Late Nights on Air

The 2007 Giller Prize winner Late Nights on Air by Canadian author Elizabeth Hay is an elegy to a now lost time of quirky local radio. Set in 1975, when television is starting to take over from radio completely, the novel follows a group of people at a public radio station in the remote town of Yellowknife, on the shores of Great Slave Lake in the Northwest Territories. They have come there for a variety of reasons and are destined to either go on to greatness or have already peaked. As we follow a year in their lives, we see that their disappearing medium is linked to the way the traditions of the Native and wild North are being threatened as well—by an oil pipeline in particular, and by the encroaching South in general.

Harry Boyd has come back to deejay at the radio station after a spectacular failure hosting a television show in Toronto. Now in his forties, Harry feels like a has-been, especially since after showing early promise, he has been forced to return to the Northern Service broadcasting station where he first got his start. Although Harry was originally hired to be on the air late at night, after the station manager runs off with a waitress, Harry is promoted—as an interim manager; it’s his job to corral the misfits employed there.

Before leaving, the former manager hired Dido Paris, an announcer from the Netherlands whose accent and slightly husky timbre fascinates all listeners. Harry and the station’s other male staff are all half in love with Dido, who is unconventional, but definitely beautiful, with wide shoulders and slim hips. Dido has come to the station after fleeing a marriage that ended disastrously—she had an affair with the love of her life, her own father-in-law.



The station’s office manager, receptionist, and point person is Eleanor Dew. Middle-aged, thoughtful, and pretty despite herself, Eleanor is an aspiring poet and a devout Christian whose religious faith is tested by her extreme loneliness. She too suffered a terribly mismatched marriage with a man who left her, then came back, but refused to consummate their re-commitment to each other.

The newest member of the staff is Gwen Symon, a shy and mousy would-be announcer from Ontario with an untrained and seemingly unpromising voice. Gwen was told to try her luck in the hinterlands if she ever wanted to get a foot in the door in radio, so she has driven three thousand miles to start her apprenticeship in Yellowknife. Harry decides to work with Gwen to make her sound less tortured on air.

The station’s resident bad boy is the American Eddy Fitzgerald, the redheaded engineer and technician whose vaguely sinister background and unsettlingly aggressive manner unnerve the others.



Finally, the station has given a ten-minute slot to sixty-year-old local resident Ralph Cody to review books on air. Ralph also loves the North Canadian landscape, which he photographs extensively.

As the year opens, love is in the air at the station. Everyone is partially in love with Dido, but she only has eyes for Eddy. They get together, but their relationship is passionate and tumultuous, and sometimes abusive. They break up after Eddie hits her, and Dido turns to Harry for consolation instead after Harry tries to woo her by setting a news script on fire to demonstrate his passion. Briefly, she and Harry live together, but it is clear that she is mostly using his neediness, and that he is over-romanticizing their connection. Meanwhile, Ralph worships Eleanor from afar but is unable to approach her.

While the station’s staff tries to make sense of their personal lives, Yellowknife is host to the real-life Judge Thomas Berger, the Royal Commissioner of the McKenzie Valley Pipeline, who travels around the Canadian north in 1975 investigating the impact of an Arctic oil and gas pipeline on Native lands and wildlife habitats in the McKenzie Valley. As part of his inquiry, the kind and patient Berger interviews Native Dene people, oil company executives, activists, and anyone else from the community.



In the spring, after Berger leaves, so do Eddy and Dido. Back together, they are off to America, where they will become famous in Los Angeles and New York circles, and where they will continue being a couple until Dido’s death.

Meanwhile, the rest of the station’s complement is swept up in Gwen’s absorbing interest in the real-life explorer John Hornby, an eccentric Englishman who starved to death with two companions in a cabin in the Barrens in the winter of 1927. Gwen has been fascinated by Hornby’s story ever since listening to a radio show called “Death on the Barren Ground” as a child. As luck would have it, Hornby’s biographer lives near Yellowknife, and Harry has a passing acquaintance with him.

Harry, Ralph, Eleanor, and Gwen decide to spend four weeks of the summer retracing Hornby’s route. The Barrens is a wild, desolate, treeless place covered with ice and so far north in the Arctic interior that the light seems endless. The journey is physically arduous, dangerous, and tests the resolve of the four travelers as they backpack and canoe across freezing lakes, have a scary encounter with a grizzly bear, and are awed by seeing an enormous herd of caribou. Nevertheless, they continue, managing to reach the cabin where Hornby died, reveling in the beauty of the tundra.



During the drip, Ralph finally throws caution to the wind—but this decision leads to his death. Meanwhile, Harry and Gwen discover a much more lasting love, which continues into the novel’s coda, which sees them reading about Dido’s early death from an illness, while their son David plays outside. The novel ends with the surviving characters changed, but not necessarily improved or fixed—their imperfections have shifted and their awareness of themselves has developed, but there are no easy resolutions for their all too human problems.