The Dominion of Wyley McFadden - Softcover

2001 Amazon.com/Books in Canada First Novel Award Shortlist: The province of Alberta is free of rats, a state of affairs that Wyley McFadden finds smug and offensive. Which explains why he is driving across the Canadian Shield in a custom-built camper van filled with provisions (a selection of fine wines and lagers, suitable condiments, roasted pigeons and squirrels he trapped himself), a young traveling companion he has been plotting to ditch ever since he picked her up alongside the highway, and a fragile rodent cargo, caged and outfitted for the long trip to Edmonton.

The Dominion of Wyley McFadden, Scott Gardiner's funny and ambitious debut, is a road novel driven by the sort of garrulous, obsessive voice that propels the novels of tragicomic masters like Stanley Elkin, Robert Kroetsch, and Charles Portis. McFadden rants (he's a fed-up federalist), he digresses (he knows more than you want to about, say, the Game and Fish Act), he self-justifies (he had perfectly good reasons for doing the things that got him barred from the practice of medicine), all with a charming mix of the fastidious and the impulsive. His hitchhiking passenger, knowing her quarry, fends off his questions about her past (and her name) by slowly drawing his story out as they drive west. It's not an entirely smooth ride (some of Wyley's longer lectures test a reader's patience, and toward the novel's end Gardiner attempts to burden Wyley's story with a moral weight it can't bear, and doesn't really deserve), but it's an enjoyable, rambling treat. --Tom Nissley

"A rich, dark and highly accomplished debut." —Ottawa Citizen

"Gardiner brings together many disparate subjects, including the legal entrapment of rats...the human fertility industry...sexual victims, what it is to be Canadian, Quebec separatism and Alberta's idiosyncratic politics." —The Toronto Star

"[Gardiner's] wry descriptions of motels, diners, truckstops and the eccentrics who inhabit them evoke Steinbeck in his hard-travelling days." —The Globe and Mail

“The Dominion of Wyley McFadden is a first novel but it sure doesn’t feel like one. Gardiner’s writing is tight and sure.... The reason the novel works is because Gardiner has Wyley’s voice exactly rigth; he was born to talk and his story feels like something you would expect from W.O. Mitchell.... A promising novel.... Wyley McFadden, the hero of this, Scott Gardiner’s first novel is a man with a mission...Gardiner has a fine sense of atmostphere, whether it is in the camper or in a truckstop restaurant.” —Edmonton Journal