Local author Nick Faragher has once again drawn from his past, this time generating a novel dealing with the impacts of an horrific crime.
The Bowen Island Arts Council held the official launch of Faragher’s new novel It’s No Big Thing at The Gallery last month. The book, published this past summer by First Press Publishing, is based on an actual crime that took place about 30 years ago.
The victim of that crime was a young girl, working alone, late at night, in a convenience store. The perpetrators were three teenage boys. The young girl was rendered quadriplegic as the result of the injuries that she sustaining in the course of that robbery.
Faragher experienced a similar case first hand while working in the justice system in Ontario, writing a report for the court on one of the attackers. He changed some details about the case – the victim in his story was rendered a paraplegic rather than a quadriplegic, for example. He has also chosen not to disclose the actual case the story is based on.
“I’m not trying to do a true crime account,” he said. “It’s entirely a work of fiction, but its genesis is in that story.”
The story, says Faragher, is less about the crime and more about the different motivations that might cause young men, from essentially decent homes, with hard working and loving parents, to commit a horrific crime.
In particular, the story is about why one of them would shoot a defenseless young woman, and how his companions might shape their own responses in light of this brutality.The subtleties of family dynamics, the power of cultural role models from Al Capone to the Bacon Brothers, differing philosophies of existence (Nietzsche), the gratuitous displays of violence in the media (John Wayne to Sam Peckinpah) and the importance of acting in accordance with what one knows to be right, all play a part.
It’s No Big Thing is Faragher’s second book. He published The Well and Other Stories in 2009, a collection in which his own personal experiences also play some part.
Faragher was born in Manchester, England in 1945. He moved to Greece in 1967 and supported himself, for the most part, by teaching English. ‘The Watch Seller’, one of the stories in The Well, suggests he found other ways to get by. A year or so later he moved to Italy where he got by in a similarly haphazard fashion.
He moved to Canada in 1979, worked as a parole officer, briefly taught criminology, then became a chairing member of the Ontario Board of Parole before moving to B.C. in 1990. He lived a year or two in Central America before moving back to B.C. where he and his second wife operated a small coffee house on Bowen Island. Faragher was a regular columnist for the Undercurrent for a time in the 1990s.
It’s No Big Thing is on sale at Phoenix on Bowen as well as online at Amazon and is also available at the library.
