BROKEN VESSELS

An ingenious reimagining of the Old Man narrative from Chaucer’s “The Pardoner’s Tale,” McCall’s latest is a speculative fiction tour de force that follows one man’s quest for vengeance over centuries and multiple lives.

Using elements of folkloric fantasy, medieval myth, and literary fiction, this impressively interstitial novel is set in the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic in a city conspicuously absent of life. The initially nameless narrator—a collector who may be suffering from dissociative identity disorder—disregards the shelter-in-place mandate to walk to an independent bookstore whose owner, via a rare-books forum, has declared that he has an original copy of Chaucer’s “The Pardoner’s Tale.” The bookstore owner, who goes by Hydrant, has told the man that he can have the priceless manuscript—but only if he listens to Hydrant’s story. In the middle of an infected city, the two men sit together, share a few shots of tequila, and Hydrant begins his jaw-dropping tale of love, revenge, and obsession. Hydrant, it seems, has been chasing the narrator for more than 700 years—over several lifetimes—seeking revenge for when the man, as a rich Norseman back in 1269 Greenland, killed the beloved wife of Hydrant, who was then an Inuit hunter named Anyu. Hydrant, who can transfer his life essence to another body when necessary, has been struggling to obtain the ultimate vengeance on his enemy, who has been cursed to walk the Earth forever. Powered by razor-focused writing, relentless pacing, and a masterfully intricate storyline that includes references to Freud, Descartes, and Edvard Munch, this tightly woven novel reads like a Ray Bradbury short story—especially the brass knuckle thematic impact of the conclusion.

While somewhat uncategorizable, this dark gem of a novel is supremely gratifying.