VANCOUVER (CCN) — Humid Vancouver summer nights, and the loneliness of a new city just might be the best inspiration Dr. Gerry Turcotte could have asked for when he started writing his latest novel, The Space Between.
“When I moved here [four years ago], I was living in a dingy apartment with no ventilation, no cooling, and every night of that first summer it was 20 degrees and above,” the President and Principal of St Mark’s College told friends and fans gathered for the book’s launch at UBC’s St. Andrew’s Hall. “Not surprisingly, sleep, which is not my friend anyway, didn’t come—I had nothing else to do but to spend the night writing.”
The book was finished in just under five weeks.
The book was launched at an event hosted by Dr. Ross Lockhart, Professor of Mission Studies at Vancouver School of Theology and Dean of non-Catholic St. Andrew’s Hall.
Dr. Turcotte said that, given the novel’s religious themes, he was gratified by Dr. Lockhart’s offer to launch the book, remarking the release was an “ecumenical event.”
“I really thought it needed to be part of the theological neighborhood,” he said.
Before reading from sections of the novel, Dr. Turcotte explained the book’s origins. “This book really emerged out of nowhere,” he said. “Sometimes books are like that. I did a book for Oxford University Press, and it took seven years and it was a misery—almost every line. And then some books just come out of nowhere. This was kind of joyful.”
The Space Between is the spiritual successor to his first novel, Flying in Silence, which was published twenty-five years ago. It follows the life of a young boy (who bears not a small resemblance to his creator) “from boyhood to adult reckoning.”
“I want to emphasize that it is a fictional novel,” Dr. Turcotte told the gathering, “even though it walks a very fine line between episodes of my own life—I’ve used things that are true.”
“It’s a small, playful novel,” Turcotte said. “It’s not Tolstoy… It’s not Toy Story either, but hopefully, it’s got a bit of pathos.”
Like Dr. Turcotte, his protagonist grows up straddling two linguistic worlds—his father couldn’t speak English, and his mother couldn’t speak French. Additionally, “[the story is] largely set in a hardware store,” he said, “a dilapidated, all-consuming business on the brink of bankruptcy, which was indeed my home and my childhood.”
The boy is steeped in religious life and culture, but unlike Dr. Turcotte, he often fails to understand what he experiences, leading to some funny moments.
All the pseudo-biography serves the literary project. “A novelist’s job isn’t to tell the literal truth about something, as much as find a way to talk about what we know in a manner that’s truthful to the human experience,” said Dr. Turcotte, “so this novel blends, and bends, all sorts of things together.”
The Space Between explores the ups and downs of life, with laughter and a palatable amount of self-deprecation. The novel might comfortably share a shelf with the likes of John R. Powers’ The Last Catholic in America.
The novel has four main sections, which revolve around the protagonist’s early faith life and his comic attempts to educate others about the faith (“a lot of the bible is set in Canada, because we know Jesus died in Calgary”); the experience of switching schools; and the boy’s ill-advised attempts to make contact with the opposite sex.
The fourth section, which follows the protagonist’s experience watching his mother descend “suddenly and catastrophically” into illness, almost didn’t happen.
Turcotte told the gathering he originally avoided the final section because it was inspired by his own mother and her experience with illness. “I didn’t want to tell the mother’s story because it is a very tragic story,” he said, “but my mom was a heroic individual, and she said, ‘You know what? you’re going to tell my story, you’re not getting out of it.’”
“She just found a way into the book—but it was not planned.”
