Through Black Spruce Book

A great tale of family resilience in remote Ontario settings balanced by narrative excursions to Toronto and New York City. It satisfied me by making me care deeply for its cast of characters, feel connected to their challenging rural environment, and empathize with the plight of Native peoples trying to sustain some identity in the larger society. Most of all I was impressed with the courage the key characters find to take action in the face of threats to their family.

We are treated to two narrative voices. One is Will Bird, the Cree son of the character in "Three Day Road", who is largely retired from a long career as a bush pilot for sport tourists and thrives on subsistence hunting, fishing, and fur trapping. The other is a niece in her 20s, Annie. She, her sister Suzanne, and their mother, Will's sister, are about the only family Will has left, as he lost his own wife and children in some disaster in the past which slowly gets revealed. Will is telling the story of his life to his nieces, and Annie is telling her story to Will. Soon we learn that Will is speaking from a point where he is hiding out in a remote hunting camp on an island in the northern wilderness, and Annie is recounting her story from his bedside at a hospital where he lies in a coma. The mysteries of how these points were reached was pretty damned effective as a plot device to hooking me into their intersecting stories.

The main setting is Moosonee, a town of less than 2,000 on the Moose River near its entrance to the tip of James Bay. The site of an old French trading post, it is accessible by water, rail, snowmobile, and airplane, but not by road. A larger settlement and historical site of a 17th century trading post of the Hudson Bay Company, Moose Factory, is nearby on an island in the river, accessible by boat or ice bridge in the winter. The island is the site of a Cree reserve, more significant commerce, a hospital, and, in Will's youth, where he was forced to attend a residential school after his parents died. This outpost of civilization is called the gateway to the Arctic, and I could feel that aspect as a fulcrum for my understanding of Canada as a whole. The clarity of perspective of man versus nature was brought home to me in an early passage in the book, where Will recounts surviving a plane crash. The quote serves to illustrate Boyden's unassuming and engaging prose and delightful comic edge to serious situations:
And when the cloud cover left on a winter afternoon a hundred miles plus north of Moosonee in January, the cold came, presented itself in such a forceful way that I had two choices.
The first was to assume that the cold was a living thing that chased me and wanted to suck the life from me. I could get angry at it, desperate for some sense of fairness in the world, and then begin to panic.
Or my second option was to make up my mind that the cold, that nature, was just an unfortunate clash of weather systems. If I made my mind up this second way, that the physical word no longer held vengeance and evil just beyond the black shadow of spruce, then I would try to make do with what I had. And when I realized what an idiot I was for ending up here all alone without the proper gear'just a jean jacket with a sweater under it and running shoes on my feet'I'd get angry, desperate for some sense of fairness in the world, and begin to panic.
Me, I preferred the first option, that Mother Nature was one angry slut. She'd try to kill you the first chance she got.

From the beginning we learn that Suzanne has disappeared with a boy from a family of local smugglers and drug dealers. Annie is preparing to go after her. Her journey takes her first to Toronto, where she learns her sister found work as a model and her boyfriend somehow make enemies with drug dealers there, leading to another disappearance. Among the homeless Indians there, Annie meets an elder who gives her spiritual guidance and assigns a man who is unable to speak, Gordon, to stick with her and protect her on her quest. Their relationship as they try to negotiate the alien urban landscape was wonderful to watch unfold. As the trail takes them to New York City and their money runs out, Annie's inner strengths and competence as a country girl gives her the courage to follow Suzanne's path in work as a model in the fashion industry. Gordon provides an anchor as Annie gets too close to the edge of the dissolute wild lifestyle of the high flying crowd and faces the corrupting force of using her heritage to serve as an exotic, ephemeral star of New York society. For classic character development and a fish out of water, this story fits right up there with that of Dorothy in Oz.

Another aspect of the writing that works so well for me is the interior dialog of the characters with their most significant family members in the face of isolation and danger. For example, at the beginning of the book, Will begins to get the message he must take some extraordinary action after he gets beat up by the gang of the brother of Suzanne's boyfriend:
I don't know how long I lay there. Something, someone maybe, told me that I eventually had to surface if I was going to live, and believe it or not, it was a tough decision to make. For me, my life's been hard, and sometimes I'm so tired out from losing things I love it feels easier to just give up and slip away.
A voice I knew, the voice of my father, talked to me, and in my head I saw him squatting beside me in the black, on is haunches, his one real leg bent under him, his wooden prosthesis straight out in front like one of those fancy Russian dancers.
"It's not you that you live for," he said to me in Cree. "It can't be. It's the others." Not very specific but I knew who he was talking about.
"What do I got to give to anyone?" I asked. I could tell he was looking down on me, staring at my wounds. He didn't answer my question.

I don't know about you, but I was well moved by the power of Boyden's plain prose to make windows and doors between the natural world and the isolation of the soul. Native peoples aren't alone in clinging to the wellsprings of family and cultural roots when the going gets tough. I leave you with a passage that gives me some delicious chills as the epitome of the human condition, not too far from the spirit of Robert Frost:

I've come to a strange place on this road. I'd gotten used to this travel, a type of comfort in the slow plod forward, until I came to here.
I hear water rushing not so far away, a big river's voice. I'm scared of it, me. I've not truly felt that feeling so strong till here. Something's there, through the black spruce, just on the other side. I can't see it yet, though. I can't see the stretch of water. I have to walk closer if I'm to see it. The sound of rushing water, it makes me feel like drowning. The water closer to shore babbles like children's voices. The sound makes me want to go to it. But I'm afraid.