Paul Serge Forest's Everything is Ori

Reviewed by Marcie McCauley

(QC Fiction, 2023)

It begins between Pentecost and Trinity Sunday on the calendar, between the rivers Pentecost and Trinity in the landscape of Quebec. Paul Serge Forest’s debut novel, Everything Is Ori, falls somewhere between a tall tale and an epic, so readers get something between a crime caper and a philosophy lesson.

The narrative is pinned between opening and closing scenes, one a feast and the other a marvel: “The rest of the story was as tough to get to as the bottom of an old wound. You could only look at the scar and imagine the rest.” And what is a scar but the between part of a once-oozing wound?

​Forest thrusts readers into a vibrant tableau at the Lelarge family gathering, with evidence of their seafood empire all around and the highest stakes: “Like any delicacy, seafood has more than one way of killing you, but the Lelarges had never really given that much thought. Until then, they’d always blamed the vomiting on the booze the night before.”
 
Through more than four hundred pages, bodily fluids are abundant and situations visceral. Whether bloodied or lust-fuelled, the scenes are boldly drawn, often with a disconcerting touch of whimsy:

​Lawrence had just hung himself with the metal handle of his clam bucket in his brother’s shed—for such a nice neck of the woods, the North Shore sure sees a lot of suicides. He did such a good job that, when his wife found him in a pool of blood, his bald head had rolled ten feet away from his body.

​Readers don’t see it coming from the “neck of the woods,” but the severance scene is grisly. (And, don’t forget about that ten feet space between a man’s head and his body.) The same tone delivers other significant—but not morbid—developments: “One morning, Florence went off on a yellow-orange school bus to Bay Secondary in Baie-Comeau and came home that night with breasts.”
 
Florence plays a key role in the Lelarge family’s story, but her younger sister, Laurie is centre-stage: “Laurie could do air quotes like nobody’s business. Her face almost took on the shape of two fingers flexing their rabbit ears.” She’s in the fourth grade when Florence comes home with her breasts, and both girls are grown by the last chapter.
 
Time moves steadily but strangely through the novel. The narrative proper is disrupted by ten intermissions about sea creatures: clams, crabs, shrimp, urchins, mussels, lobsters, Arctic surfclams, whelks and winkles, razor clams and scallops. These contain everything you might imagine wanting to know but perhaps very little truth: “Razor clams sever continuity. What an intermission does with time, they do with substance.”
 
In some ways, they serve as indicators of change: “A between is a disruption between two states of being.” One remarkable development across the breadth of the novel is the changing relationship between the community and the seafood factory and industry, an emergence of a new order. Just as changes unfold in the characters’ lives—personal loves and losses—the empire’s powers shift.
 
Time and change figure in the bawdy, libidinous side of the story too: “Afterwards, [after sex] she would feed him tea or oranges. Such was the smelly score of their secrecy: incense, damp rock, musky obese buttocks, sweat, tea, oranges.” Power dynamics are at work here, also.
 
Ultimately, the pacing hinges on this concept: “Predators charge; prey flee; humans hesitate.” Once again, readers inhabit the between. The bulk of the novel resides in the quiet spaces where characters grope towards meaning. It’s as though they are trying to translate what’s expected to have meaning into the bare bones of their lives, seeking something else but finding only echoes:  

​The repetition of the same word underscored that it was not the same word, that something more had to be considered, a profound difference between the word and its repetition. Maybe that was how the toxin worked: by seeking within a thing what makes it a thing.

There’s a literal facet of translation in the narrative too (beyond the translation from the French by David Warriner) when “The Isume Conglomerate of Tones, Colours, Pigments, Molluscs, and Crustaceans” emerges in the story. When a character in the novel is tasked with learning Japanese, the question of how many ways there are to say the same thing, and the capacity for being misunderstood, take on a fresh importance.

Readers must stretch to locate their own understanding, must wonder whether the intermissions comprise the more honest story—the salient bits that make a story of this story. Actions are relayed but rarely interpreted, so one character could be either a “civil servant in need of intrigue, a competent malacologist, or the village idiot. Perhaps all three. That’s for you to decide.”
 
Beyond characterisation, readers face bigger questions:

“Where do people go when they disappear? What becomes of their lives? How do they experience consciousness?” Laurie wanted to know.

“That’s not that important,” Florence didn’t want to go there.
​
“No. No. It is important,” Mori acknowledged. “Important and unknowable.”

​It's a lot of reading to land on unknowable. But it’s not unexpected. As one character’s experience is described, early in the novel—“Outside, he felt cold on his left side, and hot on his right”—readers must expect a state of discomfort, a sense of being caught in a net of possibilities.

Everything Is Ori is a sprawling narrative in which unanswerable questions pull the cords tight, overflowing with intimate details about—well, everything.
 
And, yet, there’s something charming about it. The sense that this is a story told around a fire in a barrel outside the loading docks of a once-bustling factory. We readers, we know everything now: and it’s just between us. 

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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.