Thirty Acres Book

A while back, I made the decision to read through the entire list of Governor General Award winners in order to gain a better understanding of my country's development as a literary nation, thus ushering in a steady stream (okay, trickle) of inconveniences and bad-to-mediocre novels into my life. Go ahead, try to find a copy of The Dark Weaver, I dare you! (Actually, don't: I promise, it won't be worth it, unless you're fascinated by bad melodrama and the history of Icelandic immigration in Manitoba).

And so, enter Thirty Acres , the latest regionalist (and naturalist) novel to tackle the transition, in rural Canada, from agrarianism to industrialism and the concomitant decline (moral, political, economic) of its human civilization. (To be fair to Ringuet, his novel's not that simplistic; on the other hand, it's also not that complex.) The novel tracks the rise and fall of its protagonist, Euchariste Moisan, the inheritor and carrier of the Moisin family's agricultural and familial legacy, as he grapples with the classic tensions of rural realism: country vs. city, land vs. people, progressivism vs. conservatism, human/nature vs. machine, morals vs. money, etc. Moisin is portrayed as a sort of tragic hero, a skilled farmer and at-least-not-terrible husband and father whose pride, like that of his forebears, prevents him from adapting to a changing society. As he ages, Euchariste's willingness to work the land stands in stark contrast to that of the new generations, or even some members of his own generation, such as his cousin Edouard, for whom "the attraction of town life had counted for a good deal in his decision and so had a rather happy-go-lucky, lazy streak in his disposition that had made him think clerking in a store more congenial than the hard drudgery of farming" (100); however, even as Ringuet critiques the laxity of the urban inhabitant's work ethic, he acknowledges that the traditional romantic depictions of life on the land, such as "the satisfaction of working one's own land" and "the triumphant beauty of the early morning, when the dew lies on the pastures," are mostly "enjoyed only by those for whom they are not a part of the daily round" (100). In the end, though, you can expect a lot of romanticized imagery of rural life, in contrast with the unpleasant representations of all urban spaces. Even if neither space is perfect, it is clear that, for Ringuet and his characters, rural life is preferable to what has replaced it. The following passage best represents the contrast at the heart of the novel, taken from the first day of Euchariste's first visit to an industrialized city: "Euchariste realized that what he had taken for a well-ploughed field with parallel furrows was the endless roof of a factory that spread over acres and acres of ground and whose canted sections looked like the ridges of furrows.

The whole thing was a field of metal, a huge sterile meadow, under which men worked like moles, far from the friendly sunlight. To Euchariste, all this was incredible. To his son it was magnificent."


If the above sounds interesting to you, have at it! However, there's not much to recommend this one in comparison to the countless other similar tales. There's some nice writing, and some thoughtful ruminations on the relationship between people and the land; a standard evocation of this theme is as follows (as Ringuet describes how an orphaned Euchariste has found a sense of belonging while living with his uncle and his uncle's distant cousin, who functions as a surrogate mother figure, doing all of the cooking, cleaning, child-rearing, etc.: "These three had united, however, to form a new family; these different fragments had been knit together upon the web of the ancestral farm. The unfeeling and imperious land was the lordly suzerain whose serfs they were, paying their dues to the inclement weather in the form of ruined harvests, subjected to the forced labour of digging ditches and clearing away the forests, compelled the whole year round to pay their tithe in sweat. They had come together on, and almost in opposition to, the harsh soil, from which nothing may be wrung except by sheer strength of arm. They had, because of its dumb will, restored the human trinity: man, woman, child; father, mother, son." So far, so good, in terms of style; however, if you're going to read this novel, you'd better have enjoyed that passage, because you will see it echoed in dozens of other passages just like it, because Ringuet's a man who wants to make sure his reader is getting the point: farming is hard; the family unit is the way people were intended to live; the land is a cold, impersonal master (when flexing its power) or mistress (when it's cooperating).

Because, really, land is the backbone of this story; its four parts, one for each of the seasons, operate as a fairly predictable structural metaphor for the changes in Euchariste's fortunes as he ages (spoiler: North-Eastern Canadian winters are bleak), and Ringuet regales (or bores) his reader with vivid natural imagery that had me longing nostalgically for the Northwestern Ontario of my boyhood--wait, "longing nostalgically" is not quite the right word. I think I meant shuddering anxiously while trying to blot out flashbacks to the snot freezing in my nostrils and frozen oxygen shredding my throat during walks to school in -45 degree weather (ah, the good old days...).

Of course, there are humans in this novel, too, but even then, nature serves as the point of comparison: "The first cawings of the returning crows are a warning to get ready for the spring. But what sign foreshadows the weather that is going to prevail in the hearts of those on whom we depend?" What sign, indeed. Really, Euchariste and, perhaps, his son Ephrem aside, the characters in this book belong mostly to the realm of parable rather than the world of living, breathing humans. Each serves their purpose in the determinist narrative, but ultimately, none of them are at all interesting on their own, which feels inevitable in a novel whose main concern is to depict the destruction, for better and worse (though mostly worse), of the agrarian idyll and the people who ostensibly lived it over the course of about forty years.

Unless you're an enthusiast for early Canlit or literary representations of historical Quebec, give this one a pass and read Frank Norris' The Octopus, The Rise and Fall of Silas Lapham, or even The Good Earth, instead. Though it's an important document of Canadian literary history, as a novel, Thirty Acres is thoroughly mediocre.