For better or worse, the novels of Montreal writer Yves Beauchemin don’t tax his readers’ intellects unduly. The first volume of his Charles the Bold trilogy was so concerned with his hero’s childhood that it could almost have been classified as a children’s novel. Now, in the second volume, with its breezy readability and episodic structure, Beauchemin has produced something that, if it fails as great literature, would at least make for great television.

Beauchemin’s working-class hero, Charles Thibodeau, is 12 when the novel begins and 17 when it ends. In between, he falls in love, has fantastic sex (not the same thing necessarily), gets involved in the soft drug trade, protects his stepfather from his biological father, and is blown away by Balzac. The book is filled with scenes – such as when a firehall burns down because a fireman forgot to turn off a deep fryer when an alarm came in – that would translate easily to the small screen.

But Beauchemin has loftier aspirations. Not only has he borrowed his title from a novel by Alexandre Dumas, he would clearly like to be seen as a modern-day Balzac, with his trilogy a sort of comédie humaine on the St. Lawrence. He has said that Charles the Bold will paint a portrait of Quebec from 1966 (the year of Thibodeau’s birth) to the end of the 20th century. Certainly, politics and the question of Quebec separatism are part of this volume’s background. Beauchemin also underscores his aim by having Charles wildly proclaim a challenge to his city (as did Eugène de Rastignac in Balzac’s Old Goriot): “Montreal! You’re going to be hearing from me! I’m going to make your ears ring!”

Wayne Grady’s translation captures the good-humoured tone of the original, and usually successfully finds equivalents for the slang and turns of phrase that gave the original much local colour.