www.philipquinn.ca
"Writer "
Quill & Quire -- March 2010
The Skeleton Dance
Philip Quinn, $18 paper 978-1-89753-504-2, 168 pp. 5 ¾ X 8, Anvil Press
For Robert Walker, the tormented mid-thirties anti-hero of Philip Quinn’s second novel, there’s “Always something breached, open, some wound, hole….Some box you’re trying to get out of, or into.” Ruptures and imprisonments figure prominently in the novel, a hallucinatory horror story that mercilessly traces its protagonist’s relentless downward spiral.
At the novel’s outset, Robert—a washout musician who
now slings advertising copy from the 21st floor of a downtown
Toronto tower—is mourning the recent death of a close friend. Faithless and
hopeless, he turns to his long time pal, Klin Abram, for distraction. The
friendship, however, is jagged. Klin, an arrogant criminal lawyer with a
shady client roster, boats a hefty cocaine habit, a disturbing aggressive
streak, and an unscrupulous tendency toward self-preservation. It’s Klin who
embroils Robert in a seedy, violent entanglement with the Diamondbacks, a
notorious
Robert is not a particularly likeable guy. Within the first few pages, he brutally manhandles a hooker until her “fake she-male padding is shredded”. He has an affair with Klin’s mother. And he somehow manages to remain in an unconcerned, blessed-out state during a gunfight that leaves a stripper dead. Glutted by “the clay of memory” and bent on executing his “own rush ending”, Robert routinely cokes up and fucks his way through anguish and regret, while the Diamondbacks terrorize what’s left of him. Though his ride is unnerving, Robert spends much of his journey mired in resignation, self-pity and disavowal.
The terrain of The Skeleton Dance is marked by violation and futility which Quinn renders with finesse –from a “black hole” Parkdale crack house to a Forest Hill “situation where it’s like Fellini; crazy high-priced whores and society cunts and their admirers” to the “aching guts, the water soap lather blood” of the Don Jail.
But what’s most interesting about the novel is its examination of masculinity and sexuality—in particular, Robert’s ambivalence about desire, his convoluted “queer knot”, and the suggestive fissures through which he and Klin interact. At its heart, The Skeleton Dance is a love story, but one from which “beauty’s long gone.”
Lisa Foad, author of The Night Is A Mouth (Exile Editions)
