Late Nights on Air

Categories: Staff Picks , Fiction

Maybe it’s something about radio.  I really loved Penelope Fitzgerald’s Human Voices, a marvelous little novel about the BBC during World War II.  Now here’s a Canadian novel about a radio station crew, Elizabeth Hay’s Late Nights on Air, and I’m charmed and impressed by it, too.

It’s 1975 in the little town of Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories.   Here we meet Harry Boyd, an old-time radio man who is acting as temporary station manager.  Harry was once a promising young broadcaster till he had a shameful failure in TV and got this second chance in this backwater radio station.  He and Eleanor Dew, the cool, competent receptionist, hold the station together as they wait for corporate decisions on its fate.  Two new staff members join them, rookie Gwen Symon and Dido Paris, a glamorous new announcer. 

Harry falls hard for Dido, but she warns him from the start that she’s not going to be good for him.  While the station is unsettled by office romance and the looming threat of a new TV station, new alliances form.  Harry, Gwen, Eleanor, and a fourth staff member decide to take a canoe trip into the wilderness nearby, tracing a famous (and fatal) early twentieth-century expedition into the Barrens.  The results of that trip are just as fateful in deciding the station crew’s alliances and future.  Meanwhile, the fate of the whole country is being affected by decisions over a proposed gas pipeline across the territory.

Rich and quirky and told with deceptive simplicity, this is a lovely work of fiction, as seductive and intimate as the sound of midnight radio voices.  Hay captures a vivid sense of time and place both lost to change and conveys a lively impression of the characters (in every sense) peopling that time and place.  Her earlier novel A Student of Weather got critical international attention, and this one is only going to add to her reputation.