The Miramichi as Setting in Richards' Novels

David Adams Richards sets his books in an area of northeastern New Brunswick known as "the Miramichi." I grew up in this area, so many of the place names and locales are familiar. However, the Miramichi is a widespread area: it includes the Bay itself and the Miramichi River, the source of which is a couple of hundred miles in the interior. It includes dozens of communities, forests, mines, and agricultural land. It includes fishing villages and two large towns, Newcastle and Chatham, recently amalgamated to be the City of Miramichi.

As I read Richards' novels, I don't look for geographic exactness. I find a vagueness to the setting - there is familiarity and yet the details are not always correct. It is like a remembered landscape with some elements clearer than others, distances sometimes compacted or expanded, a running together of time and place.

In The Lost Highway there is mention of a "giant ferris wheel" seen in the distance across the river. This could only be the ferris wheel at "the Ex," the Miramichi Agricultural Exhibition held in Chatham every August. Yet, although one of the characters in the novel is readying his vegetables to take to "the Ex" (a possibility), I don't think that other details of the locale of the story (a stretch of highway between Bartibog and Burnt Church) support a visual sighting of Chatham which would be twenty to thirty kilometres upriver.

Similarly, Richards uses detail in a rather off-hand way: an arrested man is taken to the Richabucto jail (correctly spelled "Richibucto" although definitely pronounced "Rich-a-bucto" by the locals), but later in the story he is now at Renous (the federal penitentiary). In another instance, a priest has to go to "Millerton" to conduct a service, and, while indeed, there is a community called "Millerton" on the Miramich, it is highly unlikely that a priest from Bartibog would be travelling that far to conduct a service.

I love though how David Adams Richards throws in New Brunswick references that, for me, are highly connotative. In The Lost Highway, Amy, a high school girl, "would not get the Beaverbrook scholarship." There is no explanation to whom 'Beaverbrook' refers, but the "in the know" reader immediately recognizes Lord Beaverbrook, Max Aitken, who grew up in Newcastle and whose statue graces the town square and whose name is proudly displayed at the Lord Beaverbrook Arena. It is little touches like this that make Richards' novels come alive for me.

Richards' use of "the Miramichi" as setting has been called symbolic and mythical and I have to ask myself: what does that mean? what does it stand for? The natural setting itself looms large, often a bleak and hostile environment with winter storms, craggy rocks, dense forests, and perilous waters from which a living must be garnered by the hardy souls who live in the region. And yet "the Miramichi" is embracing and compassionate; it holds its humanity (both the noble and the base, the greedy and the generous) in its bleakness and in its beauty. In Richards' works you get such images as "the great desolate bay," but also the quiet beauty of "as night fell, and the cry of the gulls faded and the shore birds slept, their wings turned inward like miniature pterodactyles on the waves."