Rod Moody-Corbett's ​Hides

Reviewed by Marcie McCauley

(Breakwater Books, 2024)

At first, Rod Moody-Corbett’s Hides is conversational and intimate, with its em-dashes and sentences of such varied lengths that we feel immediately and wholly enveloped in this story of a sessional English lit instructor, who is preparing to return to Newfoundland following the death of a friend’s son.

Soon, however, the narrative is thick. Dense with bursts like “hard-hearted satyr” and “sterile estrangement”: perhaps there will be an “apocalypse of candied cashews and vodka” or perhaps an “aborted bacchanal.”  Though the dialogue is clear and sharp, the exposition—the character’s reflections on all that happened a year ago, and all that happened before that—is heavy.  The vocabulary is studded with “-ck”s and “-x”s that slow the tongue with an “onyx-like shine to the blackness.”

Tinted blood is compared to a Mary Pratt painting (imagine the light reflecting through her row of small preserving jars), and there’s a hardcover copy of Malcolm Lowry’s final novel (imagine the darkness suspended in the empty liquor bottles). And, as if to prove it could be more Canadian yet, someone does their thesis on the tragedy behind Cassie Brown’s Death on the Ice (imagine the silhouettes of 132 seal-hunting men against the ice, where they were marooned off the coast of Newfoundland in 1914—where 78 of them died).

Both St. John’s, Newfoundland and Calgary, Alberta are described in detail: streets and train stations, bridges and bars. “This is not to say that St. John’s vies with any more paternity for that title: home. It doesn’t,” our narrator says. “Though there are times when I miss the island, the people, the sea, the scoured skies and whittled inlets aburst with bawling gulls, I know that to live there again, even contentedly, would be to invite, or court, a kind of sickness.”

Calgary could be seen as the place where he…hides; the novel’s title, however, also refers to the outermost layers of our selves—the border that exists between a body and everything else. Bodies being fragile, borders being permeable, and endings coming too quickly. Bodies of animals because, although the bulk of this story is concerned with two-legged creatures (their insides and their edges), non-human creatures also play a significant role in this story.

The novel’s heart beats loudest at The Castle, which hosts elaborate and luxurious hunts: the narrator and friends and family gather there, at the request of the friend whose son was shot and killed in Calgary where he had been attending classes. The narrator had made some effort to connect with him, inspired by his friendship with the boy’s father; he now reviews those efforts, and how he navigates (and circumvents) relationships more generally, with this fresh awareness of mortality.

What better way to mark a young man’s shooting than to abruptly and violently end the lives of some other animals: the narrator remarks on the irony in the novel’s opening paragraph, so this is a purposeful and inescapable layer of the story. Meeting The Castle’s founder and CEO, he notices that her “eyeglass frames were clear and stylish. You could see into their machinery, the metal of them, through the plastic, as into the limbs of a prehistoric insect, bulbed in amber sap.” Readers are directed to look beyond the surface—beneath the skin.

This decision to acknowledge the death of one animal by killing others is rigorously dissected. But while the distinction between living and dying is foundational, the difference being living and wanting to be alive is paramount. “I didn’t feel exactly suicidal, if that’s even the word,” our narrator observes. “The thought that I might jump out a ten-storey window passed over me like a tiredness, and I reflected that one feels this longing, this incremental descent, always. Always but by degrees. I didn’t want to die; I just didn’t want to be entirely alive at that moment.”

Similarly, the space between two people is acknowledged, but the space between one person and the space previously inhabited by another person is exposed. There is an everyday, ordinary but surprisingly moving scene, in which this specific kind of absence takes shape, towards the end of the novel. Leaning hard into discomfort like this in a narrative can refocus the lens, to highlight for readers what is immovable and what is irretrievable.

Hides could settle on the shelf with novels like Munir Hachemi’s Living Things (in English translation by Julia Sanches), which reflects on similar themes and also invites readers to consider masculinity and class; with Alissa York’s The Effigy, in which taxidermy plays a key role in the lives of characters who navigate loss and love; and with Agustina Bazterrica's Tender is the Flesh (in English translation by Sarah Moses), which also interrogates the predator-prey relationship. And the characters in Hides could go for beers with figures in the fiction of Eva Crocker, David Adams Richards, and Michael Winter.
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The absence is almost overwhelming in Hides: all those discordant vocabulary choices are smothering, and it’s all just so, so—much. But, in the end, those em-dashes curl up into periods, and the syntax tightens so the past is confined in concise phrases that rush us from behind, but then, all that is—at last—left behind. And we realise just how delicately Rod Moody-Corbett has held this whole mess in his storyteller’s grip, how tenderly he has pressed and released this flow of story into readers’ hearts and minds.

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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.