I Remember Lights by Ben Ladouceur
Reviewed by Ian Colford
I Remember Lights, poet Ben Ladouceur’s alternately poignant and blistering debut novel, is the engaging story of one young man navigating his way through a world hostile to gay culture in the 1960s and 1970s. The story is told in two threads, set ten years apart.
“If I Remember Lights has a message, it is one of hope, that we will never revert to a time when people were taught to hate who they are.”
A major portion of the action takes place in Montreal during the summer of 1967: the summer of love, the summer of Canada’s Expo celebrations. A 19-year-old gay man has come to the city, having left his former life in the Canadian Maritimes behind. However, he has only a hazy notion what his new life is supposed to look like.
First, though, we encounter the same young man ten years later. In the first of several sections with the heading XX, it’s 1977. The narrator has returned to Montreal after time spent abroad. He has met a man, John, in a bathhouse. The two are immediately attracted to one another, and after the sauna they head out for a night of drinking and dancing at a well-known gay night spot, a bar called Truxx.
Chapter 1 of the main story follows. We’re in 1967 and our narrator is new to Montreal, trying to figure out what it means to be gay in a cosmopolitan setting. The people he meets find his naivety and innocence endearing, and he gradually learns the intricacies of living a gay life in hazardous times from a series of sex partners, friends and lovers who have been navigating these byways for years. Because in 1967 homosexuality was widely considered a deviant criminal practice and interpretation of the law was left to a police force with a reputation for intolerance and heavy-handed methods. Over several months, the narrator’s encounters reinforce in him the notion that survival depends on keeping his sexual nature private while convincingly masquerading as heterosexual. The narrator encounters a gay culture that is vibrant, but the community keeps to the shadows. Prudence is key and people live in fear of exposure. Ladouceur’s hero is self-effacing. Streetwise and observant, he manages for the most part to fly under the radar, living an unexceptional life, working a succession of menial jobs while conducting a discrete search for love. Eventually, he finds himself drawn to Tristan, a charismatic young man from Wales, an employee at the British pavilion at Expo who is in Canada temporarily. The two connect and form a trusting and loving bond. At the end of the summer, when Tristan is forced to leave Canada and return to the UK, the narrator follows, and for a time the two live as travel companions, hiding the truth of their relationship from those around them. Gradually, though, the narrator finds the constant need for secrecy increasingly burdensome and is disillusioned by Tristan’s skittish lack of commitment to the relationship.
In the XX sections, which are interspersed throughout the book, we follow John and the narrator to Truxx, where not long after their arrival, a police raid takes place. The two are rounded up along with dozens of other gay men and incarcerated for the night in squalid, over-crowded conditions. The next day, before being bailed out, they are subjected to the degrading ordeal of being tested for venereal disease. Throughout this experience they are treated with casual contempt by the officials they encounter.
Ladouceur’s prose is elegant without being flashy, polished without seeming overwrought. The novel is coherently structured, the story easy to follow. Its crucial moments flow logically from the action. I Remember Lights is a compulsively readable and highly accomplished piece of fiction.
By declining to name his protagonist, Ladouceur bestows his narrator with the status of a queer Everyman, making his experiences all the easier to empathize with. His rite of passage is simply an education in human fallibility, which is the same for all of us, queer or straight. If I Remember Lights has a message, it is one of hope, that we will never revert to a time when people were taught to hate who they are.
About the Author
BEN LADOUCEUR is the author of Otter, winner of the Gerald Lampert Memorial Prize, finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, and selected as a National Post best book of the year, and Mad Long Emotion, winner of the Archibald Lampman Award. He is a recipient of the Writers’ Trust of Canada’s Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers and the National Magazine Award for Poetry. His short fiction has been featured in the Journey Prize Stories anthology and awarded the Thomas Morton Prize. He lives in Ottawa.
About the Reviewer
Ian Colford was born, raised and educated in Halifax. His reviews and stories have appeared in many print and online publications. He is the author of two collections of short fiction and two novels, and is the recipient of the Margaret and John Savage First Book Award for Evidence.
Book Details
Publisher : Book*hug Press (April 24 2025)
Language : English
Paperback : 268 pages
ISBN-10 : 1771669357
ISBN-13 : 978-1771669351