The Back of the Turtle.

 

King, Thomas. The Back of the Turtle. Toronto: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. 2014

Did ye know that a fortune may be read on a face and a fate found in a query?[i]

I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.[ii]

             Imagine you have a job as a technician in a large corporation employing thousands. Imagine further that your job is to develop and produce a certain combination of chemicals in order to facilitate other aspects of whatever else the corporation produces. Suppose that you discover one day that the corporation has been found responsible for the deaths of many people in an accident resulting from the faulty use of a product that contains the component you developed. Would you feel guilt at having contributed to such a disaster? Would you feel that you ought to have had a handle on the potential risks and foreseen the tragedy?

      
            Are individuals responsible for the actions of the collective entities of which they are parts? Does the plea, “I was only following orders,” pass the moral smell test?

            King has created a marvellous novel in The Back of the Turtle, a story that contains the questions above without ready answers. Rich with unforgettable characters, it chronicles the aftermath of a horrifying mistake made by the Domidion Corporation in accidentally destroying a BC reserve and tourist town, poisoning people and destroying flora and fauna alike in a fatal effort to defoliate an area for the construction of a pipeline. What's different from typical diatribes against ruthless resource exploitation is that The Back of the Turtle tells the story through individuals experiencing the events. Corporate groups, institutions, reserves, towns are in the end not so much cohesive, active entities  as collectives that serve to limit accountability, excuse the culpability of the individuals involved, bury the lives of people under the rubric of “the common good.”

            What a fabulous cast of characters King has imagined here. Sonny and Crisp, eccentric characters who have outlived the disaster and continue to inhabit the ghost town that is Smoke River. Mara who comes back to the reserve where she grew up to find that her childhood friend hasn't survived the disaster . . . and then can't leave. Gabriel who turns up in the ruined community with a secret deeper than he can tell.

            And then there's Dorian Asher, the CEO of Domidian, a man swimming in money but drowning for lack of the things money can't buy: a fulfilling marriage, health, peace of mind, self respect.

            King's narrative takes us back and forth between the BC coast and corporate Toronto; the contrasts between the high-end shops of TO and the ruined houses, abandoned convenience stores and motels of Smoke River characterize the gulf between the haves and the have nots: First Nations and white corporate culture in this case. Most Canadians will have sensed the depth of that division by now as it plays out between the Canadian government/petroleum business and the people who are directly affected by the collateral damage of oil extraction, the laying out of pipelines and other infrastructure. What King achieves in his novel is the removal of this tension from the political sphere and the placing of it in the realm of the personal.

            Readers may be left with a question: how ironical is it that people can be trampled by massive projects whose justification is “the welfare of the people?”

            It's difficult for us to be certain about what happens behind corporate board room doors and in the offices of Suncor, Shell or Exxon, and so King's retailing of possible conversations between corporate executives on possible ways of handling disasters like spills and bird deaths has to be speculative. If King is accurate when he fictionalizes their conversations, his boardroom dialogue (including plans to spread suggestions that sabotage, extreme environmentalism, terrorism are behind such “accidents”) has to be read judiciously: companies are run by people, individuals who have homes and lives and families and worries about their health. They are all are people who fear for their jobs, their incomes, the caché and power they possess and a lifestyle that most only dream about. That they are willing to behave ruthlessly, lie if necessary, treat consumers as commodities is hardly surprising. In fact, it should be absolutely predictable. Furthermore, corporations carry the "Ltd" affix after their names; individuals who control them must see their liability as limited and therein lies the dilemma that faces ordinary citizens: you are valued as a compliant consumer, the quality of your life often hangs from a lopsided negotiation.

            But to stop here would be to do The Back of the Turtle an injustice. Smoke River, the reserve, the people who remain and those who wander back are best characterized by their resilience. It's their stories that will stay with readers after the indignation at corporate injustice has faded. The creation myths surrounding turtles and the woman falling from the sky thread through the novel and serve as foundations for the hope that King's characters possess: the turtles, the whales, the people will come back. They will fall from the sky, they will emerge from the sea and the place will flourish once more.

            I've long been impressed with the generosity of spirit in Thomas King's writing. Even in his non-fictional The Inconvenient Indian, the tone is refreshingly conciliatory when considered in the catalogue of literature chronicling indigenous/settler conflicts and injustices. For me as a privileged, white settler who recognizes the need for justice and reconciliation, a real danger exists that I will make the same mistake that governments and corporations have long made at the aboriginal/settler interface, namely the homogenization of “the opposition” into a blob such that the persons involved are rendered faceless and nameless . . . and insignificant.

       
            I began this review with a question: what responsibility does a minor functionary in a corporate entity bear for the actions of the conglomerate for which he works? I might have added: what responsibility do we all share for destructive behaviours that can ensue when we act corporately? I was surprised at the degree to which King practically answers this question for us in a near-essay in Chapter 82 where one of these “functionaries” recognizes his own role in an unbelievable disaster:

How had he come to such a fantasy, that there was a benign purity in scientific inquiry? He had mistaken the enterprise completely, had seen only the questions and had ignored the obvious answers.

  What was the proper goal of research?

  Profit.

  What was the proper use of knowledge?

  Power.

He could see his errors now, could see all his illusions in stark relief. Too late, of course. Very much too late.[iii]

I generally prefer that I be allowed to come to such a conclusion through the actions and words of the characters, but I'm willing to forgive King for superfluous guidance here, particularly as  The Back of the Turtle gave me probably the best read of the year.     

 Really.        

           

           

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[i]Page 1

[ii] Invictus, William Ernest Henley

[iii]Page 466

Wiebe, Rudy - Come Back

 

Wiebe, Rudy. Come Back. Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014

First, a disclaimer: for me to critique either the quality or the content of any of Rudy Wiebe's work would have to be considered presumptuous, what with fully a page-length of titles of literary work behind him, much of it publicly and critically acclaimed. So this is not about evaluating, but about the experience—by only me—to the reading of Come Back.

                A good friend gifted me with Come Back as we celebrated a "Thompson United Mennonite Church alumni" Christmas in Winnipeg recently. I was half way through it by the time we reached home in Rosthern and puzzling about the Author's Note that precedes the novel: "The 'Hal' in this fiction was a character in my first novel, Peace Shall Destroy Many . . ." Was this necessary to prevent its being read as autobiography, possibly as a bookend complementing his 2007 Of this Earth: A Mennonite Boyhood in the Boreal Forest?" I couldn't think of any other reason for the note; Come Back certainly doesn't depend on a reread of Peace Shall Destroy Many for coherency.

                But inasmuch as the primary setting in Come Back is territory on which I've walked a lot myself—roughly the Old Strathcona, Whyte Avenue section of Edmonton—and the fact that this is the same ground which both "Hal" and the author consider home, distinguishing the novel from the author was a challenge for me. Those who know Wiebe know that it's not only the setting that he and his fictional Hal Wiens have in common; tragedy very similar to that which gives rise to the central motif of the novel visited the Wiebe household in the early '80s and the existence of Aspen Creek also has family resonances.

                A writer's life quite obviously provides the grist from which a novel is milled. I recently read and reviewed Miriam Toews' All My Puny Sorrows and it shares with Come Back the portrayal of that excruciating pain that is in-family suicide. Is the experience of losing a son, a father, a sister to voluntary, untimely death comprehensible only to those who've gone through it? I've wondered. And is the surviving family by implication invariably guilty of failing to prevent such a tragedy? I too have lost a child—in my case in a highway accident—and that experience has taught me that the stone-in-the-shoe of regret (guilt?) will linger, subside, recur for a lifetime but never disappear. This is a theme worthy of exploration and sharing and it's possible that novels like Toews' and Wiebe's fill a void, one made more poignant in our time by the reconsideration of voluntary death, abortion law and the postmodern climate's permission to rethink older, assumed paradigms regarding life and death.

                Come Back is far more complex than the above would suggest, however. Hal Wiens' "stone of regret" is reawakened 25 years after his son Gabriel took his own life at age 23. Hal and Dene friend Owl are having coffee on Whyte Avenue when through the window, Al sees an orange down-filled parka and the long-hair and walk that is exactly his long-dead son. He rushes out in pursuit, causes a traffic accident by running across the street against the red light but doesn't catch up to the person or apparition. The sighting drives him into his basement where his recently-departed wife, Yolanda, has stored all Gabriel's effects, particularly day planners, coil binders and scraps of writing that he compulsively filled  with thoughts and impressions in his final few years. It's this story within Hal's story that grips and stings: the despair, the hopelessness, the fatalism of a young man inexplicably and increasingly devoid of all joie de vivre.

[Day Planner: 25 July 1984]

8:00 why does it go on and on, self-inflicted. Dear God where are you  Man and alone  both sets of parents have cars  they must both be somewhere close  close only counts in horseshoes XH4U

5:30 DM fuer a Whopper and coffee

End this—

I can do it. To hell with money  here I go.

In bed by 9:45 p.m. Wednesday  o sweet sleep of the dead. be dead  (p. 61)

This excerpt from a diary entry posted while backpacking through Europe is typical of the stream of consciousness style of Gabriel's writing. He jots down a partial thought, something else occurs and the first thought breaks off. As reader, I found I had to do some work to grasp the flow of Gabriel's thinking while allowing the disconnectedness to live as representative of a disjointed, sad state of mind that would eventually lead to suicide.

                Why are we depressed? Why are some people chronically bipolar and others not? There's no certain explanation and Come Back suggests none. In Gabriel's notes, however, it becomes clear that there's stuff going on in him that's probably symptomatic of some pathology.  Particularly striking in his behaviour is his infatuation at 23 with the 13-year old daughter of family friends. Her name is Ailsa and he obsesses about her to the point of writing her letters and declaring his love for her repeatedly in his notes and diary. Memories of Nabokov's Lolita come to mind easily but Gabriel's obsession is that of a man just barely past boyhood and although he recognizes cognitively the absurdity of his unusual attraction (he is also infatuated with Nadia Comeneci and Nastassja Kinski in Paris, Texas, both females with little-girl-like characteristics), the fantasy of Ailsa as lover persists against all reason, including his own:

June 17, 1985

Well, I look at (in my mind's eye) A[ilsa]'s family and they are nothing special. Middle-class ordinary. And let's face it, what I've observed is that A is physically beautiful but otherwise nothing at all special either—I'm being very cruel—lousy school marks, Christian (?) rock, clothes clothes—why have I created her (with those incredible green eyes) into this legend? All of us, me in particular, are nothing special / I love her, I love everything about her, the things she likes, does, wears, I love every part of her body I have ever seen.

    What does one do with love, emotions, tenderness what stops me

    As the old joke goes: I refuse to worship a god who creates a pathetic lump like me. No way. (178)

                And then there must be some mention of his relationship to church, Christ and God beyond what is telling in his "old joke" above. The Wiens family has apparently been regulars at the generic Edmonton Mennonite Church and it becomes apparent in the latter part of the novel that Gabriel has spent considerable time perusing his Bible, even underlining passages that have struck him, but in a kind of "reverse proof texting" way. Gabriel is disappointed in both the church and the God who is adulated there. "So okay, God, you create a world, a world we have to exist in. Why?" (184) Those who attribute beauty and joy to the benevolent hand of God will adore him; those who experience their lives as tedious, often painful, always meaningless may attribute their reality to God as well, and despise him for it. Gabe's self-loathing generalizes to the one who made him.

                But Gabe's ennui and the tragic end to which it leads is essentially a sub-plot. We come back to those who live on with that stone of regret, of "if onlys." In this story it's Gabriel's father, Hal, the novel's protagonist and the one who can only barely abide the excruciating pain of a tragic past that can't be undone. Wiebe masterfully evokes his dilemma in the imagery of the orange down-filled parka flashback, the ravens that circle the intersection near the old Strathcona Hotel, the dizzying height of the High Level Bridge over which Gabriel used to pass (and from which, Hal realizes, he could have jumped at any time), the search for the wearer of the orange down-filled parka up and down the right bank of the North Saskatchewan.

                As readers, we empathize with Hal's longing for a chance to do over what causes us pain; the man in the parka is never found; the lost never Come Back.

                Come Back doesn't set out to propagate an idea or teach a lesson. It's neither an apology for faith nor for its opposite, doesn't paint a smile on the face of sorrow. What it does, though, is depict courageously and skillfully a significant reality in human life in a way that seems honest . . . at least to me.

                Does it succeed as art?  My test of that is simple: if it moves me, if it carries me along and lingers well after I've put it down, it's probably art. But such judgments end up being moot considerations most of the time, tangled up in questions of taste, literacy and whether or not what's read as a book, seen as a visual representation or listened to as speech or music supports our current and preferred worldview.

                Would I recommend it if asked? Yes, of course. I'd recommend it partly because it's a "hard read;" Wiebe's work has always assumed thoughtful effort on the part of his readers, and literary workouts are probably as good for us as physical exercise.

                If a "work of art" happens to provide insight into the life with which I personally am seeking to come to grips, well that's a bonus.