By Tyra Forde
Have you ever been on “a joy ride set on a crash course with the past?” With this simple tagline, Andrew Wedderburn paints the lines of the road with Audrey Cole’s lifeline: driving. For Alberta native Wedderburn, his second novel, The Crash Palace, proves that while you can temporarily escape the present, the past will always catch up to you. Audrey Cole is a single mother with a secret: her past as a chauffeur for Alberta indie band the Lever Men. Four years after a fateful December in the Crash Palace, an unregulated refuge for wilderness explorers or escapists, Audrey still cannot shake her memories of the lodge at Two Reel Lake. When a spur of the moment Grand Theft Auto incident gives Audrey the keys, she races to revisit part of her history.
With her daughter and mother asleep at home, Audrey’s drive into the wilderness in the safety of a stolen Audi begins to blend with the same trip she and the Lever Men took years ago. The novel switches timelines like a midday driver switches lanes. Sometimes, the transition is seamless, like when Wedderburn draws parallels from the band’s visit in 2005 to when Audrey returns alone in 2009. Other times, the timelines are shrouded in mystery, with all the clues to her past ready for the picking but only pieced together towards the end of the book. Even when the story comes full circle, it’s clear the road ahead for Audrey will contain many twists and turns. This ambiguity is part of what makes the novel so captivating. Much like life, or a road trip without a set endpoint, The Crash Palace is about the journey rather than the destination.
The descriptions of both place and person is what sets this novel apart from others. Wedderburn captures the B-list Alberta music scene of the mid-2000s with accounts so rich it feels as though you’re standing on a sticky floor watching the Lever Men play a late-night set to a mostly empty bar right along with Audrey. Just as easily, he conjures the endless scenery of the Rockies and the open roads that penetrate them with authenticity and vibrancy. Audrey’s love for driving and fond memories of every vehicle she’s ever driven in punctures every hour on the road and every paragraph on the page with her distinct persona.
At just under 250 pages, The Crash Palace is a book that will be hard to put down and even harder to forget. It questions what happens if we let life pass us by and “coast downhill in neutral,” as Wedderburn puts it, and what happens if we take our eyes off the map and instead explore exactly where we are. It tells the story of people who come together and then drift apart and how our past shapes the present. It also explores how shared interests created shared history. For Audrey Cole and the Lever Men, all it took was a love of music and a long open road.