The Father of Rain by Martin West
The Father of Rain
by Martin West
Anvil Press, 2023; 346 pages, $22.95
Review by Pat Mackenzie
The Father of Rain begins when the parents of two adolescent boys vanish from their middle class Abbotsford home without a trace within a year and a half of one another. placed into the care of their grandparents, Cirrus and his younger brother Stan suddenly find themselves living in Vancouver — rendered in these pages as equally sordid and surreal. After all, this is Vancouver of the early 1980s — the transition years that would see Vancouver drink deeply from the poisoned cup of neoliberal orthodoxy. And it is here in the urban landscape where Cirrus, unstable and unreliable first-person narrator (whose name may or may not refer to high altitude cloud formations, or a tendril), takes up an obsessive, and indeed depraved, search for answers regarding his parents’ disappearance.
“The evil waits with predictable lethargy… Not in dilapidated opium dens disguised as stuccoed grocery stores or industrial warehouses where stolen property lurked at midnight. . . The economic crash had come. Good surf was over, and jobs were running out. Conservatives were taking power all over the world… The good fight just wasn’t worth fighting anymore. The year was 1981.” It is immediately after Cirrus makes this observation that Russell Hobbes, former small-town bully (also from Abbotsford) turned ambitious criminal with entrepreneurial aspirations, enters the narrative. Russell, as his last name no doubt implies, is completely mercenary and self-interested — a necessary product of the just begun neoliberal era. “Fascism, man. Fascism is coming back,” Russell exclaims to Cirrus, followed by, “Nobody tells me what to do. In the New World order, the strong survive. The weak perish. You need the proper friends. We have a mailing list. Give me a cancelled cheque and they’ll send you the newsletter.”
Despite Russell’s fascistic sympathies, or perhaps because of them (fascism, if anything, deals in absolutes and hierarchies and Cirrus is in desperate need of grounding, order, and direction), Cirrus and Russell enter into a criminal enterprise of what amounts to high-end B-and-Es carried out mainly at night. Cirrus provides a description of a “typical evening:” “The plan was to penetrate the low-level security facility and make off with an experimental antipsychotic medication that could be only got with a Solicitor General’s note. Which, of course, our client did not have. The clinic was an experiment in privatization that the provincial government was undertaking with wild abandon, so I felt no moral qualms about the venture.”
Although much of the novel revolves around Russell and Cirrus’s criminal association and moral, how shall I put it, elasticity — author Martin West captures their criminality mainly through dialogue (Cirrus’s position on the matter of culpability is ambiguous at best, any proceeds from their B-and-Es are spent on certain sexual appetites — more on that later — and Russell’s are unsurprisingly of a self-interested if-I-don’t-do-it-somebody-else-will type of base opportunism) — it is in Cirrus’s “relationship” with the dominatrix Azy where the narrative becomes far more morally and, presumably purposely, fraught.
Initially meeting Azy through Russell — indeed the two appear to symbolize two sides of the same morally vacant coin — Cirrus is soon drawn into a world of S and M parties where he gladly pays Azy to be tied, whipped, asphyxiated, prodded, and left bleeding. Azy is both beautiful and cruel, disdainful, and like a moth to a flame, irresistibly attractive. Like a black hole, like a corrupt economic order invented by a bunch of half-wit economists from the university of Chicago designed for the benefit of the few, everything is directed towards her.
Written in first-rate prose that is equally surreal and specific, The Father of Rain presents people living in an unstable and ungrounded world where the the rules of civility have been abandoned in favour of a cruel individualism. In a way, the disappearance of Cirrus’s parents symbolizes the disappearance of the welfare state — one of the stated goals of the neoliberal project — the absence of which, among other things, reduces the individual to a mere object in service to those in power.