Sly wit powers Indigenous thriller
Billionaire-chasing vies with quiet actions and humour to tell a powerful story
Jeremiah Camp, the protagonist of Thomas King’s dazzling new novel “Sufferance,” leads a simple, quiet life. He has a highly regimented routine, checking in with the locals in the town of Gleaming — stopping at the bakery and café, catching up on the day’s news — before connecting with friends and family on the adjoining Cradle River First Nations. He then returns home, to the former residential school where he has come to live, and where he works replacing the seventy-seven mouldering wooden crosses in the school’s graveyard with river stones, each etched with the lost child’s name. It is easy to feel, at least initially, that “the simple life. The quiet life. The unattached life” reflects a simple man, a man who hasn’t ventured far from home, a man who has always been a part of his community, to the point where he is almost taken for granted.
Appearances, however, are deceiving, and the first fault in Camp’s homespun image comes with the style of the book: why is Camp’s narrative voice so clipped, so sharp, with a noir sensibility? Why is an ominous black SUV following him through town? Then there’s the matter of the residential school itself: what exactly does it mean when Camp muses, “I didn’t buy the property. But now it’s mine.”
And why does Camp never speak? King gradually reveals that Camp, in a previous life, was known as “Forecaster,” using his ability to see the result of nearly invisible patterns (including the dot com bust and the S&L collapse) in the service of the Locken Group, a powerful multinational conglomerate. He travelled the world, seeking patterns, hobnobbing with the rich and famous and, more importantly, the uber-rich and reclusive. Camp fled the job, and his previous life, after compiling a list of a dozen of the most powerful, least known, multi-billionaires in the world. “When I left the city, I decided I would stop talking. Completely. That was easy enough. I also decided to stop paying attention to what was happening in the world.”
But now, billionaires are dying, in a series of accidents and misadventures, the only common element seeming to be their inclusion on Camp’s list. And the world — in the form of the Locken Group — has come to enlist Camp’s particular skills one last time.
“Sufferance” is a powerful reading experience, a combination of genres and narrative approaches so deftly blended the reader is forced off-balance at almost every turn. There are elements of a skilfully handled thriller, and a lowkey, almost bucolic community narrative.
It is a thoroughly political novel, dealing with elements of corruption and governmental inadequacy in actually implementing elements of reconciliation (“‘That land claim is never going to see the light of day,’” the town’s mayor says at one point), and a powerful reminder of the legacy of the abuses of the residential school system.
It’s a novel which grows increasingly tense by turns, but with a sly wit and humour throughout. It is a novel of frustration and despair, leavened with an odd, and ultimately redeeming, sense of hope.
How King manages not just to juggle all of these elements, but to resolve them in ways that are both entirely unexpected and completely satisfying, is a reminder of why he is one of Canada’s foremost writers. “Sufferance” is a novel entirely of its time — our time — with the timeless air of greatness.