On the edge

Water gives way to desert sand in Kevin Patterson’s sophomore effort, which reconsiders the war novel – and Canada’s role in Afghanistan

BY KAMAL AL-SOLAYLEE PHOTOGRAPHY BY STEFANIE NEVES STYLING BY MELODIE DULY

Over a body of work that moves from non-fiction to fiction and back again, Kevin Patterson has carved a place for himself and his characters on the edges of the world. The cold of the Arctic in his 2006 debut novel, Consumption, gives way to the heat of Afghanistan, captured in his sophomore novel, News from the Red Desert – to give but one example from a literary output in which science and art, city and tundra, solitudes and multitudes alternate. Life’s extremities have a hold on Patterson.

In person, the Manitoba-born, B.C.-based writer of these narratives of extremes seems fairly centered, perhaps even middle of the road. Gone is the thirtysomething, heartbroken guy who, in 1999, documented an ocean voyage from Canada to Tahiti and back in The Water In Between. That sailor is 17 years and several lifetimes removed from the 51-year-old father of three (aged 16, 11, and nine) he is today. When we met in late June in the Toronto headquarters of his publisher, Penguin Random House Canada, he solidified this impression with his loose-fitting, white linen shirt, the official uniform of middle-aged dads in the summer.

“That was the younger, wilder version of me,” says the author and internal-medicine specialist with a grin when I show him the bearded, shaggy-haired man in the publicity photo that ran with glowing reviews of his travel memoir.

The Water In Between bestowed a certain Byronic quality on Patterson among the literary types in Canada. It marked his first foray into the publishing scene, but he kept his distance from that milieu – or, at least, from Toronto’s “cappuccino-swilling, black-turtleneckwearing Queen Street boys,” as he quipped to a reporter from the Winnipeg Free Press.