The Fighter [Paperback]

When twenty-five-year old Paul Harris is severely beaten outside a nightclub, the event kick starts an unremitting yearning, perhaps partly a reaction to the fierce and unbidden fear that stole over his head, and also a response to the privileged life that he leads, Paul steadily finds himself caught up in a state of anger that bubbles up from nowhere, an undirected and one-dimensional "teeth-clenching, fist-pounding fury."

The only son of Jack Harris and his wife Barbara, Paul helps his father run the family owned Ripple Creek Winery, situated not far from the city of St. Catherines, and while his job description is "organizational advisor," he frequently strikes Jack as frail and useless, never showing the slightest ambition. Plagued by restlessness, and a huge sense of disassociation between what he's capable of and what he's aspired to, Paul begins spending empty days in the fields with the grape pickers, much to the embarrassment of Jack.

Up before dawn, and enduring ten hours of back-breaking field labor, Paul begins to feel better than he'd felt in years, but this seething anger begins to manifest itself in other forms as a cold nausea and nameless dread begins to manifest itself, buried under the weight of physical exhaustion. Soon Paul is hitting the weights at the local fitness center where he meets the bent proprietor who begins him on a regime of illegal steroids.

As Paul becoming ever more obsessed with achieving a type of brutal hyper-masculinity, the young working class Rob Tully, a natural at boxing, trains with his Uncle Tommy at a ramshackle gym called Top Rank, located deep in the basement below a paint store. Together with a "boxing ring and a few punching bags hung from exposed girders," this is a world where the marginalized and often sweaty men gather to study "the edicts of hurt."

Tommy has boxed since the age of ten, loving every art of it; the training and roadwork, the sparring, and also the fight, and along with Reuben, his squat and pot bellied older brother, he absolutely lives for the sport. Not so Robert, although he shows great skill and as a boxer, he trains hard and fights regularly, and although it had been a forgone conclusion that he'd become a boxer himself, Rob possesses no true love of the sport.

Wanting peace and security for his family, Rob cannot help but be drawn to the rush of the boxing life, even though he worries whether this is all that there'll ever be. Meanwhile, Paul, discovering the miracle of adrenalin, starts to work out at Top Rank, surprised at how quickly his body accommodates itself to pain, not only the mediated pain of training but also the immediate and unavoidable pain of the ring.

As Paul becomes in tune to the familiar rhythms of life in the gym, with the sparring sessions, the trainers with their heavy bags, and the rap music constantly blearing out, he begins to think about participating in a genuine fight. His trainer tells him about the Barn, a rundown shed, situated out in the country, where on the second Thursday of each month, amongst the straw and the bales of hay, the real fighters gather.

The Barn is place that operates under its own laws, where "the washed up trial horses and clubbers, the tavern toughs with cobalt fists," brutally act out their bare knuckled and blood soaked destinies on top of a makeshift sawdust floor. These are men who have bared the mistakes of their trade with their warn out and mangled foreheads, their split brows and pitcher lips. And it is here that Paul eventually comes head to head his fate as he gets down and dirty with these men hurt in ways they will never recover from.

In truly explosive and explicit prose, author Craig Davison gets right to the heart of what it means to be a fighter, especially with the character of Paul as he peels away the layers of his masculinity, trying for a glimpse of the violence that lays inside. Once frail, moneyed and fearful, Paul is now newly muscled, with copious bruises and missing teeth, and he's longer the man he had once been. He's especially awed at the notion that he can reduce another human being to a thoughtless slab of meat.

Meanwhile, Rob and Tommy are in danger of coming out forever scarred and irreparable. When a fight goes horribly wrong and Tommy is hospitalized, Rob is engulfed in an unremitting hopelessness, with a dark and massive rage steadily pulling him in. Through Rob and Tommy and Paul, Davidson is able to delve deep into the nature of rage and suffering and masculine fear, introducing an element of psychopathology as Paul realizes that only knowledge and atonement can come from the pain as it washes over him, attempting to cleanse his every wrong.

Davison offers up an astonishing view, though not necessarily a comforting one in this world of fighters with their scars and welts and bruises, and missing ears, not a full set of teeth among them as they spar in dilapidated and decaying boxing rings that stink of blood and sweat with spit buckets strapped to opposite right posts and the five gallon drums once containing oleo lard.

It's indeed a rough occupation, full of men whose soul value lay in their willingness to absorb punishment and who are intent to follow the path of "yesterdays man" with his glorified bloodlust and quick fists. This novel is indeed provocative, bizarre and also horribly gory and without a doubt an absolutely fascinating expose on this hardscrabble and blood-fuelled life. Mike Leonard July 07.