Five Little Indians

Review: 4 stars

This was Tanya's pick for my university girls' book club, which we read last fall, and the timing finally feels right to write about it: September 30 is the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation in Canada, and this is the book I would press into every Canadian's hands this week.

It was an extremely difficult read. I was born and raised in Vancouver, and growing up I spent a lot of time in Chinatown, trailing my parents as they picked up fresh vegetables and meat for the restaurant they ran. We always passed through the Downtown Eastside to get there. My pediatrician was at 475 Main Street, which on a recent visit home, I found lined with tents and makeshift shelters. It has always been a hard area to look at directly. But reading the stories of Kenny, Lucy, Clara, Howie, and Maisie, five residential school survivors trying to stay alive in that same neighborhood, changed the way I pass through it - with less prejudice and caution, and more curiosity. The book asked me to see individuals, not masses.

The book reminded me of A Little Life, one of my favorite novels, in the way Michelle Good is unrelenting about lived experience in all its harshness. No softening, no looking away: the bleakness, the compounding trauma, the way a person's history quietly sets the ceiling on what they believe they're allowed to be. Maisie's story was the hardest to sit with, the brutality of it, how completely her sense of self and reality had been warped by the schools. All five of them grew so accustomed to loss, to people leaving without warning, to nobody being on their side, that doing something as ordinary as living a normal life required them to be almost extraordinary.

It also left me humbled by how little I knew, and honest about something uncomfortable: I don't know how to teach my own children about this yet. The brutality makes it hard. You want them to understand how much they have compared to the children who were taken, and the comparison is so jarring it barely feels shareable. That's not a reason to look away, but it is a real tension I sat with.

My favorite arc was Clara's: surviving, finding her roots, returning to her community without apology to serve it and lift it up, and finally arriving at her own quiet life. It sounds like such a simple list of wants. Community, support, love, living into your forties and fifties. But nothing on that list can be taken for granted in a community with this heritage of abuse, this history of having identity stripped away. Clara earning the ordinary felt like the most radical ending in the book.

I highly recommend it to Canadians, especially right now. And take it slowly. Don't rush through it. Sit with what it means to be Canadian, a country built on the shoulders of this past.

Washington Black | outlandish, questioning, expansive

Review: 4 stars

I always feel inspired by Indigo’s slogan - “The World Needs More Canada”. With that in mind, I picked up a copy of Esi Edugyan’s multi-award winning novel, ‘Washington Black’ to see if the hype around this Canadian author was deserved.

The novel opens on the Faith Sugar Plantation in Barbados, where our young, eleven-year-old protagonist, Washington Black, is a slave at the mercy of a cruel, new master. The adventure begins when Black is taken from the fields to serve as an assistant to Titch, the master’s brother. The two quickly defy the odds, developing a friendship founded upon scientific curiosity and mutual respect. Edugyan masterfully builds up the tenuous warmth of the bond, as Titch tends to Black’s wounds after an accident, praises Black for his artistic brilliance and saves Black from fatal punishment after an unexpected death occurs.

The pair escape Faith in a “Cloud-Cutter”, and as they wander further and further (Nova Scotia, Canadian Arctic), instead of relishing freedom, they become enslaved to their fear of recapture. The investment that Edugyan has made in the familial relationship between Titch and Black is ripped away without notice. Black is stranded, bereft of the sense of identity and worth that Titch had bestowed upon him. The remainder of the novel unravels through twists and turns, enriched by romance, tormented by the fear of being hunted, and encircled in unanswerable questions.

Edugyan’s central theme revolves around what it means to be free. Big Kit, Black’s closet caregiver on the plantation, asserts that freedom is “to [go] wherever it is you wanting”. Clearly, Black was beholden to the chains of slavery on the plantation, his very breath extinguishable on the whim of Master Erasmus. However, even after he escapes, Black is not truly liberated. He is monetarily and emotionally dependent on Titch, unable to imagine an independent path for himself. He has freedom from abuse, forced labour, brutality, but not freedom itself. After Titch’s disappearance, Black remains imprisoned in his own anxieties, as Willard, a brutish bounty hunter, draws nearer and nearer. In the final chapters, Black continues to be tethered to Titch, unable to extricate himself from perennial questions of “Why” and “How could you” as he scours the globe for his elusive friend. It is only in his final act of the novel that Black releases himself from all bondage, and goes where he is wanting, to the incredulity of the reader.

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel for its complexity, inventiveness and ability to approach the oft-visited theme of freedom across so many dimensions. Edugyan’s writing is meticulous in its fidelity to the novel’s temporal and geographic settings. Washington Black as a narrator is completely believable, and engenders deep reader sympathy as well. I would definitely recommend this book, and look forward to reading ‘Half Blood Blues’ - Edugyan’s prior work.

Bellevue Square | eery, otherworldly, unsettling

Review: 3 stars

My friend Patrick and I have a lovely Christmas tradition. We gift each other our most anticipated read, or our favourite read from the past year. Over the years, he’s sent me some great choices, and this year, he opted for ‘Bellevue Square’ by Michael Redhill.

Redhill has written a cerebral thriller in which the credibility of our narrator, Jean Mason, is questioned throughout the novel. Jean lives a fairly ordinary life in Toronto, until she discovers from chance acquaintances that she has a doppelgänger that frequents Bellevue Square, and that myth has it only one of the doppelgängers can exist in the physical world. This news ignites Jean’s all-consuming hunt for her look-a-like, Ingrid. Jean works with a band of haphazard characters that frequent the square to unravel this mystery. We soon learn that Jean suffers from mental illness, and that is when we begin to question the veracity of her commentary and whether we, the readers, are being duped ourselves. The novel pulses towards an inexorable face-off between the Jean and Ingrid, in which only one can survive.

The premise of the novel is original, but at times gimmicky, and Redhill takes many pains to elevate the suspense of the novel. He guides the reader unwittingly to invest deeply in Jean’s character, which I think is a wholly successful rendering. We empathize with her struggle to appear ‘normal’ to her sons and husband, and are impressed by the ease with which she slips into the patchwork fabric of Toronto’s underbelly. This outpour of support for Jean is what makes the twist in the end quite dramatic. The finale unravels our notion of who, or what, Jean really is and prompts us to shift our sympathies to Ingrid.

While the ending is intriguing and refreshing to me, I found that there were a few doldrums in the novel, when pace fell off and my interest waned. I would’ve appreciated more time allotted to the hasty ending to explore the questions of reality and existence that Redhill launches with pages left to go. Overall, this was a good read with a well-developed protagonist, but fell short for me on a few other dimensions.