Jeff Bursey's Unidentified Man at Left of Photo adopts the "classic" metafictional conceit: a writer writing a novel about writing a novel. The narrator forthrightly acknowledges he is making things up as he goes along, at times providing the moves a novel is expected to make but more often warning the reader such moves have been rejected:
Writing is hard work, often unrewarding, so there's not going to be much effort here to convince you that you're in a version of the so-called real world. Things are told, not shown. Everything's so open-ended you'll soon believe you're writing this yourself. . . .
As it turns out, however, the effort the novel does make proves quite consistent with evoking a semblance of the "real world," precisely because its portrayal of both characters and setting remain "open-ended." As we accompany the narrator through the process of creation, we indeed watch the novel's "world" come into view, but since this is not purely an invented world but the author's recreation of Prince Edward Island (which, indeed, might seem largely uncharted to everyone except Canadians--and perhaps even to many of them), based on his many years as a resident of PEI, the effect is of gaining a slowly developing, ultimately synoptic view of the place (although the novel is more specifically set in Charlottetown).
The characters as well seem both tentatively presented, as if the narrator is not entirely sure what he is going to do with them once they are introduced (with some of the minor characters there are even slippages in identification, the character's name changing even as he/she is invoked), and ultimately part of a broader cross-section of Charlottetown (somewhat more emphasis on the arty/bohemian side of town) that seems all the more convincing because they seem to have been created for no reason other than to be themselves--no "arcs," no moral fables attached to their fates. By the end of the novel, it can't be said the characters have undergone any dramatic transformation, any inner "growth," but this refusal to engage in any of the usual tactics of literary fiction turns out to be the novel's greatest strength.
In addition to the novel's self-reflexive premise, Bursey also incorporates various formal and stylistic stratagems that mark Unidentified Man at Left of Photo as unconventional. One chapter consists of a series of suggestions the narrator has received about what to put in his book, but, he says, "I don't have the ingenuity or energy to work them up," so he presents them as notes. Two chapters, with the same title, are blank. Another chapter is narrated entirely through questions, and photos are inserted at numerous points in the text. None of these gestures are especially radical, but Bursey's ambition seems clearly enough not to break previously untouched formal ground but to enlist an array of unorthodox formal devices in realizing his novel's subject without falling back on the usual novelistic clichés, an ambition the novel does fulfill, although such a strategy arguably threatens to reduce these devices to just more "tools" a writer might use to raise the same old sort of structure.
Bursey resorts to a more traditional type of device--personification--at the novel's conclusion, although the result is decidedly not a typical kind of ending for a novel. (Krasznahorkai's Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming might be a recent analogue, however.) Bursey brings to life a hurricane, Bruce, who exults in the havoc he wreaks throughout the Atlantic basin before he finally makes his way to Prince Edward Island. Bruce is an especially savage hurricane--RAGE! RAGE! RAGE! KILL!KILL!KILL! is his refrain--as he ignores the advice given by the ghosts of hurricanes past to "stay away from Nova Scotia," but retains enough strength to reach Prince Edward Island, anyway. Thus Bursey essentially destroys the fictional PEI he has endeavored to create, perhaps a final reminder that the setting has been a composed illusion all along. Some readers might regard this inverted deus ex machina as trivializing the achievement of that illusion, but the author might retort: this is a novel, and the end is the end.
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