First Fiction Friday: The Higher the Monkey Climbs
Bruce Geddes’ The Higher the Monkey Climbs (Now or Never Publishing) finds middle-aged Richard McKitrick in a murder-mystery not of his own making. After his cousin Tony convinces him that his father’s death was no accident, Richard begins to question the past in a new light.
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What: The Higher the Monkey Climbs (Now or Never Publishing, 2018)Who: Bruce Geddes’ fiction has appeared in The New Quarterly, Great Lakes Review and the Hart House Review, and he has written two books for Lonely Planet and worked as a producer for the CBC. With a MA in Latin American Literature, he’s a graduate of the Humber School for Writers. Bruce lives and works in Toronto. His new novel, The Higher the Monkey Climbs was just published by Now or Never Publishing in Vancouver. Follow him on Twitter.Why you need to read this now:What do you do when you’re presented with a mystery but you know that solving it will reveal truths you’d rather keep hidden?This is Richard McKitrick’s problem. One of a few, actually. The mystery begins when he gets a call from his cousin Tony, a disaffected, disempowered auto worker who in his mid-forties lives with his xenophobic mother and who has just been arrested for arson. Tony’s working on a theory that Richard’s father Gord (Tony’s uncle, mentor, fatherly stand-in) did not die in a car accident twenty-five years ago but was actually murdered. And the culprit? None other than Al Forzante, Gord’s former boss and a powerful union leader in the vein of Fidel Castro.At first, Richard thinks Tony is crazy and he decides not to pursue. He’s got problems of his own. His marriage is being threatened by the sudden appearance of his wife’s ex-boyfriend, a former Colombian guerrilla leader. His performance at work is suffering.But the clues accumulate. A murdered bus driver. A plot orchestrated by Gord to depose Forzante, an assignment that looks very much like a bribe. Corruption. And yet it’s all circumstantial. Tony has no hard evidence.Does Richard believe Tony, pursue Forzante and risk revealing unsavory elements of his father’s life? Or does he keep his mouth shut, humiliate his cousin, and allow Forzante’s crime to go unpunished? A compelling mystery plated with plenty of sides for literary tastes (and actually quite funny in many places), Bruce Geddes’ debut novel The Higher the Monkey Climbs examines our relationship to our own pasts and how we adjust to the world as it shifts around us.x = yFor the page-turning literary-ness of it, The Higher the Monkey Climbs compares well to Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. For the complexity of plot, readers may be reminded of American Hustle.
* * *Thanks to Nathaniel G. Moore and Now or Never Publishing for bringing us Bruce Geddes’ The Higher the Monkey Climbs, available now on All Lit Up.
