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]
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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