Book Reviews

Out of the North, Into the Desert

Joseph Boyden (Author)
Through Black Spruce. Penguin Books
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Fred Stenson (Author)
The Great Karoo. Doubleday Canada Limited
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Reviewed by Gordon Bölling

In an interview in February 2006, Joseph Boyden disclosed that his debut novel, Three Day Road (2005), is only the first part of what he refers to as a "triptych of novels." With the middle panel still missing, Through Black Spruce, the 2008 winner of the Giller Prize, functions as the third part in Boyden's series. Readers familiar with Three Day Road will instantly recognize the hallmarks of Boyden's powerful storytelling in this new book. Boyden's second novel is again informed by his deep knowledge of Native culture and its mythologies. Like its predecessor, Through Black Spruce is peopled with traditional figures such as the windigo. Also in its narrative design Through Black Spruce closely echoes Three Day Road. Adapting oral traditions of storytelling, Boyden again relies on two narrators from different generations who take turns in relating their interwoven life stories. The first of these is the legendary Cree bush pilot Will Bird who, as it soon turns out, is the son of Xavier Bird, one of the protagonists of Three Day Road. Will's counterpart is his niece Annie Bird. She, in a way, is the successor to Xavier's aunt Niska. Annie has inherited Niska's ability to see into the future and to heal, a "gift that pops up in our family once in a while." Despite these similarities and continuities, Boyden's second novel is more than a mere sequel to his successful debut. Like outer panels in a triptych, Three Day Road and Through Black Spruce are wholly self-contained works of art and yet mutually dependent parts of a larger narrative.

Through Black Spruce is set in present-day Canada and New York. As the novel opens, Will is in a deeply catatonic state in a hospital in Moose Factory. Annie visits her uncle regularly and, only reluctantly following the advice of the medical staff, begins to tell him stories. In her narrative she focuses on her recent search for her younger sister Suzanne, who has been missing for two years. The novel's second narrative strand follows Will's story. Told from a comatose state and addressed to his two nieces, Will's story chronicles his life from his childhood to his long-running feud with the drug-peddling Netmaker clan. In Through Black Spruce the massive influx of cocaine, hash, ecstasy, crack, and other drugs into remote Native communities and the violence that involuntarily accompanies this development threaten the very foundations of Native culture. Will, in fact, compares the abuse of drugs to the destructive effects of the residential school system: "The big white building that I thought was finally gone came back into my nightmares again when I began to contemplate the Netmaker clan. What Marius and his friends brought into our community was more destructive than what the wemestikushu brought with their nuns and priests." In an attempt to rid his community of its evil, Will decides to kill the windigo. He shoots at Marius Netmaker and has to flee into the Canadian North, first to Akimiski Island in James Bay and later to a place called Ghost River. Returning to his hometown of Moosonee, he still falls victim to Marius' wrath. Will's journey northwards finds its equivalent in Annie's search for Suzanne. Her quest takes Annie to Toronto and Montreal and later to Manhattan, where she briefly steps into her sister's shoes as a successful model. Suzanne, however, eludes her and Annie painfully realizes that this fast-moving world of false promises, drugs, and violence is not for her. She also returns to Moosonee, "the asshole of the Arctic," and begins to tell her story at her uncle's bedside. As the two plot lines converge and close in on the narrative present, Through Black Spruce moves towards an end that, like the end in Three Day Road, counters the threats to Native culture with a celebration of loyalty, friendship, and family. Through Black Spruce is a strong second novel from Joseph Boyden. Read in conjunction, Three Day Road and Through Black Spruce present a collective portrait of Cree culture from the late nineteenth century through the First World War, and from the second half of the twentieth century to the present. It will be interesting to see how Boyden's next novel will fill out the middle panel and complete the triptych.

In comparison with Joseph Boyden, Fred Stenson is a veteran of Canadian letters. The Great Karoo is his fifteenth book and his eighth work of fiction. In close to five-hundred pages, Stenson's epic novel spans five decades and three continents. The Great Karoo is one of the latest additions to the time-honored genre of the Canadian war novel. Revisiting the South African War of 1899-1902, Stenson's historical novel explores a conflict that Canadian war writing has been all but neglected. The Great Karoo tells the story of Frank Adams, a young cowboy from Alberta's Chief Mountain country, who serves first with the Canadian Mounted Rifles and later with the Canadian Scouts. Soon after his arrival in Africa, Frank is forced to realize that the reasons for his voluntary enlistment were fairly vague: "By now, Frank knew he had outfoxed himself. Like a moose to a horse, the Great Karoo was wide open all right, but was nothing like Alberta would have been in that condition. Thinking that it would be like home, but a purer version, had been a dangerous mistake." Although he hardly ever speaks about it after his return to Canada, his experience of the Boer War does not leave him alone. Unexpectedly switching to a first-person narrative, the final pages of The Great Karoo find Frank in May 1942 writing a short memoir. Even before he has finished his memoir, Frank decides that he will consign it to the flames of his wood stove as a failed attempt to give meaning to his experience of war in South Africa: "Back in the Great Karoo when I kept telling myself it was a moose to a horse, that was the closest I came to understanding. The whole war was like that. We travelled inside it, Ovide, Jeff, and me, but we never understood it and were never part of it . . . And here I am trying to make sense of it still, trying to make a horse when it never was a horse and never will be." A different and somewhat larger perspective is granted to readers of The Great Karoo by British General Butler, whose musings on colonial warfare and politics chronicle his growing disillusionment with British imperialism. Like Timothy Findley's The Wars, Stenson's novel is suffused with a compassion for horses. In graphic detail, The Great Karoo describes the suffering of horses as they are dragged into the machinations of ‘modern' warfare. To Canadian soldiers like Ovide Smith the welfare of their horses is of far greater importance than the defense of British imperial interests. All in all, The Great Karoo is a novel that demands (and rewards) attentive reading.

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This review originally appeared in Canadian Literature #204 (Spring 2010), David Carpenter. (pg. 172 - 174)

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