'Foregone' review: Russell Banks' complex portrait of a dying man

At 80, novelist Russell Banks understands the mingled triumphs and humiliations of a long, complicated life. The central character of his new novel, "Foregone," is Leo Fife, a documentary filmmaker known to his Canadian fans as "the Ken Burns of the North." Leo has stopped cancer treatments and resigned himself to the inevitable. His life, once so illustrious, now hovers in the strange confluence of conflicting hospice timelines — suspended at the final precipice while he rushes frantically through the inventory of his past.

We meet Leo in that twilight moment, when a CBC crew arrives to interview him about his documentaries on the Vietnam War. At the height of his fame, he broke important news about Agent Orange. Presumably, his recollections of that tumultuous era will serve as a critical capstone to his legendary career.

But Banks has constructed "Foregone" so that nothing in front or behind the camera is stable. Leo's long-suffering wife is dead set against this exhausting interview, and, in any case, his collapsing body makes completing the project unlikely. The director, Leo's old protege, comes off as a heartless exploiter, but Leo has his own reasons for sitting before the camera that he spent a lifetime pointing at others.

Once the living room is darkened and Leo is wheeled beneath the spotlight, it's clear he has no intention of being guided by any of the director's questions. On the contrary, he insists on using this setup to expose a cowardly life riddled with episodes of betrayal and deception.

The film crew may be frustrated, at least initially, by the off-topic anecdotes that Leo insists on reciting, but they're terrifically compelling to us — of a young man more determined to craft his persona than his art. Handsome and intense, Leo once attracted devotion but not real success. He constructed and abandoned families the way a novelist composes and discards flawed manuscripts.

Chapter by chapter, "Foregone" moves between Leo's dramatic past and his necrotic present, between his serial betrayals up and down the East Coast years ago and his impending demise, stuck in a wheelchair in a pool of white light. In that sense, "Foregone" may remind some readers of Richard Flanagan's remarkable first novel, "Death of a River Guide," which takes place entirely during the few minutes it takes for a man to drown.

"It's the cancer that has freed him to dig up and expose the lie," Banks writes. But that same disease and the attendant painkillers have "dissolved chunks of his temporal lobe" and addled Leo's mind, calling into question the veracity of his revelations. "Fife's memories shift like slides in a projector," Banks writes.

Ultimately, we can't divine the truth of Leonard Fife's life or even the efficacy of his confession. But in this complex and powerful novel, we come face to face with the excruciating allure of redemption. Even as Leo's memories fade, his hunger for forgiveness comes into radiant focus.