PROULX’S ODYSSEY A NEAR-MASTERPIECE
Historical novel deserves every bit of praise it has received, writes Robert J. Wiersema.
It was inevitable that Barkskins, the new novel by Annie Proulx, was going to get a lot of attention. First and foremost, any new fiction from the author of The Shipping News and Brokeback Mountain is an occasion. The fact that Barkskins is her first novel in almost 15 years, and that it’s a dense, 700-page historical she has spent more than a decade writing, certainly hones the interest to a fine edge. But when pre-release reviews started using words like “magnificent” and “momentous,” and referring to Barkskins as “a monumental achievement,” the hype was clearly in full force. And rightly so. Make no mistake: Barkskins deserves every bit of praise it has received. It is very nearly a masterpiece; an enthralling, multi-generational odyssey at once sprawling and intimate, a novel suffused with a love for both humanity and the natural world, even when — consistently — they are at odds.
It is not, however, a perfect novel, but the difficulties readers may encounter are as much a part of its nature and its design as its strengths.
Barkskins begins in the late 17th century with the arrival of two Frenchmen to New France. Destitute and desperate, Rene Sel and Charles Duquet are pledged to the service of their new seigneur Monsieur Trépagny. Trépagny, who lives with Mi’kmaq woman Mari, is a cruel taskmaster, and Duquet quickly balks at his treatment, disappearing into the wild, where he is presumed “eaten by the loup-garou.”
That schism, early in the novel, establishes the framework for the book. Over the next 700 pages, Barkskins follows the descendants of the two men, alternating their stories to chronicle, from very different viewpoints, the settlement of the North American continent, and the devastation of the natural world and the native peoples and their cultures.
Sel, through his involvement with Mari, is the father of a line of Métis descendants: Men and women increasingly lost between worlds, clinging to beliefs and social structures even as they are torn from them.
Duquet moves south, working in the woods and founding a logging company, Duke and Sons — an enterprise that will help shape the new world, while at the same time suffering its own defeats and setbacks.
Proulx writes evocatively, with keen sensory detail immersing the reader in any given scene, as comfortable describing a white pine forest or daily life in a logging camp as she is describing the stately homes and well-appointed meeting rooms of Duke and Sons.
And she doesn’t limit herself geographically: Overseas voyages allow her to explore the slums and docks of Europe, the courts and merchant quarters of China, and the magical forests of New Zealand. She captures the squalor of the communities in which the last Mi’kmaqs are forced to settle with a vividness that will affect most readers at a visceral level, a skill she extends to her depictions of injuries and disease.
By its nature, Barkskins is a novel of death and loss. By following multiple generations, death becomes an inevitability. It is a relentless reading experience: Just as one becomes attached to a particular character, the novel either shifts away from them, or the reader witnesses their death. Despite the often traumatic nature of these deaths, the detached voice of the novel lends the events a heartbreakingly unsentimental tone — as if to affirm that death happens, and no matter its nature, life, and the novel, go on.
This unremitting sense of death and loss is key to understanding the novel beyond its storyline. There is an anger here, one that tips frequently into resignation as Barkskins follows the decline of the natural world. Repeatedly characters express an amazement at the boundlessness of the great forests, but readers are aware of just how wrong they are.
As the forests disappear, when the European settlers establish cities and countries, Barkskins’ narrative seems to shrink. Where it takes 150 pages to establish the first 35 years of Sel and Duquet’s lives in the new world, the last 80 pages of the novel cover more than 120 years.
The reader comes to realize the novel isn’t really about the human characters so much as it is about the forests. As they disappear, the narrative seems to recede, revealing a crucial interdependence between the human and the natural world previously handled almost entirely as subtext.
It’s a significant shift, requiring a step away from the narrative and new consideration for the undertones of the previous 600 pages. This is especially true in the novel’s closing, where the anger and despair that have characterized the novel shift into environmental advocacy.
So strong is the messaging in these pages that readers may not realize what is happening at a narrative level, how the environmental message plays into the narrative resolution of the book. When that understanding comes, though, it’s an exhilarating moment — the sort of synergy it is all too rare to find in fiction.
Barkskins is that, in spades: It is a truly singular book, rare and to be treasured.