Plunder and progress
The Shipping News author Annie Proulx has written the book for which she will be remembered, says David Herkt.
In an author’s career, there is often one book that seems intended to mark the summit of their achievement. Annie Proulx, the American writer of The Shipping News and Brokeback Mountain, obviously anticipates that her new novel Barkskins will be that book.
It is Proulx’s first novel for 14 years and it is her longest. It is a multi-generational story of two families, spread over nearly three centuries, with a diverse range of characters whose actions will interconnect and develop.
Barkskins also focuses intently on the human relationship with wilderness trees, and how we use them for both good and bad. Settings range widely from Quebec and the north-eastern American states to China and New Zealand.
The book begins in the late 17th century with Rene Sel and Charles Duquet, two indentured immigrant servants with very different personalities, in the thickly forested and Indianhaunted land of New France, Canada.
Structured like a genealogical tree, the book reveals how personality traits and inherited situations produce different consequences in individuals, and while we might change the world, our world also changes us.
At its base, Proulx’s novel is a study in the growth of a family business in lumber, and the effects this industry has on the Sels and Duquets, now the Duke family. Proulx’s method is swift and compressed. Short scenes and widely varied stories flow together seamlessly. It is a grand view of life by an 80-year-old writer.
Barkskins is full of sights and sounds, from the swarms of midges that fill the air of Canadian forests to the noise of a straining ship in a savage storm. It is a visceral novel, like life itself. While there is action, personal human incident, and all the variants of love, the novel is also a story of business, land and inheritance.
Ends come suddenly, by murder or misadventure, for some. An elderly wife is exposed on her deathbed as a transvestite. The traditions and history of the Mi’knaw Indians are explored. Lavinia Duke’s search for an heir has a crucial qualification. It is a wise book and the reader experiences the way that decisions play out over time.
Of particular notice to New Zealanders are the sections dealing with kauri and the Maori. It is hard not to react with sorrow to the decimation of 1000-yearold Northland forests to make building materials for boarding houses in San Francisco. Proulx’s lessons about natural despoliation are just as relevant now as they are to the past.
There is something to be applauded about a novel which does not waste its space. In a narrative of audacious compression, Proulx keeps up a constant flow of incident and consequence. Barkskins is, indeed, a significant work.