Alex Pugsley

Alex Pugsley’s first novel, Aubrey McKee, depicts the first 20+ years of the book’s eponymous protagonist, who grows up in Halifax, Nova Scotia in the 1970s and early 1980s. In 14 richly imagined sections, Aubrey narrates his story in a lively, warm and self-deprecating manner, along the way introducing the reader to a succession of intriguing and eccentric characters who help to shape his childhood and adolescence. Aubrey, a child of privilege with an active imagination and creative leanings, does not always follow a straight or smooth path to adulthood. His is no ordinary upbringing. The McKee household is unstable: Aubrey’s mother leaves his lawyer father to dedicate herself to her acting career. In his teens—a period of emotional desolation—he falls in with a rough group of older boys led by streetwise Howard Fudge, small-time hoodlum and drug dealer. Later, Aubrey and a group of friends led by childhood mainstay Cyrus Mair form a punk rock band and briefly gain notoriety within the city’s vibrant music scene before the project implodes, a victim of internal bickering, changing tastes and diverging passions. Cyrus emerges as chief among the novel’s large cast of eccentrics. The illegitimate son of a former provincial premier, Cyrus assumes something like legendary status in Aubrey’s private mythology, first as a garrulous five-year-old oddball who declares himself “the world’s best escape artist,” and later as a nerdy and reclusive deep thinker, a boy with a brain in overdrive who pushes those around him to strive for and sometimes achieve seemingly impossible goals. A tragedy affecting two of Aubrey’s closest friends rounds out the book, with Aubrey disillusioned and ready for new adventures elsewhere. Pugsley’s prose is elegant, detailed and resonates with startling visuals and memorable turns of phrase. The story of young Aubrey’s Halifax years is crammed with incident and heavy with philosophizing and life advice. The novel tells a richly entertaining story, but it is also a book that at times can seem relentlessly verbose and at the end comes across as longer than it needs to be. Still, this first volume in a projected five-volume series of autobiographical novels charts the early growth of a young man whose exploits are well worth following.… (mais)