Victoria novelist conjures Island disaster

Photos by Will Johnson

A devastating earthquake has ravaged the West Coast. Victoria is completely destroyed. As the survivors pick through the rubble, they‘re tested in hellish ways they’ve never imagined.

After rescuing a mother and her son, Arthur Lear finds himself trekking across the city in search of a lost daughter.

This is how Steven Price’s debut novel Into That Darkness begins.

“I had been wrestling with the idea since 9/11,” said Price, who was attending graduate school in Virginia when the 2001 terrorist attack occurred. “I found myself wondering, what if this happened here?”

Price was fascinated by the culture of hyperbolic fear that came in the wake of the attacks, and the exaggerated rhetoric of politicians like George Bush. However, he thought a terrorist attack didn’t seem suitable for a Canadian setting.

“I was mostly interested in this idea of natural evil, of public cataclysm,” he said.

Subsequent natural disasters over the course of the last decade convinced him that this was a potent topic. Price began work on the novel in 2003 and completed the project last September.

“There were a few times I would hit this stopping point, and I think this is a very Canadian mentality, I’d put it aside and say, ‘This seems extreme and unlikely’, but then another terrible thing would happen in an unexpected place,” said Price.

The recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan are just further examples of the natural disasters that have been plaguing the planet.

“It’s a brutal tragedy,” said Price. When asked about the timing of the disaster with the release of his book, he had to shake his head. “I can’t even think about it in those terms.”

Price is hesitant to classify his work as post-apocalyptic. But he doesn’t think it quite qualifies as speculative fiction either, which has been recently popularized by Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and Year of the Flood.

“This story is less interested in the earthquake,” he said. “It’s more about the question ‘why do bad things happen to good people?’”

Price himself doesn’t have an answer to the question, but he feels that is beside the point.

“I think it’s important to ask certain questions of ourselves and how we see the world, but it’s not as necessary to answer them,” he said.

Price links this questioning back to Voltaire’s controversial work, Candide, which saw the characters trying to reconcile their optimistic world views with the hardships they experience.

“For a long time, people assumed this was the best possible world. And then they see people who are punished and killed for nothing, and they start to question that,” he said.

Price was born in Colwood and has spent most of his life in the Victoria area. Now he teaches fiction and poetry in the creative writing department at UVic. He credits a lot of his success to Canadian author Jack Hodgins, who taught Price when he was an undergraduate.

“He was an amazing teacher,” said Price.

Price is also the author of the award-winning poetry collection Anatomy of Keys.

“Writing is not as glamorous as some people think,” he said. “It’s a lot of sitting around typing, looking out the window, going for long walks.”

Price’s advice for fledgling writers, including his students, is to read as much as they can and to keep working constantly. “I think talent is a lot more common than people think it is,” he said. “It’s more about putting in the hard work.”

Price said he is excited for the launch, but he has already switched gears and begun work on his next book of poetry, an untitled project scheduled for release in 2012.

“You hope people will enjoy the book,” Price said. “Well, if ‘enjoy’ is the right word.”