SPARE AND ARTFUL PORTRAIT OF A MAN'S PERSONAL EROSION
Author Pullinger tells story of a life ruined by the reverberations of one childhood event
Pain, confusion, flashing red-andblue lights: On a Downtown Eastside street in 1995, 68-year old Art Lunn, down on his luck “a while now,” is trying to orient himself in the searing first chapter of Forest Green. Aiming to extract himself from the latest in a long line of scrapes, befuddled Art yearns for his estranged sister and to “get out of the damned city and back to the forest.”
For a reader, the scene incites questions. Prolific Kootenay-born, London-based writer (The Mistress of Nothing) Kate Pullinger follows with answers in chapters depicting episodes from the grind of Art's unrewarding decades — 1934, 1942, 1944, 1956, 1968, 1977 and 1989.
“Loosely based on a bit of family history,” Pullinger's modest novel evokes a lifespan turned paltry and ruinous by the reverberations of one childhood event.
Chief among Pullinger's chapters is “1934: The Jungle.” At seven years old, Art is at the start of a path with limitless possibilities, with a boisterous sister, stern yet kind and honest parents, and a rural British Columbia hometown portrayed as neighbourly even as it weathers the Great Depression. Change arrives in the form of a “great gang of unwashed men” setting up a tent camp on the outskirts of town. Nicknamed “the Jungle,” the hobo habitat ignites fear in a few townies.
For Art and his sister Peg, however, the Jungle sparks curiosity. In keeping with a universal constant of cautionary tales, the siblings disobey their parents and sneak off to spy on the forbidden camp.
It's an innocent act but a consequential one. Unforeseeable, the ensuing skirmishes culminate with killings. Art is burdened not only with guilt but a deep wound within his sense of self.
Art is encouraged to drink “cherry hooch” during his brief stay at the hobo camp, and as he ages it is alcohol and a poisoned self-regard that come to dominate his days and nights. Art's relationships with his family falter, his friendships and romances sour, and his job prospects grow fewer as his reputation as a garrulous drinker precedes him. With every new decade his actions become reactions, his hopes to recoup losses or gain status characteristically lead to further losses and lowered status.
By the 1960s, Art has begun to drink steadily and to wander the province for short-stint jobs at logging camps and on commercial boats where he can drink in solitude, fight in bars or pursue easy money and one-night pleasures.
As portrayed by Pullinger, Art is locked in a kind of cycle where each desperate effort to turn his life around leads to a misstep, bad choice or failed enterprise that proves — to him — what a loser he has been and will always remain. Besides the steady drinking, diminishing social bonds (family, friends, lovers) only worsen his predicament; in his echo chamber of a mind, he's a man fated to do no right.
Until a fortunate reunion in 1995, Art's tragic demise appears fated.
Befitting the man, Forest Green is a spare, economical novel. Its artful portrait of steady personal erosion offers the quiet observation that in 2007 (Pullinger's final scene with Art) an experience from seven decades previous can still be playing itself out.