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Lucien & Olivia
André Narbonne 
Black Moss Press

In his short and stunning Giller Prize longlisted new novel, Lucien & Olivia, André Narbonne demonstrates a short story writer’s gift for creating a system of experiences that propel us deep into his characters’ obsessions, fears and desires. I don’t say that simply because the novel is short (at 110 pages). I say it because it is potent and intense. Like new love.

Each moment, each scene, feels like a complex recipe using meticulously gathered ingredients designed to complement one another and refined palettes, but then distilled, perhaps over a period of 12 years or more, into something that smells sophisticated but tastes smooth.

His two titular young protagonists, a marine engineer on a Canadian tanker and a philosophy student at Dalhousie University, are at times their own worst enemies. [Narbonne’s fiction is informed by his life; he was once a marine engineer, “living out of his duffel bag when he arrived in Halifax on a damaged tanker in the mid-eighties,” and he later completed a degree in English at Dalhousie.] They say and do the wrong thing, at the worst possible time, as if they are working at cross purposes, and trying to repel one another.

On first sight, meeting while Lucien is on a one-month shore leave in Halifax, they hate each other, but they quickly find they have many synchronous idiosyncrasies. Their purposes align, yet their signals (being limited by their era, before cell phones and social media, usually expressed in the form unread letters and confused imaginings never spoken) keep getting crossed.

They aren’t really at cross purposes, but they don’t even know exactly what it is they want, or what precisely their purpose should be. They are caught up in greater forces. But really they seek what we all do, love and self-improvement.

And again, this novel feels like short fiction because of its intensity, which is emotional, temporal and spatial. An ingenious touch is setting much of the emotional action with Lucien alone aboard his ship, performing monotonous, predictable tasks. The worst place to be a for a young, lovelorn man longing to express his full self, especially his enormous feelings.

Also brilliant is that Olivia forbids Lucien from saying he loves her, a maddening repression turned claustrophobia floating within the walls of a ship at sea. Narbonne dives into this woven leviathan piece by piece, with the two lovers at home alone or among friends downtown, exchanging philosophies in dialogue that is often witty, at times acerbic and usually has characters revealing deeply felt vulnerabilities, whether or not they mean to share them.

The result is an acute mosaic, an almost synesthetic involvement with these peculiar characters as they try against their own misdirections to live ordinary lives together.

In other words, Lucien & Olivia is the most realistic–and beautiful–of love stories. It is about what any great romantic love is about, finding one another beyond all the ways we hide ourselves, and finding how at the core of things, what we have in common far outweighs whatever keeps us apart.