The Dominion of Wyley McFadden

by Scott Gardiner

"I'm taking them to Alberta."

"Why?"

"Why?

"Yes, why?"

"Because Alberta doesn't have any."

I had a dream the other night. In it I had to sign some kind of contract or legal document. My lawyer had wrapped the contract in a towel then covered it with a pillow, for safekeeping. When we uncovered it, the contract was wet, so was the towel. The pillow was wet as well. The lawyer pulled the pillow out of the case. "Here's the problem, " he said, pulling out a handful of baby rats. Rats. They started running everywhere, not just babies, but full grown, huge rats. Hundreds of them. I jumped onto the nearest piece of furniture and screamed uncontrollably. That's a sad fact about me: ask me to crack open a fish's skull and poke around in its brain and I have no problem. Show me a living rat (or mouse for that matter) and I turn into a 50s housewife.

The reason I'm dreaming about Rats is Wyley McFadden. I dream about rats because he's obsessed with them.

McFadden, whose first name is only mentioned in the title, is a fallen fertility-doctor-turned-urban-trapper. I won't tell you what led to his downfall, but I will tell you that his ethics were questionable, but his heart was in the right place, approximately. At some point during his trapping career (much of it illegal) he gets turned onto rats, and then it all begins.

The girl has no name. She appears, hitchhiking in the middle of nowhere, on the first page. Wyley picks her up and never drops her off. Her name is never revealed. Wyley, over a few days, tells his long story: the events in his life that led to this particular road trip. The road trip's purpose is to deliver over 1,000 rats into Alberta, because Alberta doesn't have any. Once his story is told, she tells her own sad, horrible story.

I expected more of a road trip story, it was less about the literal trip and more about the metaphorical journey of life. That's about as abstract as I'm going to get. There is some philosophy in it, mostly about man's nature to create, destroy and play God. The rats are really only a moot point. They are released (in an incredibly planned, scientific fashion) with no problem. We're lead to believe that there's enough of them that Alberta will no longer be rat free, despite her efforts to the contrary. There's that human nature to destroy. Alberta was all fine, and rat free (free of this species anyway, I know for a fact that they do have kangaroo rats) until some guy gets it into his head that they should have rats. If you want to you could easily read a lot into this. I don't want to.

Bottom line: great book, funny, intelligent. My thoughts were so provoked that they were up in arms. In addition to entertaining, it was educating. I learned a lot about things like trapping, infertility, Canadian politics and cuisine (apparently pigeons? good to eat).

{shout out to Kimm-my whom gave me this book for my birthday. Thanks Kimm, and would it kill you to drop me an email?}
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