Christophe Bernard's ​The Hollow Beast

Reviewed by Marcie McCauley

(Biblioasis, 2024)

There’s great potential for a series of jokes with a “puck stops here” punchline in Christophe Bernard’s debut novel, The Hollow Beast (translated from the French by Lazer Lederhendler), which is more than six hundred pages long and spirals around a controversial call made by a referee during a hockey game.

One needn’t follow hockey to understand the twinned sense of triumph and injustice for the historic teammates, however; Bernard traces the event’s impact across three generations, entertaining readers with scenic inanity—and insanity—and a string of zingy metaphors.

By rotating through perspectives of the originators and the descendants, alongside rivals and allies in the community, The Hollow Beast recalls other larger-than-life Québécois novels like Eric Dupont’s Songs for the Cold of Heart (trans. Peter McCambridge) and Paul Serge Forest’s Everything Is Ori (trans. David Rarriner); but it also displays the playful-yet-melancholic tone of classic fiction by Jacques Poulin and Antonine Maillet. In Maillet’s Pélagie, too, a hundred years had passed since a family member committed an unforgiveable and unforgettable sin—echoes resounding generations later.

Bernard’s readers witness scenes in both timelines in this ancestral tale of pride and resentment; they enjoy (and suffer) the process of determining the justifiable and inexcusable, identifying the righting of wrongs and the ranting of disappointments. Initially, sympathies lie with the goalie, but complications ensue. It’s a fine line between a curse and a conspiracy, two characters muse. But it’s clear that neither is desirable: better not to be conspired against, not to be cursed.

Several hundred pages revolving around either a curse or a conspiracy (let alone both, potentially) would make for dark reading indeed. But Bernard keeps it light—literally. François, for instance, notices “a crack of light at the bottom of the opposite wall, as though this was where the darkness came unzipped.” Driving through town at dusk, one can see “perfectly synchronized flashes in the windows of the more affluent houses or the homes of poor folks with misplaced priorities.” Shadows lengthen in headlights on an overpass, the dome light inside a taxi “pushed the night aside”, and a fridge light sweeps across foil “like the middle of a photocopier.”

Sunbeams are “splintered by branches”, and the nighttime explodes “into polygonal suns”: the light in Bernard’s story is sometimes as overwhelming as the nefarious story elements. The narrative is literally colourful, too, and not only the snowshoes—one pair cobalt blue, the other fuchsia. Even an article of clothing, like a blouse, could have a geometric print that “turned your pupils into asterisks.”  A blouse like that could do some damage, it could leave a mark: violence lurks in ordinary and unlikely places.

There is a kaleidoscopic energy to the building blocks of this story, and the cumulative effect pulses with an almost unbridled energy. When a hospital tray goes flying, there is “chicken juice, little green peas, purple Jell-O everywhere.” In a car accident, weightlessness overtakes the car’s interior: “Cardboard fir tree, briefcase, hockey bag, screws, screwdriver, Canada exercise book, leftover ethnic food and related menu, everything floated around.” In an insurance advertisement, the “laid-back, physically fit seventy-year-olds against a background sunset” are imagined, with the correct coverage, to fracture into “a shower of green, red, and brown banknotes” for their fictional descendants.

This persistent sense of chaos creates a space for the beast to slip—“away in puckish whorls of photons”—so that one might pursue it into the forest. This beast seems to shape-shift at the margins of the story—once described as mocking, once as “rare”, and the title itself is yet another descriptor—but there is little-to-no incentive to unravel its true nature, so long as the antics of the other characters in the novel maintain this well-illuminated and high-energy presence. In another sense, the beast is the story.

There is room for all possibilities in Gaspésie, which amounts to more than “the Historic Site of the Battle of the Restigouche and Percé Rock.” Where people “are generally very fine folk, but they aren’t put together the same as others.” Where there is only one traffic light. Where news about anyone who’s published in Le Vivier means a fifty-fifty chance of front-page status (it being a two-sided sheet). Gaspésie: “North of a certain latitude, where the cute red-hatted centaurs known as Mounties grew scarce, the laws had to be entirely overhauled.”

It's a fine line between lawful and lawless in a place where it’s so cold that “clothes bent nowhere but at the joints, making a noise like chips between a set of molars.” So cold, even, that a crack between the worlds could open: “One world where they had their mothers, grandmothers, sisters, aunts, nieces, wives. Like anyone else. And another where they were alone among themselves, a situation liable to get out of hand….” And, oh, it does get out of hand. It’s a fine line between a joint’s extreme flexibility and its fracturing.
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Then, it’s over. The door of the story slams shut “so hard you’d have thought he’d just shut in a velociraptor.” Although readers reach the last page, there’s really no way to end a story like this, because that inherited resentment is still on its hinges and a mere thought could blow it all open again. But Bernard constructed The Hollow Beast so that it’s rich enough to reread, for anyone prepared to share close quarters with a velociraptor. 

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​Marcie McCauley's work has appeared in Room, Other Voices, Mslexia, Tears in the Fence and Orbis, and has been anthologized by Sumac Press. She writes about writing at marciemccauley.com and about reading at buriedinprint.com. A descendant of Irish and English settlers, she lives in the city currently called Toronto, which was built on the homelands of Indigenous peoples—Haudenosaunee, Anishnaabeg, Huron-Wendat and Mississaugas of New Credit—land still inhabited by their descendants.