Three stories woven together, not by narrative, but by theme.
The layout of Michael Helm’s new novel, After James, explores a new way of storytelling, allowing the reader to bridge the gaps between three separate tales.
The stories are tied together by theme, rather than narrative, and diverge into different genres.
Helm tackles the bigger questions: Our existence, science versus faith, the connectedness of our world and determining truth from science fiction as the two meld together.
“The novel discusses things like genetic technology, interconnectivity and I think the effect of that is that some of the lines between what’s real and what’s not has become a little uncertain. I think it throws into doubt some of the borders we’re used to living with.”
Nothing is certain in After James.
“If we associate truth with certainty, then maybe some of that truth has eroded,” the Giller Prize finalist said.
The York University associate professor feels that people feel anxiety over these unanswerable questions and the changing world.
Shuswap BookFest will be hosting Helm at the Okanagan College, Oct. 14 at 7 p.m. He will be do a reading and Q&A.
The first story is a horror, a whistle-blowing neuroscientist intending to dig into a pharmaceutical company’s’ creativity drug gone wrong.
The second is a poet, lured to Rome to decode the works of an internet poet who writes about murders with oddly private details and the last is a virologist who discovers her identity has been stolen.
Helm is a person with the ability to write multiple novels at the same time, which was where After James got its start.
The ideas flowed after his last novel, Cities of Refuge, was released in 2010.
“I didn’t really see this one coming,” he said.
Taking six or seven years to process, Helm felt connected to the three stories and would revisit each one depending on the day.
“On any given day I was more interested in story X or story Z and I think that’s how the story came about.”
His goal became to produce “three shorter novels to provide at the end of each some resolution, but to keep alive some mystery.”
The difficulty for Helm was deciding on how to intertwine the stories. When he changed a small detail in one, the other two would be affected.
To dig deeper into the material, the 55 year old spent time travelling to research his novel, which takes place in Rome, Vancouver and Turkey.
He worked on the novel part-time while teaching, working evenings and weekends and is constantly changing the books he is inspired by.
“I’m especially interested in fiction that’s written well from sentence to sentence,” he said.
He enjoys spending time in rural communities like Salmon Arm, which is where he starting his tour.
