WE'LL ALL BE BURNT IN OUR BEDS SOME NIGHT

By Joel Thomas Hynes. Toronto: Harper Collins, 2017.

Johnny, a young Newfoundland man with a criminal record and an absolutely horrific childhood is awaiting trial for assaulting his girlfriend. When she fails to show up for court due to having died of a drug overdose, Johnny is tasked with transporting her ashes to Vancouver in order to scatter them in the Pacific Ocean.

I downloaded this book from the website of the CNIB Library for the Blind. It was in the Humour section. However, it wasn’t funny at all.

Nevertheless, this was a novel I wanted to like. Johnny is a character I could have gotten into and Hynes does a really good job at giving the reader a sense of place.

However, I ended up disliking this book for so many reasons.

First of all, the time period it is set in is unclear. Johnny can remember the cod moratorium in 1992 when he was a child but he says he remembers listening to “Sex With Sue” on the radio, which I would have to assume meant Sue Johansen, who was on AM 640 for a brief period in the mid-nineties, when he was sixteen and evading police in an  old shack.

Second, at one point, after being seriously injured by a group of teenage girls in some prairie town, Johnny walks out of the hospital, hot-wires a car and drives to Grand Forks, BC, something someone in his condition would never have been able to pull off.

Third, realistically, nobody is going to pick up a dirty, smelly, battered young hitchhiker, especially not one with two teardrops tattooed on his face.

Fourth, Johnny can’t at all stop being a complete jerk ruled by his impulses. He robs a store the day he picks up his girlfriend’s ashes (just after getting off on an assault charge) and in general never quite grasps he should make a serious effort at starting anew.

Fifth, nobody along the way truly tries to reach Johnny. We learn about Johnny’s past mainly through his thoughts. Nobody along his route ever actually is able to take any real pity on him and encourage him with that new start he so desperately needs to make.

Sixth, of course Johnny dies at the end. (Yes, I just unexpectedly spoiled the ending. Deal with it.) No trying to work things out or make things right. No actually making it to Vancouver with the urn intact, scattering the ashes and getting a pleasant surprise that would have gladdened the reader and helped Johnny turn his life around.

All in all, don’t waste your time on this book, especially since CBC is promoting it so heavily.