort might be boring, but Reid gives us a glimpse of domestic homelife that is sweet and sentimental — giving us something for the characters to work towards restoring, and something for the reader to pin his or her hopes on. You do want Junior and Hen to kiss and make up, you do want Junior to have a fun time in space, and even you do hope that Terrance, as creepy and calculating as he is, gets to complete his mission of transformation and reconciliation of the couple. That just makes the very ending of the book — not to carp, but its really endings plural — all the more mortifying.
Foe is a book that’s hard to pigeonhole. It’s science-fiction, but not very. It’s a domestic family story, but it’s not really literary. (No offense to the author, who has weaved a fine tale here.) This book might be categorized under the New Weird fiction genre, of which Jeff VanderMeer seems to be a proponent of. The only exception to that attempt at categorization is that Reid doesn’t really go off too much into the biotechnology angle of things with his tale. Still, there are comparisons between Foe and VanderMeer’s Borne: the feuding couple, the surrogate baby (in Reid’s case, of the replacement), a somewhat post-apocalyptic landscape. Still, Foe stands on its own as a superlative tale. The only drawback is that the book does have those multiple endings. You expect the book to end at a point, and you turn the page for an “and then this happened.” Still, the duplicity of endings leads us to a double-twist, so there’s that. It’s a trade-off, and I don’t think personally that I would change a word of this book.
I appreciated Foe for what it was: an attempt to out-paranoia what is one of the most paranoid texts out there, John Carpenter’s 1982 take on The Thing, just without the Antarctic setting. You’ll find yourself checking your allegiances with Foe. Start cheering on one character and suddenly you might be distrusting them moments later. There’s a sense of danger in the day-to-day and ordinary, and that all culminates to a whopping conclusion, even if one character’s motivations for doing what is done not very clear. Still, I can breathlessly exude that Foe is one of the very best Canadian books I have read in a long, long, long time. This is a page-turning thriller that will get the heart rate up and the blood flowing. I’m glad to have read it, no matter the season. I really do think that I now have a new favourite author, Canadian or otherwise, to champion, and I hope that there’s more like this one in the author’s book writing pipeline. If so, I’ll be sure to savour it.
Iain Reid’s Foe was published by Simon & Schuster Canada on August 7, 2018.
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Get in touch: zacharyhoule@rogers.com
