7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Worthy Of The Giller, December 25, 2008
Through Black Spruce was chosen as the winner of this year's Giller Prize, the top Canadian book award. The panel of 3 that chose it included Margaret Attwood and Colm Toibin (IMPAC Award winner). I hoped this meant I was in safe hands with the recommendation.
I had nothing to worry about. I found Boyden to be an excellent storyteller.
Annie, a young Cree woman from very far northern Ontario (look Moosonee up on the map) has returned to her home town to escape recent events. She gets into the habit of visiting her coma ridden uncle at the hospital for several hours each night.
At this point two story lines emerge. Every second chapter is narrated by Annie as she relates her recent experiences to her uncle. She wonders if he can hear her.
Every other chapter is narrated by Uncle Will as we discover the sequence of events that lead to his current state.
Both storylines are very different and both are compelling. It is difficult to decide which one I liked better. The stories are fluid and both action packed.
Annie, who has lived near Moosonee all her life goes to Toronto with a friend for a vacation with the hope of finding information about her missing sister, Suzanne. Annie and her family are very concerned that Suzanne has met an untimely end. Suzanne is very beautiful and they know from magazines that she has done high fashion modelling. She left Moosonee with an unsavoury character and has certainly gotten into some osrt of trouble.
Annie becomes obsessed with finding her sister and ends up becoming entwined in the world of high fashion and drugs. She also does some modelling and becomes very involved with a world of privilege in Montreal and New York.
Uncle Will's story revolves around his conflict with a local drug dealer named Marius. Marius believes Will has informed on him to the police. Will is terrorized by Marius and must learn to fight back.
Ultimately the story lines intersect and events come to a head.
This is a very quick and fast moving read and I found it to be consistently entertaining. I definitely recommend it.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
North Side Story: Wherever you go, there you are!, July 10, 2010
Canada is an unexplored literary continent for me. Some people try to change that, as if I had excessive spare time. The downside of the amazon friends system is that I buy more books than I can possibly digest. (And then amazon goes and punishes the system that helps them earn their bucks.)
Anyway, strictly speaking this book is different because it was a gift. I never heard of it before. Even Canadian literary prize winners are not easily known to me. I had to struggle through the first few chapters until I believed: yes, this is a genuine voice and it is worth staying with it for 400 pages*. I had initially mistaken it for an exercise in exotic quaintness, with drinking bush pilots and non speaking Indians (had that in Cuckoo Nest already) and disappeared models and obese nurses.
(*If you think that is normal, you overestimate my patience! This novel is a current Canadian prize winner. 2009, I believe. For comparison: Germany has a German Book Prize since a few years. From the beginnings I have honestly tried to stay with the times and always tried to read the best novel of the year, and truly, there was not a single one that I could finish.)
No, no, this one here is a genuine crime story, a murder book, around a fragment of a Romeo and Juliet core tale, set among Cree Indians in the North and in the big cities. The narrative device is ingenious: the bush pilot is in coma and seems to tell his chapters like in a trance, while his niece tells him things, in alternating chapters, for therapeutic purposes. It is supposed to make him come back to life.
Our opposing families are the Birds, trappers and hunters, and the Netmakers, bootleggers, smugglers, drug dealers, Hells Angels. The epos is fed to us in short chapters, combining present tense events (the hospital, the patient etc) with the recollections from various times.
The young couple has gone south, to the big cities, and disappeared. She had become a short-lived shooting star in the model scene, with her exotic good looks, and he was also different from his gangster clan, looking like Johnny Depp, and into arts. Now they are gone. Her sister Annie is the narrator. She had gone searching for the missing. That is one main strand of the narrative. It leads her from Toronto and Montreal to Manhattan and she dives into the model, club and drug world.
Her uncle's narration is more interesting. His world is the poverty of his people and survival in the wilderness. (Do mosquitoes get drunk with the blood of drunken men?)
`Through Black Spruce' is volume 2 in a trilogy, following WW1 novel `Three Day Road'. Will is a son of one of the snipers who are the heroes of vol1. The link between the 2 volumes is the gun that sniper Xavier leaves to his son Will. The gun plays a major part as a prop in the story. Enough said. Volume 3 is pending.
I will most certainly go and look for volume 1.
Both narratives share the background of the harsh life in the North and the violence of race and sex relations. Both also share the beauty of nature.
One of my last book reviews was about stories set in the extreme south of the American continent (Coloane's Tierra del Fuego). The similarities are partly striking, but of course not really surprising. (Coloane as well as Boyden use a stranded whale's skeleton as a prop for their plots. Coincidence, or are low latitude shores full of them?)
As we have learned from many sources, old Indian men are up to the most surprising philosophical insights. Will meets an old man and tells him of his troubles, and then he gets this as a response: Wherever you go, there you are. Will is not happy with that, he wanted more. But there you are.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
