Book Review: “On the Ravine” by Vincent Lam
The Long Road to Recovery
If you’re Canadian and follow Canadian writing, you will need no introduction to Vincent Lam. He’s a very respected writer who astounded me by winning the Scotiabank Giller Prize for his first book, the 2006 short story collection Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures. It is rare for a first-time author to win such a prestigious award, and to do with a collection of stories — which typically don’t attain the same readership numbers and acclaim that novels do. After that feat, he published his first novel, The Headmaster’s Wager, in 2012, which was met with warm applause. Thus, if you can do the math, it has taken about a little more than a decade between that novel and his latest, On the Ravine, so you can say that Lam is not a prolific writer. The reason is that he’s an addictions physician living in Toronto, Canada, and God only knows how busy doctors can be — I have to wonder how he finds the time to write and do it so well. Well, On the Ravine draws upon his experience working in the addictions field and also recycles a character or two from Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures. One feels that this is a deeply personal book and one that is tough to read as it was to write because Lam infuses his troubled characters with deep humanity and watching them stumble can be, at times, heartbreaking.
At the heart of On the Ravine is the doctor-patient relationship between an addictions physician named Chen and a promising young classical violinist named Claire. As the novel progresses, they develop more of a platonic friendship with Chen desperately doing everything in his power to keep Claire clean — even if that sometimes involves administering tough love, though sometimes letting Claire be herself. Claire’s struggles begin as a music student overseas in Europe when she is prescribed painkillers to deal with a shoulder injury she attained that caused problems for her violin playing. Back in Toronto, she goes on to become addicted to first heroin and then fentanyl. She struggles to recover, though she frequently slips, and hopes to both stay alive and keep alive her passion for playing music. The main problem in her life is her sister, the cleverly named Molly (which is slang for ecstasy on the streets), who is her enabler and keeps her hooked on the junk. Woven into this narrative are a couple of subplots: one involving a former doctor who has lost his licence because he supplies clean drugs and needles to his “clients” in his once upscale home in the tony Rosedale neighbourhood of Toronto. The other subplot involves an experimental drug dubbed “Memorex” that could help cure addicts of their addictions being pushed for drug trials on humans.
The big selling point of this book is the human interactions between characters and the struggles they endure to recover from their vices. In an author’s note that precedes the novel, Lam talks about On the Ravine as being a novel about desire: the desire to stay clean, the desire to keep using, the desire to make music, and the desire to help other people. To that, the novel is successful in showing that the road to recovery is not always easy, especially when drugs such as methadone are prescribed to help addicts withdraw from their illicit substances. It’s a fine balance, this novel says, trying to keep addicts on their prescriptions while balancing their addictions and wants for more of the thing that could kill them. Lam offers no handholding here: he’s very clinical about the language he uses and readers without a knowledge of the narcotics subculture may very well get slightly lost. However, in doing so, he is perhaps offering a commentary about how dispassionate the doctor-patient relationship can sometimes be, and also offers a sneak peek into the politics of getting new drugs that can help addicts recover in pharmacies.
On the Ravine shows Lam to be an exceptionally talented writer, one who has matured since his last novel. I found The Headmaster’s Wager to be a great novel about the Vietnam War, but my recollection of it is that it had multiple endings and was perhaps a little long — the product of the book being that difficult first novel to write. I’m probably wrong in offering that assessment because the whole point of that book was to show how difficult it is to escape from countries where violence and oppression are a day-to-day reality and the importance of having socially progressive countries such as Canada as havens to those trying to escape. Thus, the overlength was perhaps a means to an end. Still, On the Ravine shows Lam’s growing command of the novel and his ability to weave various strands of thought and plots together. It is a predictable tale, but then it is not. You know there are going to be tragedies, but you are caught off-guard as to who these tragedies occur. And with tragedy comes loss. If anything, On the Ravine shows that there’s a cost in dealing with the human side of the opioid crisis.
Still, this is a hopeful book — one that suggests that it may be possible to live something of a normal life even if you are troubled by the spectre of addiction. All in all, while On the Ravine has its blemishes — I wanted to know more of Molly and Claire’s backstory as siblings, which may have explained why they were so susceptible to abusing street drugs — it is a crucial Canadian text about a serious problem facing society. On the Ravine offers no easy fixes, per se, even when “cures” seem to work. But that’s what makes it so captivating, and it offers a springboard for discussions in group contexts about a problem that isn’t going to magically disappear and probably requires a degree of tough talk to reveal the extent of the problem and what to do about it. To that end, On the Ravine is another feather in the remarkable writing cap of Vincent Lam — even more so given the extended length of time we must wait for the output of his second chosen career.
Vincent Lam’s On the Ravine will be published by Knopf Canada on February 28, 2023.
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