by Joseph Boyden Adult Fiction
Hardcover;
Published: September 2008 by
Viking Canada Winner: 2008 Scotiabank
Giller Prize
Will Bird, a former bush pilot and renown Cree hunter, lies in a coma, the result of violence, bad luck and misunderstanding. From the inside of that dream world, he talks about his journey from boyhood to the present. The other voice telling us her side of the story is Will’s young niece, Annie Bird. At the bedside of her uncle hooked up to his life- sustaining apparatus, Annie talks to Will, hoping her voice and stories will reach him, waken him and bring him back.
Like a small bush plane climbing out of the muskeg on the wings of an impending storm, this book starts off cautiously. Most readers will stumble and perhaps have to flip back a few pages before they realize that they are dealing with two narrators. Somewhere in the story, author Joseph Boyden mentions a parallel universe. That reference is more than a metaphor for the two central characters whose voices become the catalyst for all the players in this tale of mystery, adventure and mysticism set in Ontario’s Far North and in Toronto, the province’s glittering Mecca.
Reviewers have already written myriad words about this novel, the follow-up to another stellar work, Three Day Road, both books exploding onto the popular literary scene like twin shooting stars. It has all been said or written: Praise for a skilled storyteller with a grasp of the narrative, an affection for the terrible beauty of the tundra, the constant battle of wits with the land and weather to stay alive. That is the backbone of an Arctic adventure. The other more subtle side of this story is the way Boyden captures the spirit of the people and their ties to the land.
The writer, a professor at a Louisiana university who was raised in the Toronto suburbs and who has only tenuous Metis ties to the North, manages to grasp and articulate the essence of being Cree, the people who thrived in the challenging Hudson Bay area centuries before Europeans found them.
Perhaps it is Boyden’s gift as a storyteller that enables him to see the beauty in the poverty, the struggle and the daily ennui. The town that most visitors would look down on with pity bustles with families who care about each other. Boyden writes about people celebrating a successful hunt, nurturing a new baby, or experiencing the thrill of a teen crush. We see people dealing with disease, death, heartbreak and disappointment, a people living in the fallout of misguided government policies, officially sanctioned lies, broken by cruel colonial attempts to “civilize” them. He has a passionate eye for detail, texture and sensations.
The drama of local life is played out in Annie’s varied roles as rebellious daughter, skilled trapper and hunter, seasoned snowmobile driver, torn sister, best friend and loving niece in a world where family and friendship are everything. Things get complicated when greed brings evil to the community.
A family named the Netmakers conspires with biker drug dealers to transport the worst of city street toxins to the town. While kids are dying from chemical abuse, the Netmakers are living high.
When an informer fingers the drug traffickers, Will is suspected, making him the target of gang violence. He is also blamed for a missing member of the Netmakers, who left town with his niece Suzanne. Neither has been heard from for months. Their separate odysseys take Annie and her uncle to startling levels of self-discovery. While the Netmakers harass and intimidate Will, forcing him to go into hiding before a final brutal beating, Annie goes south to find her missing sister who was a popular fashion model before she disappeared.
Young Annie gets a first hand taste of the glamour, corruption and treachery of life in the high fashion worlds of Toronto, Montreal and New York City. Both Annie and her uncle will learn about loyalty and the power of friendship.
I especially liked the way the writer captures the speech of the citizens of Moosenee and other northern communities. Holeee! Ever! Those are words that I heard many times during my residential school days and again as an adult when I caught up with old classmates in the city or at college. “Me, I get homesick for the good old, bad old mush-hole days. (Mush-hole is a nickname for some of those “home away from home” schools where the government used to send Native kids, and a lot northern Crees ended up at the school in Brantford.)
Through Black Spruce is exceptional for its revealing portrayal of the Crees of Moosenee and for its beautiful depiction of life in the North, as well as for the storytelling acumen of the author. The book is a wild and crazy ride until the end, where the final scenes become maudlin, missing the potency of the rest of the story. Some reviewers had a problem with this, calling the ending anticlimactic.
Personally, I don’t think I could have handled any more suspense and drama.
