Environmental cause and effect

Horsefly
by Mirielle Gagńe (translated by Pablo Strauss)

Toronto: Coach House, 2025
$24.95 / 9781552454992

Reviewed by Kenna Clifford

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Mirielle Gagńe’s Horsefly, translated by Victoria-raised Pablo Strauss, binds together environmental cause and effect, body and ecological remembrance with incessant time, and unrelenting seasons.

Gagńe (Le lièvre d’Amérique) weaves between three separate perspectives. There’s Thomas, a young entymologist conscripted to the island of La Grosse-Île to conduct experiments for the war effort. Almost sixty years later, Theodore, a young factory worker, wrestles with an alcohol problem. His only living family is his grandfather, who has long since been hospitalized with violently presenting dementia. Lastly, horseflies swarm the area over the span of the jumps in narrative. 

Gagńe attempts to detail the macroscopic ways in which familial and ecological disintegration overlap, yet falls short in the importance of the small, linguistic minutia, the “subtle congress between beings” that forms the full picture of relational trauma on the self, and the landscape.

Gagńe’s writing style is heavily engaged in the senses. Chapters told from the perspective of the horsefly evoke a sensuality only available to those small enough to feel a blood-pulse beneath the flesh, leaving behind the third-person narration favoured by the other plot lines and effectively writing chapters from the viewpoint of the horsefly, a carnal, anthrax-carrying vampire fuelled by anger and sex, and tantalized by sweat-brined skin. 

These chapters are the most viscerally descriptive and central to the narrative, and work to create a relational dynamic between the two species. Through these, the reader receives information on how horseflies live, breed, and, ultimately, hate; they’re integral points to the pathogenic elements of the storyline. In Thomas and Theodore’s timelines, this strength shines through in foreboding descriptions of place, an “ascepticized fecal odour” emanating from the retirement home, or the symphony of life on La Grosse-Île as “a lull in the tide, a state of waiting crystallized, a tangible stillness engulfing the island.” 

Gagńe’s writing is at once beautiful and morose, ghostly present and whispering each narrative into another through descriptions of squelching riverbed clay, the pain of a bite, and a landscape that is as unrelenting to us as we are to it.

With that said, Gagńes passages tend to slip into heavy-handed foreshadowing and prescriptive exposition: lengthy details of scientific life cycles which break out of an animalistic voice are common throughout the horsefly-centred chapters, breaking the ruse of microscopic scale that would otherwise come from writing in this perspective, and would have been more aptly placed within Thomas’s scientific narrative. A horsefly wouldn’t know the name of the St. Laurence River, for instance, nor the words that we would use to describe its life cycle. It seems counterintuitive to the narrative argument, moreover, perhaps a bit self-indulgent, to believe that a species which views humanity the same way we view horseflies— as biohazardous spreaders, vermin—would learn the colonized names that are used to describe the land.

I had hoped Gagńe’s writing style in these chapters would extend into the taste, touch, smell, of a world that is tethered to ours, yet separate in language, culture, and understanding of the world altogether, by virtue of being told by a different species. 

Thomas’ portion of the book, on the other hand, is written with sub-headers, suggesting that the reader might be viewing the contents of a diary or scientific log and reinforces the formal elements of scientific writing; yet, the prose remains similar to that of Theodore’s storyline, choosing to opt for a standard third-person delivery of the narrative.

Throughout all of the third-person sections of writing, the reader goes back and forth between being kept at arm’s length and receiving tertiary emotional insight that would go beyond the scope of what characters might understand about themselves in the moment. There is little light shed on the inner workings of the characters in either Thomas’s or Theodore’s sections of the book that doesn’t feel stated, presumed, or otherwise written with a sense of hindsight that would not necessarily be available to a character at the time. 

Due to this choice of style, an opportunity to explore the nuances of Theodore and his grandfather’s relationship, how Emeril’s past relates to his family and Theodore’s early memories with him, or the long-term effects that the inhumanity of war has on a family unit is only ever explored at a facile level.

Horsefly is an atmospheric novel that highlights the beauty and terror of Quebec’s landscape, all while considering the past and future of all its inhabitants, human or otherwise. Though the novel speculates on the not-too-unreal questions of ecological disaster and biological revenge, the novel limits its true scope of commentary through decisions regarding narrative angle. Elements of truth are scattered throughout the novel; the real biological experimentation on La Grosse-Île that the narrative was based on looms over the narrative as the geese and the ground.

Kenna Clifford is a writer and filmmaker based in so-called “Vancouver, B.C.” They are the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Semipermeable Press. Her creative nonfiction and reviews are published by RANGE, The Dry River (Crybaby Press), Inkyard Press and SAD Online, as well as on their blog Speculative Fiction. Kenna likes to write about desire, culture, art and memory—and especially the places where all those things touch. [Editor’s note: The review of Horsefly is Kenna’s first contribution to BCR. Welcome ahoy, Kenna!]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors: Trevor Marc Hughes (nonfiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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