Through Black Spruce
Joseph Boyden
April 2009
368 pages
Me reading this book was a total fluke. I was browsing the shelves at Borders (which honestly, isn't as much fun as browsing the shelves at B&N, but Borders has free parking) when I came across this one. First, the title piqued my interest. Then, the cover. And then the description. Plus, it's set in Canada, and I tend to have pretty good luck with Canada, book-wise.
The story alternates between narrators. Will Bird is a notorious bush pilot. Currently in a coma, he reflects back on the circumstances that have landed him in his current situation. His niece, Annie, visits her uncle in the hospital. In an effort to reengage her uncle in the world of the conscious, she tells him of her search for her missing sister, Suzanne, a search that took her far from their frozen, remote homeland. As Annie journeyed from Toronto, to Montreal and then to New York, she gets caught up in the same shallow world of modeling and drugs that her sister was living in. As Annie describes her search to Will, and Will narrates his past to Annie (not out loud, obviously, 'cause he's unconscious, but he is talking to Annie in his head), the reader comes to understand how they each came to be where they're at. Okay, that was a lame sentence, but I don't know how else to say it. Their two stories eventually intersect, and it's the combination of figuring what exactly happened to Annie and Will (and the missing Suzanne) and the language that makes this story so engaging.
I loved the author's use of language in this book. The Birds are Cree, and the syntax of their English is just different enough from my Californian English to be intriguing. Here are a few excerpts from Chapter 1, which is in Will's voice.
"Me, I preferred the first option, that Mother Nature was one angry slut. She’d try and kill you first chance she got.You’d screwed with her for so long that she was happy to eliminate you. But more than that, the first option allowed me to get angry right away, to blame some other force for all my troubles.The panic came much quicker this way, but it was going to come anyways, right?"
"And so me, I climbed out of my cockpit and onto the wing on that frigid afternoon in my jean jacket and running shoes, walked along the wing, fearful of the bush and the cold and a shitty death all around me. Push bad thoughts away. One thing at a time. First things first. I crawled quick as I could, trying to stand and walk, and I frankensteined my way to the trees and began snapping dry twigs from a dead spruce.
After I made a pile, I reached into my chest pocket, breaking the ice from the material that felt hard as iron now. My fingers had lost all feel. I reached for my cigarettes, struggled to pull one from my pack, and clinked open the lighter. I’d decided that if the lighter worked, I’d enjoy a cigarette as I started a fire. If the lighter didn’t work, I’d freeze to death and searchers would find me with an unlit smoke in my mouth, looking cool as the Marlboro Man. On the fifteenth thumb roll I got the lighter going."
"The snow’s deep here, nieces. I’m tired, but I have to keep walking. I’m so tired, but I’ve got to get up or I’ll freeze to death. Talking to you, it keeps me warm."
The author also peppers his characters' speech with the word ever, which as far as I can tell is a handy catch-all for totally, right on, whoa, as if, and probably many other things. I know "eh" is a Canadian thing, but I've never heard ever used to the extent that all of characters in this book use it.
Anyways...I just loved this book, although I don't know that I'd recommend it to everyone. It's a bit slow...it's beauty is both in the language and the slow discovery of what happened to both Will and Annie.
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