Sens at Land’s End

Puck Lit Project Review #2: When She’s Gone by Steve Lundin

Plot Summary: A young Canadian named Mark, disillusioned with the state of hockey in Canada after the departure of the Jets from his hometown of Winnipeg, goes with his brother Jack to the UK to try out for a goaltending position on a Welsh hockey team. The novel tells the story of their canoe trip from Hadrian’s Wall to Cardiff, as well as stories from Mark’s past about his relationship with his girlfriend Caroline and Mark and Jack’s youth playing hockey, attending Jets games, and canoeing in Manitoba.

Genre: Fiction, Fantasy, Eulogy, Polemic, Adult, Youth Hockey, Mythology, uh … Travel? Very hard to describe.

Hockey Content: The characters attend several Jets games, and the book has quite a few references to the WHA, the Jets’ history, and players who played in Winnipeg over the years along with other real NHL players, and the team Mark is trying out for (the Cardiff Devils) is a real team in the UK’s Elite Ice Hockey League. This is a book that positions hockey as Canada’s greatest national myth, and several episodes from Canadian history are retold in a hockey context. Additionally, there are a few hockey folktales, such as the one about a zombie hockey team. And of course, the main characters play hockey, and there are descriptions of their games as well.

Choice Quotation: “To what god have we sacrificed our most precious myth? And who the hell said we had to and why the hell why in fucking hell did we listen to them?”

My Thoughts: I’m really undecided about this book. I wasn’t crazy about the writing style — the author is one of these people who seems to think writing really long sentences and not using punctuation is automatically “poetic,” which it is not — and some of the plot is just plain nonsensical. On the other hand, I did find the equation of hockey to mythology really interesting, and some of the guy’s rants about the commercialization of the game were well-written. What this book reminded me most of was, oddly, the Angels in America mini-series. I’m not saying When She’s Gone is as good as Angels in America, but I think they share certain themes. They are also both written from a place of real rage and sadness, and they both benefit and suffer from that: on the positive side, the strong emotions make them powerful; on the negative side, the quality of what’s being written is sometimes sacrificed to the strong emotions, if that makes sense.

Rating: 2.5 pucks out of 5. I’ve gone with 2.5 instead of 3 because there’s a fair bit of sex in the book (not to mention the incredible amount of penis talk), so I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who doesn’t want to read that sort of thing. I’m also guessing that the writing style won’t appeal to a lot of people, since it didn’t appeal to me, and the plot may be just too out there for some. But if you’re in the mood to read something that’s very ranty about the state of hockey, or you’re still feeling depressed about the Jets, then you will probably enjoy it. At least parts of it.