Late Nights on Air comes daubed with the usual eulogies, yet this is one book that truly merits the ecstatic blurb and more besides. It is Elizabeth Hay’s third novel, after A Student of Weather (2000) and Garbo Laughs (2003), both of which have been lauded in her native Canada and, to a lesser degree, beyond. Late Nights on Air is set largely in the mid-Seventies, in Yellowknife, the main town of Canada’s Northwest Territories. Harry Boyd, edging into his forties, has failed elsewhere, and has come to lick his wounds at the local radio station where his career began. He is joined there by a motley band of fugitives: honey-voiced Dido who fell in love with her father-in-law further south; clumsy ingénue Gwen, in retreat from an uninspiring home town; as well as some monosyllabic, disdainful veterans.
The novel opens in June, ‘the start of the long, golden summer … when northern light held that little radio station in the large palm of its hand’. Under the glare, Hay’s characters twist and turn, their feuds and edgy pacts played out against the implacable wilderness, which sometimes consoles and sometimes appalls them. Hay’s prose is riddled with memorable descriptions: in autumn the sky above Yellowknife is
filled with a moving white fog, which began to shimmer and ripple downwards in long, shaggy icicles, then sideways in draperies of pale green and violet — a huge, heavenly version of the gas flame of a jeweller’s torch shooting out to the side and shifting in colour from white to blue to green to orange.
When winter comes a local woman, Lorna Dargabble, goes for a walk and disappears: ‘Whatever tracks Lorna had made had been covered and wherever she might have gone lay hidden by snow.’
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