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230 pages, Kindle Edition
First published June 3, 2009
"It isn't courage, Erica, it's exactly the opposite. There's nothing good about it. It's exactly like running away from everything that matters, and I wish I could make you understand that. ... I've never moved to anywhere in my life. When I show up in a city ... I'm not arriving anywhere, I'm only leaving somewhere else." (p.78)One thread of the narrative follows Eli, who receives a strangely worded postcard from a stranger, Michaela, a month after Lilia's departure, providing a vital lead as to her whereabouts. He takes leave from his mundane job at an art gallery and applies his meagre savings to pursuing Lilia across the border into her native Québec, Canada, hoping to find his enigmatic girlfriend and tell her how much he needs her in his life. He makes contact with beguiling exotic dancer Michaela, developing a platonic relationship with her over the course of several meetings at cafés and 24-hour diners in the small hours. Despite repeated assurances that she knows where Lilia is and will eventually reveal that information to him, Michaela refuses to do so until Eli trades his knowledge of a shocking incident from Lilia's past.
"His only part in the story: to observe and remember the chain of events. Not all of us will be cast in the greatest dramas. Someone has to remember them. ... Or perhaps it's just this: memory is too unreliable to entrust a story to the hero alone. Someone else has to have observed the chain of events to lend credibility; if no one else remembers your story, how are you to prove that it was real?" (p.175)Meanwhile, two intertwined narrative threads take us back in time. The first depicts Lilia Albert's abduction from her mother's home south of Montréal at age seven, and the intervening years spent traveling back and forth across the United States with her father, avoiding the scrutiny of authorities and gaining an informal education along the way. The second follows Montréal police officer - turned private detective Christopher Graydon, as he agrees to review the case of the missing Lilia, slowly becoming so obsessed that his work and family life fragment irretrievably.
"You know what bothered me about it? Everyone was supposedly committed to the pursuit of truth and beauty, or at least one of those things, but no one was actually doing anything about it, and it seemed all wrong to me. The inertia, I mean. The inertia made everything seem fraudulent. There we were, talking about art, but no one was doing anything except Lilia. ... no one was doing anything important except her. She worked as a dishwasher, she lived cheaply, she took beautiful pictures and translated things. She never made any money off it, it was just something she did. The point is, she never talked about it. She never seemed like she was posing. She never theorized or deconstructed. She just practised her art, practised it instead of analysing it to death, and it rendered the rest of us fraudulent. There aren't many people in the world..." (p.146)A major current through the novel is the drive Lilia has to keep on the move, a drive that is so much more powerful and insidious than mere wanderlust or "itchy feet" that occur in the context of an otherwise functional life. There are clear signs that there's more to her abduction than might first appear, and she's conscious that she's unable to remember details of her childhood prior to her father scooping her into his arms on that snowy winter night. She's only aware of a nebulous shadowy presence that compells her to keep running - but why?
"How deep in our genes is the longing for flight embedded? We always were a species of nomads. Eli found it easy to imagine an instinct passed down generation to generation, a permanently thrown breaker on a genetic switchboard: fight or flight, and a switch jammed permanently in the flight position, the limitless longing for travel pulled down by hooked genes." (p.160-1)Last Night in Montreal is in many respects an unsettling read. While we gradually develop an investment in each of the characters, they're complex and not entirely likeable individuals. There are highs in the story of Lilia's life on the road with her father, but much of the present day narrative is fairly bleak, including the shocking but poignant ending. Emily St. John Mandel's rendering of the brutal Montréal climate is fitting for the mood of a story that possibly raises more questions than it answers about the human condition.