Bookmark Interview: Timothy Taylor: The Blue Light Project

Vancouver’s Timothy Taylor is an award-winning and best-selling novelist who likely has struck literary gold with his new novel The Blue Light Project, published by Knopf Canada. On the one hand, this book is a serious novel with big ideas woven through it, such as our fascination with fame and anti-fame and society’s repeated sacrificing of celebrities as a sort of cultural ritual, the meaning of art as a political force, of underground street culture and modern-day terrorism. This also is an edgy suspense story, centred around a man who takes hostage an auditorium full of children attending a television talent contest. En route to the story’s amazing conclusion, we meet a beautiful woman and former star athlete still celebrated only for a moment of glory many years before, a broken down journalist whose stellar career crashed and burned when he got caught inventing a source for one of his stories, and the strange street artist known as Rabbit with his almost super-hero abilities in racing across the city’s rooftops in true Parkour fashion.

Timothy Taylor, a one-time banker and self-taught writer, visited Edmonton recently on a book tour, returning to the city where he received his degree in economics from the University of Alberta. Taylor talked to Bookmark about the characters that populate The Blue Light Project and the big ideas that run through this engaging story. You can listen to that interview by clicking on the Title of this Blog Entry.