A Tale of "Hell and Healing"
The book I'm now reading for my next book club meeting is Joseph Boyden's Three Day Road. A comment on the cover by Louise Erdich calls it "a masterful account of hell and healing." It is indeed that. Against the backdrop of the First World War (the hell), the gradually unfolding story of two young Cree boys and Niska (the healer) evolves.
The story opens after the war with Niska meeting one of the boys, her nephew Xavier Bird, at a railway station somewhere in Northern Ontario and heading with him by canoe into the bush. Xavier is largely incoherent and on morphine and has returned with only one leg. We don't know what has happened to his friend Elijah Whiskeyjack. But gradually the two, Niska and Xavier, tell the story, alternating voices as if in oral storytelling, although perhaps the voices are simply the voices of memory speaking to us. Xavier and Niska, back and forth, telling episodes of the war, episodes from childhood, stories of hunting and trapping in the bush, stories of the residential school at Moose Factory, and very gradually, the story of what happened to Elijah. There is a measured cadence to the story which takes place over a three day canoe trip - a trip that may well be Xavier's "three day road, " in native spirituality, a metaphor for that final journey, death.
The book was nominated and shortlisted for a number of awards, both Canadian and International, but it is not an easy book to read as the author holds nothing back in his descriptions of the war. There is page after page of brutal, horrifying and graphic detail. But like no other book on the First World War that I have read has the reality of the experience affected me so strongly. It is stunningly, yet bluntly told, as are the scenes of what it was like for aboriginal people to live through a winter of near starvation, when the windigo was known to come and when another kind of killing had to take place. "Sometimes one must be sacrificed if all are to survive," Niska tells Xavier.
I find "the three day road" to be a haunting spiritual image for the final journey. There is much about the number "three" that is connected with myth and magic, spirituality and religion in all cultures, so we can make connections between what the story reveals of native lore and the Judeo-Christian tradition. I kind of wonder if the nuns and priests who went to bring Christianity to the Indians even tried to see those connections. I am sure the good ones did, but it depresses me to think of the repression and downright cruelty that was done to native people by some sadistic individuals in the name of religion.
The story opens after the war with Niska meeting one of the boys, her nephew Xavier Bird, at a railway station somewhere in Northern Ontario and heading with him by canoe into the bush. Xavier is largely incoherent and on morphine and has returned with only one leg. We don't know what has happened to his friend Elijah Whiskeyjack. But gradually the two, Niska and Xavier, tell the story, alternating voices as if in oral storytelling, although perhaps the voices are simply the voices of memory speaking to us. Xavier and Niska, back and forth, telling episodes of the war, episodes from childhood, stories of hunting and trapping in the bush, stories of the residential school at Moose Factory, and very gradually, the story of what happened to Elijah. There is a measured cadence to the story which takes place over a three day canoe trip - a trip that may well be Xavier's "three day road, " in native spirituality, a metaphor for that final journey, death.
The book was nominated and shortlisted for a number of awards, both Canadian and International, but it is not an easy book to read as the author holds nothing back in his descriptions of the war. There is page after page of brutal, horrifying and graphic detail. But like no other book on the First World War that I have read has the reality of the experience affected me so strongly. It is stunningly, yet bluntly told, as are the scenes of what it was like for aboriginal people to live through a winter of near starvation, when the windigo was known to come and when another kind of killing had to take place. "Sometimes one must be sacrificed if all are to survive," Niska tells Xavier.
I find "the three day road" to be a haunting spiritual image for the final journey. There is much about the number "three" that is connected with myth and magic, spirituality and religion in all cultures, so we can make connections between what the story reveals of native lore and the Judeo-Christian tradition. I kind of wonder if the nuns and priests who went to bring Christianity to the Indians even tried to see those connections. I am sure the good ones did, but it depresses me to think of the repression and downright cruelty that was done to native people by some sadistic individuals in the name of religion.
Labels: books
posted by mamie @ 11:35 AM
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