Cannon
Title: Cannon
Author: Lee Lai
Publisher: Giramondo Publishing
Shortlist: Fiction
We arrive to wreckage – a restaurant smashed to rubble, with tables and chairs upended riotously. Under the swampy nighttime cover of a Montreal heatwave, we meet our protagonist, Cannon, dripping in beads of regret sweat. She was supposed to be closing the restaurant for the night, but instead, she destroyed it. The horror-scape left in her wake is not unlike the films Cannon and her best friend, Trish, watch together. Cooking dinner and digging into deep cuts of Australian horror movies on their scheduled weekly hangs has become the glue in their relationship. In high school, they were each other’s lifeline – two queer second-generation Chinese nerds trapped in the suburbs. Now, on the uncool side of their twenties, the essentialness of one another feels harder to pin down. Yet when our stoic and unbendingly well-behaved Cannon finds herself very uncharacteristically surrounded by smashed plates, it is Trish who shows up to pull her out.
In Cannon, Lee Lai’s follow-up to the critically acclaimed and award-winning Stone Fruit, the full palette of a nervous breakdown is just a part of what is on offer. Lai’s sharp sense of humour and sensitive eye produce a story that explores the intimacy of queer friendship and the weight of family responsibility and breaks open the question of what we owe both to each other and to ourselves.
Judges’ Report
Lee Lai’s masterful graphic novel considers the small, universal and intersecting catastrophes of everyday life. A charming book about a nervous breakdown, it’s also a salve, for who hasn’t felt frustrated, not heard, misunderstood, exhausted? The judges loved this book for the way it nudges at what words can’t do: in playful slippages where sentences go unfinished and words drop off the page, where Cannon’s internal storm goes unnoticed and black birds trouble the psychic weather. Instead, we get a phone ringing out, the hiss and flash of a hot pan, blips from a meditation podcast, a splash of red ink. We see characters in the bedroom, on the toilet, on the phone, taking out the rubbish. Breathing and sweating and startled and despairing. How do we let ourselves be known to others? What do we do when everything is too much? Where does our rage live and how do we harness it? These intimate questions dance across the page. And what beautiful pages they are; to read Cannon is to take tactile pleasure in its extraordinary design. We can’t all wreck a restaurant, but we can all read this playful, moving work and exhale.
Extract
Click the image below to view
About the Author
Photo by Bee Elton
Lee Lai
VPLA book photography by Shannyn Higgins
The Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards are proudly supported by the Victorian Government.
