Rise and Shine

Ghostly writer: Author Robert J. Wiersema. (Steve Carty/CBC)

For an aspiring novelist, Robert J. Wiersema spent several years in just about the best and worst situation. The former student of University of Victoria’s creative writing program (he dropped out to complete an English degree) co-ordinated author events at Victoria’s famed Bolen Books. He was a little like a literary Tantalus: a guy with a drawer full of unpublished manuscripts and rejection letters who was surrounded by successful writers, literary agents and book publicists.

So Wiersema came up with a plan. He would establish himself as a respected book critic, writing reviews for the Quill & Quire, the Vancouver Sun, the Globe and Mail and the Ottawa Citizen. He called it his “audition for publishers.” And it worked. After writing dozens of reviews over a three-and-a-half-year period, Wiersema called up publishers and agents to tell them about the latest novel he’d been toiling over.

“A few years before, I had sent out an earlier novel and was completely frustrated. This time, everyone I spoke to knew my name. And everyone I contacted asked to read the book,” he says, sitting in a light-filled boardroom at his publisher’s Toronto offices. The 35-year-old author looks every bit the West Coast creative type, with his goatee and shaggy hair. He jokes that he’s “ill-equipped for anything else but writing.”

Before I Wake, Wiersema’s page-turning debut, was released in August with a serious promotional push by his publisher Random House and a larger-than-usual print run. The book has received rave reviews across the country and has already been sold in the U.S. and the U.K. It is currently being shopped around for a film adaptation. Wiersema, who started writing stories when he was seven, says that Before I Wake is his “fourth or fifth first novel. Thankfully, all its predecessors, which were very standard, thinly veiled autobiographical coming-of-age stories set in small-town Canada” — he rolls his eyes in mock horror — “are lost now to the mists of time.”

(Random House Canada)

Before I Wake is an unlikely CanLit hit in a season that boasts new releases by Margaret Atwood (Moral Disorder) and Alice Munro (The View from Castle Rock), as well as highly anticipated new works by literary fiction heavy-hitters David Adams Richard (The Friends of Meager Fortune), Wayne Johnston (The Custodian of Paradise) and Mary Lawson (The Bridge). These are the kind of acclaimed, much-admired novels that cover the territory that Canadian writers love — finely woven, thoughtful stories about life in a small prairie town, or a remote Maritimes village during the Great Depression, or the Second World War.

Wiersema’s book, on the other hand, is a contemporary spiritual thriller set in Victoria. Three-year-old Sherilyn Barrett, the beloved, long-awaited child of yuppie couple Karen and Simon, is hit by a speeding truck after she briefly lets go of her mother’s hand at a crosswalk. Karen is driven mad by her guilt, while normally stoic Simon can’t bear his grief and seeks solace with his mistress, Mary. When a doctor explains that Sherilyn will never wake up from her coma, Karen and Simon decide to take their little girl off life support. But then the first of a series of miracles occurs. Sherilyn doesn’t die. Instead, in her peaceful, limbo-like state, the little girl begins to heal people: first the arthritis of her nurse, then a terminal cancer patient. Meanwhile, Henry, the hit-and-run truck driver who struck Sherilyn, commits suicide — only to find himself caught between life and death as well, a refugee ghost among other immortals at the Victoria Public Library.

If forced to describe Before I Wake in the “blank-meets-blank” jargon of the book cover blurb, then it’s “Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code meets Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials Trilogy” — an age-old battle between good and evil set against contemporary life.

That’s not at all surprising. Wiersema is influenced as much by the fantasy writing of Neil Gaiman and William Gibson as he is by the CanLit canon, making Before I Wake both literary and populist. And that’s no easy fit for Canadian fiction, he says, which makes the novel’s reception all the more gratifying.

“[Canada is] known around the world for our writers, rightly so. We have a literary culture that includes Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Michael Ondaatje, you could go on and on. But as far as CanLit goes, that’s it. We have the upper crust, but there’s no filling,” Wiersema says. “Our genre writers and commercial writers generally publish out of the U.S.: Charles De Lint, Robert Charles Wilson, Tanya Huff, William Gibson, Nalo Hopkinson. We do publish certain commercial writers — like Giles Blunt at Random House, or Penguin with Jack Whyte and Guy Gavriel Kay. But all of those people are published within a certain literary structure, because there’s no existing commercial structure in this country.

“I like stories. I’m not a strong prose stylist. And so many of our writers are gifted prose stylists. Their sentences just shine. ... I don’t have the chops to write a beautiful objet. I write stories. That being said, [this book] is still grounded in the fundamentals. ... It’s rooted in strong characters and big ideas. But at the same time it’s got the narrative momentum that I like.”

Wiersema credits his wife, Cori Dusmann, who he met in university, for introducing him to fantasy and speculative fiction. “I was the snotty, undergraduate creative writing student who felt that books that people were actually buying, and reading and enjoying were beneath me somehow. I mean, I hadn’t even read [JRR] Tolkien.”

As for Before I Wake’s spiritual overtones, Wiersema says he is neither a practising Christian, nor is he, like Pullman, intent upon exposing religious hypocrisy. Wiersema attended Sunday school classes at United Church in Agassiz, B.C., while he was growing up. He says what he took away from that experience “was a lot of great stories. A lot of the stuff I read — urban fantasy, contemporary fantasy, high fantasy — is very liberal in its borrowing from other cultures and other faiths: Celtic mythology, Norse mythology, things like that. But [what] we haven’t had a whole lot of is stuff drawn from the Christian faith.”

What most intrigued Wiersema was the question of how non-believers would deal with evidence of miracles. “Is it possible to be good without God? That’s what interested me. Because the religious right, particularly in the U.S., has, in the last 10 or 15 years, co-opted the idea of righteousness. There’s a de facto judgment that if you are not of the faith, you can’t be good. And I just cannot believe that. I think that’s what you see the characters going through in this book. They’re trying to be as good as they can be without [using] religion as a crutch.”

Before I Wake is published by Random House.

Rachel Giese writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

CBC does not endorse and is not responsible for the content of external sites - links will open in new window.