On the evidence of Midnight Cab, James Nichol, established as one of Canada’s prominent playwrights, has made a perfectly seamless transition from acts to chapters. This, his first novel, however, is drenched in an intensity of atmosphere and emotion that have long been his stock in trade.
The story itself is enrapturing and demands to be read uninterrupted, such is the intrigue surrounding its central character, Walter Devereux, who is abandoned, aged three, by hismother at a roadside, with no clue as to his identity except a photograph of two girls and an adolescent letter.
Just who are his parents, and why would they abandon him? These are the burning questions that torment Walker and provoke him to undertake a relentless search for his own identity, uncovering, in the process, a series of chilling family secrets.
The trail leads Walker, accompanied by Krista, his invalid lover and work colleague at A.P. Cabs, from Toronto to Jamaica, and eventually into the murderous clutches of Bobby, a sadistic sociopath.
Bobby, it transpires, is Walker’s uncle and was also neglected as a child, by a father who thought military camp would make a man of his mentally deficient son; this only worked, however, to develop Bobby’s psychological dislocation into a clean break from all sense of social propriety.
While such a plot might seem concerningly reminiscent of a Sunset Beach episode, Nichol transports the reader into the mind of a madman and leaves him breathless and disturbed, as Bobby’s trail of ritualistic murder is conveyed in hypnotic, fastpaced prose.
With his mother and father already disposed of, Bobby targets Walter, in an insatiable pursuit of slaughter. By this point in the novel, the intrepid reader, having been ruthlessly harnessed by the gathering momentum of Nichol’s narrative, is rapt to discover whether Walker can break the chain of destruction, or whether the problems of nurture can never be overcome by one’s nature.ARCHIVE: 6th week TT 2004
Midnight Cab
