Very loosely inspired by the childhood of Sébastien Dulude, Asbestos — who, with a nomination for the Literary Prize The World and the Première Plume prize in France, has generated unprecedented enthusiasm so early in the literary season – yet it is based on a very simple premise: that of a friendship forged in the idleness and curiosity of childhood, affected by a tragedy.
Steve Dubois, aged nine, enjoys the pleasures of the summer of 1986 in the company of little Poulin, his best friend, with whom he spends entire days reading Tintin albums in his cabin, documenting the catastrophes that shake the world and exploring the half-forest, half-lunar landscapes of Thetford Mines on his bike.
However, the violence and isolation in which this mining world is bathed will soon put an end to the idyllic paradise of a season full of promise, igniting in Steve the fire of a dull anger and an adolescence eaten away by darkness and regrets.
Digging into tensions
Sébastien Dulude is not a newcomer to literature. Author of three collections of poetry, he is also literary director at La Mèche publishing house; a rich experience that perhaps explains his ability to put down on paper a story that takes shape in a chiseled and abundant language, supported by the accuracy of sensations and emotions that form the heart of his narrative engine.
“I wanted to situate this invented friendship between two inseparable boys in a territory that I had really known, even experienced, because it is not an easy territory. I wanted to exploit the relationships of tension that it underlies. It was therefore to place a super sweet friendship in a violent territory, and to write from the sensations; the summer, the rustling of the leaves, the cicadas, the sweetness and the voluptuousness and, a few steps away, the gray, the arid, the noise of these sites where dynamite is exploded every day at 4 p.m. It created a contrast in which I wanted to evolve.”
The author’s poetic approach was therefore deployed in novelistic writing, taking the route of feeling, symbol, and metaphor to trace the framework of his story. Asbestosthe title of the book, is the first word that sparked my creativity. It is a toxic material, which represents the ambient toxicity, but also insulating, like Steve’s best friend, who becomes a bit of a shelter against all the violence in the world, and the one he experiences at home. It is also a flammable material, which represented Steve’s anger well, incapable of rebelling against a city that does not burn, that is as if indestructible. It gave me the idea of a somewhat vain quest in which I could raise a lot of heat. It is all these possibilities that guided the writing.
The exploitation of tensions and binaries was evident even in the form of the story, which is divided into two sections representing two different years in Steve’s life—1986 and 1991—which are themselves constructed in a non-linear horizontal structure, with jumps in time that inform the preceding passages by offering them new insights. “It allowed me to let the reader fill in what happens between these scenes. It’s not an action novel, but the relationships created by juxtaposing these moments together give a kind of in-between that speaks, I think. This form was really an initial intuition.”
The violence of norms, the violence of mines
The novelist also enjoyed exploring the pure and tender dynamics that develop between two boys protected from the expectations of masculinity. “I have not known a friendship like the one between my two characters, but I still remember, as a child, feeling when it was no longer possible to be friends in the same way with boys. I quickly understood that it was necessary to play a game, a role, in which I never recognized myself, moreover. When Steve loses his friend, he loses a refuge, where he lived sheltered from prying eyes and social norms, and he must take on a new role.”
Throughout the pages, Sébastien Dulude takes the reader into a city almost out of this world, whose very horizon is subject to the will of mining companies, into a forest of trucks and wheels larger than a man that toil to dig craters and build grayish and stifling hills that limit possibilities, in which a few resilient pine forests survive. “It’s dizzying, this absence of horizon, of possibility of exits. There is an ambient unease caused by the power relationship that humans have established with nature in this city, a domination that betrays them to the point of making them sick.”
This geographic oppression, reinforced by worker violence, is underlying in Asbestosboth in the relationships that are forged between the characters and in the vision that the latter have of themselves, of the world and of its possibilities; a vicious circle summed up by this hypnotic sentence that captures all the power of the novel and its protagonist. “The mine is the violence on certain parents, then the violence on certain children; the mine is the isolation of children, and isolation is boredom, and boredom is the violence that took my friend away from me.”
Worker violence is well documented in the literature, but that in the mine seems more insidious, more stubborn. “In Yours, forever, your Marie-Louby Michel Tremblay, Léopold is alienated by his machine and transfers this violence to himself. The chain is quite obvious. But, in the case of mining towns, violence is everywhere, even in the asbestos that we breathe and that poisons us. It is a rather hypnotic cycle from which it is almost impossible to escape,” concludes the writer.