Tyler Enfield’s Like Rum-Drunk Angels // Charlotte Simmons

“Space. Time. The harmony of the planets.” This is the imagery we’re given as Francis Blackstone, our 14-year-old protagonist fromNowhere, Arizona, sees a pair of breasts for, presumably, the first time. Coupled with a chapter that successfully makes catapult-enabled pianos as graceful as a hawk, among countless other things, it’s apparent right away that Tyler Enfield’s Like Rum-Drunk Angels (GooseLane Editions, 2020) turns the historically mundane into the psychedelically evocative, and the far less mundane into something even more grandiose.

Francis Blackstone is too soulful for his own good. We’re treated to his point of view for most of the story, and his surroundings need only give him the tiniest push to get him going. Indeed, Enfield finds ways to weave Francis’s complex and sometimes intense insights and emotions into every paragraph where our protagonist is present. Simultaneously, this otherworldly fascination that Francis seems to possess gets the better of him, and the resulting chaos is just as entertaining: “He doesn’t know where he is going, though he is firm in the belief that speed is somehow necessary. Everything is imperative. There is no time to lose. He is lost and clueless and utterly alive.

His fellow westerners would never be able to tell. Francis’s tongue is as sharp as they come, and whether he’s flirting, flexing his smartass muscle, or anything in between or beyond, I couldn’t help but cheekily smirk when he interacted with any other character.

I found LikeRum-Drunk Angels to be much more digestible than most other novels I’ve read, as well. This is done through a combination of present-tense, third-person storytelling, and incredibly short sub-chapters within each act. This makes each scene much more intimate and individual, almost allowing me to absorb each sub-chapter as a one-shot, all while subconsciously adding to the overarching story; it’s brilliant.

I get quite giddy when my tasks for the day involve reading a book to give my thoughts on, but now that I know what awaits me in Tyler Enfield’s latest, the giddiness levels have skyrocketed.

Charlotte Simmons: Aladdin as an American Western is a supremely interesting idea, but also one that I would probably never think of. How did you come up with the idea for Like Rum-Drunk Angels?

Tyler Enfield: It actually began as sort of mischievous investigation. I started to wonder if there existed two genres that had never been combined. It was just a mental exercise at first, a way to amuse myself when bored. I also understood that contrast, as a storytelling device, creates friction, and friction creates tension, and tension is good—we want that.

So which two genres do I bang together to give off the most outrageous display of sparks?

I couldn’t recall a single instance where a fairy tale and a Western had been successfully bred. I’m not saying it hasn’t happened—just that I couldn’t think of an example at the time. It seemed like a good start. Add to that my mother, who claims I distinguished myself as a child with a highly advanced sense of bad taste: by the age of three I was already glued to the TV, enthralled by the strangeness and absurdity of Sergio Leone’s SpaghettiWesterns. OnceUpon A Time In The West was my favourite. You know that opening scene with the fly, buzzing pointlessly about for like three solid minutes? That was me. I totally resonated with the aesthetic. I’ve furthermore always loved the story of Aladdin—which is essentially a fairy tale of the East. So, in some sense, welding the two categories together was less of a literary endeavour than a latent childhood caper. I did it because it would be fun.

CS:As I read, there’s hardly ever a moment that I’m disinterested in Francis Blackstone’s character. Can you discuss him a bit?

TE: Francis was, and still is, a bit of a wonder to me. He was the result of a second set of questions: What would it be like to create a character who remained unconditioned by the world? Who has a heart of gold, but doesn’t give a f--- if you like it? And what would it belike to set that character loose in the West, a notoriously hard land, and watch him live and grow and bleed and learn?

Tying all those qualities together turned out to be easier than I expected—just make Francis a fourteen-year-old boy. This alone made him a force of nature. It seems the older I get, the more I get the significance of teenagers: their no-nonsense honesty, their courage, and their hostility for BS. They’re the natural champions of the world, and so it followed that Francis, the hero of our tale, would most easily carry these qualities if he too could personify “the hot clean irreverence of youth.”

The second benefit of Francis’s youth is that it could be contrasted with Bob Temple, his volatile brother-in-arms, who was perhaps similar to Francis in his day but now has “more years behind him than ahead.” Francis and Bob Temple come to represent the opposing poles of life’s phases. Between them, it was possible to explore the spectrum of life circumstances that bridge one to the other:Francis, buoyant and assured as he gallops a straight line into adulthood, versus Bob Temple, who’s grown weary and nostalgic, gazing back through the years at a life in decline.

CS: I like how you broke the book down into 1-to-3-page sections before introducing the next 1-3 pages with a new header; I felt it helped to streamline the novel, and allowed me to read each section as a one-shot if I so chose. How did you come to this choice?

TE: Early in its creation, I knew Like Rum-Drunk Angels would have elements of magic realism. I love magic realism. I love how it combines two qualities that should be mutually opposed, and I love the strange, surreal atmosphere that results. I began to wonder what it would be like to create a structure for the novel—a means of delivery—that mimicked this atmosphere; a way to extend the magic of the storyline to its layout and design.

The simplest way to accomplish this was to break the story down into tiny segments, like micro-chapters. In some cases, these micro-chapters were no more than a single sentence. In one instance, it’s a single word. It also worked best if these micro-chapters could stand alone, acting as individual stories unto themselves.

In theory, this looked like taking a linear timeline and breaking it down into little pieces, like the vertebrae of a spine. Most exciting to me was that each of these little bones, or micro-stories, could be unhooked from their origin and reattached elsewhere to create an entirely new skeleton, a whole new spine for the larger story to hang upon.

Suddenly the story’s arc became highly plastic, mutable. It could accommodate creative impulses, every kind of experimentation. I could now rearrange key elements as easily as shuffling blocks on a table—essentially changing the story’s direction on a whim—without sending shockwaves through the remainder of its arc.

Looking back, it’s no longer possible for me to separate the story from its form. The two grew as one. They pushed and inspired and supported one another. They rhyme.

Tyler Enfield is a writer, photographer, and film director from Edmonton, AB. He is the author of Madder Carmine and three young adult novels, the winner of the High Plains Book Award and a finalist for the Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Award. His film Invisible World, produced by the NFB and co-written with Madeleine Thien, is the winner of three Alberta Screen awards, including best director.

Charlotte Simmons is a recent graduate of St. Thomas University in Fredericton, NB. She holds a degree in English Literature with a concentration in Creative Writing. She is an intern at Goose Lane Editions and also writes for The East Magazine. Her play Lesbians: A Review was selected for St. Thomas University’s Plain Site Theatre Festival.

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