Douglas & McIntyre, March 2020
Nature writing, in the form of a novel about the limits of human understanding about our place in this world.
Alternating chapters switch between Sandy Langley's account of her day spent following the tracks of a sasquatch in 2003, with longer flashbacks to the events of her lifetime living in a tiny cabin in the woods, where she was raised by her grandfather. It was an idyllic settler Canadian childhood, despite being marked by tragedy: being orphaned at seven. Luke, a boy her age, lived with his mother in a nearby cabin, but the nearest town was an hour's drive.
The multi-sensory evocation of the setting, a mountain valley in British Columbia, is my favourite thing about this book. I could smell the lake and trees, hear the birds, and feel the spongy moss.
The air was damp and fragrant, the forest floor was soft under our feet and the rocky outcrops and huge fallen trees were blanketed in a brilliant green carpet of moss. We followed the trail uphill, looking for interesting things. We hooted to attract barred owls, but none answered. We thought we spotted one and tried to sneak up on it for a closer look, but it turned out to be just a dark fungus on a tree trunk.
Luke knelt down, his face nearly on the ground, and called me over to breathe in the intensely sweet fragrance of the twinflower that was finally blooming. Our jeans were damp from the moss when we stood and continued upslope. The canopy thinned on the ascent, and soon we were scratched and sweaty, climbing deer trails through the old burn with juncos zipping around and squirrels calling out from the well-spaced trees.
As a young man, Sandy's grandfather had abandoned his priestly vocation after his first sighting of a sasquatch in 1920. He became obsessed with the creature and keeping its existence a secret. He ruefully tells her:
"Of course, many have succeeded in reconciling their Catholicism with a modern approach to science, but I was the sort of young man who lacked the courage to tolerate any whiff of ambiguity in my own convictions."
Sandy has learned a scientific approach from her scholarly grandfather:
Long before I was grown, I accept as self-evident the importance of knowing whether a particular chickadee chattering from the cedars was a Poecile atricapillus or a Poecile rufescent, because I had experienced for myself the deep satisfaction in that sudden spark of recognition, that acute and particular pleasure of unexpectedly spotting a familiar and beloved friend in a crowd.
This particular pleasure resonated with me, because I was a rural child with nature guidebooks ready to hand, happily absorbed in identifying plants and birds.
Sarah Louise Butler's romantic outlook grated on me. Day-to-day hardships inherent in living in a remote place are glossed over in favour of the exaltation of living a primitive lifestyle, and of nature itself.
Whenever Grandpa and I encountered something particularly striking -- a distant grizzly family foraging on the flats, a golden eagle soaring over a remote peak -- his face took on a rapturous expression, features lit from within as he beheld the fresh wonder. He would turn to me, make sure I was paying attention, and then, after, he would let me try to work out why that particular creature was right here, right now, steering me toward a recognition of the connections between everything.
Foreshadowing is neatly slipped into place, though sometimes heavy-handed. There are only a few examples of humour. Luke and Sandy, soon to be parents, are watching a salmon run:
"There's just something so compelling about their life cycle," Luke said. "The circularity of it; how they spawn and then immediately die. It's kind of perfect, in a way."
I looked at him, my hand resting on my pregnant belly, and shook my head incredulously. Really, the man had no sense of timing whatsoever.
I must be clear that the oversized humanoid creature is never referred to in the novel as a sasquatch (or a bigfoot, a yeti, or anything similar). The way it is presented as a mystical muse for Sandy and her grandfather is an aspect that didn't work for me. Otherwise, I enjoyed following the giant footprints while looking backwards upon an interesting life.
Giller chances: LOW - Existentialism within quintessentially settler Canadian wilderness writing; it harks back to an earlier era, oblivious of contemporary social and political realities. Nostalgia is fine, but not award-worthy.
This post is part of a series. I'm on the Shadow Giller jury this year, so I'm reading as many qualifying Canadian titles as possible in order to come up with my own longlist prediction before the official one that will be announced on September 8, 2020. To see my other reviews that are a part of this project, click on the Shadow Giller tag. Also, please visit our Shadowing the Best of CanLit website to see what the rest of the Shadow Giller jury are up to. Thanks for visiting my blog.
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