Panel has mostly praise for father-son tale
The Sun’s book club is discussing Richard Wagamese’s new novel, Medicine Walk. It’s the story of a First Nations father and son who are estranged, but who reconnect as the father prepares to die. We will be chatting online with Wagamese, at a date to be announced soon. Plan to join the conversation at vancouversun.com/books.
Melanie Jackson: I would rank Medicine Walk as one of my favourites of all the novels I’ve read along with you as a member of the Sun’s Book Club. The writing is clean and spare, yet often mystical and spiritual. The book has two age-old themes that, explored well as Richard Wagamese does here, never fail to compel: a boy’s maturing; and his conflicting relationship with his father.
I like that there are no wasted words in Wagamese’s writing, none of the dreaded purple prose that fleshes out many novels into being fatter than they should be. At one point Franklin surveys the morning, and thinks: “Purple.”
The cleanness of writing reminds me a lot of Hemingway,
especially since Franklin is an outdoorsman (or almost man), living by the land. When he goes hunting, or learns to fish the descriptions are lyrical in their practicality and sparseness.
There’s another writer I’ll mention: Mark Twain. Not because Wagamese’s writing reminds me of Twain’s, but because his story, of Franklin coming to know and understand his drunkard father, is the part of Huckleberry Finn Twain never wrote.
Julia Denholm: I read this book in one long go when I was seriously supposed to be doing something else. My most favourite feature of this book is that the story could be about anyone. Yes, it’s about First Nations men (mostly), but that’s secondary. This is a book about a boy and two men. And it’s more than enough at that.
Monique Sherrett: There’s certainly a degree of sorrow and hope in this novel that plays out well, but it is one of my least favourite novels. I feel the complete opposite about the writing. The narrator presents us with a character of few words but the narration itself is annoyingly verbose. Maybe I’m putting too much stock in the opening paragraph but I felt like yelling, get on with it. “He looped the rope around the middle rail of the fence and turned to walk back to the barn for the blanket and saddle. The tracks looked like inkblots in the seeping melt …”
Then a page later we learn “he’d grown comfortable with aloneness and he bore an economy with words that was blunt, direct, more a man’s talk than a kid’s.” The dialogue perhaps is blunt and sparser than the narration but it read like forced cowboy talk to me.
I do think the metaphor of the journey of father and son as a medicine walk is lovely. The idea of a slow plod through the land, where you gather the things you need to heal, is beautifully realized. There are lots of things to like about this novel, but not a favourite for me.
Tracy Sherlock: I really enjoyed Medicine Walk — I even stayed up late reading it. I really loved the portrayal of Franklin, particularly the things he didn’t say, but you knew he was feeling, and also the portrayal Eldon, because although he was not a sympathetic character as an alcoholic, absentee father, you had to know he was masking a lot of pain.
Julia Denholm: Interesting comments from Monique about the writing. I found the dialogue clunky to start but then I thought more about some of the people I met when I used to spend summers up near Boston Bar and remembered that some of them spoke exactly like Franklin does. I didn’t speak with them much because for the most part they didn’t speak at all.
The thing that bugs me the most about the novel is what happens to Becka. She interested me a lot but just falls out of the plot, which I found disconcerting, particularly because she explicitly invited Franklin back.
Ian Weir: I grew up in the Interior of B.C., which is undoubtedly one of the reasons why this novel struck such a chord with me. Perhaps there are moments when the dialogue strives just a tich too hard for significance, but I love this book. It’s one of those tales that’s haunted by fundamental human truth.