Through Black Spruce

by Joseph Boyden

Boyden's Through Black Spruce is a powerful and fitting follow-up to his first, incredible novel, Three Day Road.  It continues to chronicle the lives of the Bird family, focusing on Will Bird (son of the main character of Three Day Road), and his niece Annie.  The story unfolds through the use of a double narrative.

When the book opens, Will is in a coma in a hospital in Moose Factory (in far Northern Ontario), and Annie sits with him each day, speaking to him to try to bring him out of it.  Annie tells her story to her uncle, and he, in his coma, narrates his own story to both Annie and her missing sister, Suzanne.

Suzanne went south with her troubled boyfriend Gus Netmaker a while ago, and seems to have fallen off the face of the Earth.  When Annie's friend wins a little money, they travel to Toronto together to look for her.  Annie has some problems in Toronto, and meets Gordon, a mute homeless man, also First Nations, who stays with her, serving as her protector as she travels to Montreal, and then to New York, picking up jobs as a model (her sister's profession) and slowly learning about the dangers Suzanne placed herself in.

At the same time as Annie was moving south, Will was having his own problems with one of the Netmakers; Marius, one of the brothers, had singled Will out as having informed on Gus to the RCMP, and began exacting revenge.  Marius and his friends beat him, and tried to firebomb his house, among other acts of intimidation.  This in turn led Will to commit an extreme act, and then remove himself to the bush, to hunt and trap through a fall and winter.

Boyden has his characters narrate their tales in sparse, straight-forward language that slowly works a spell on the reader, until he or she is utterly consumed by Will and Annies' stories.  He is at home describing New York nightlife as he is the intricacies of trapping beaver alongside a frozen pond.  I found myself relating better to Will and his story, but found this book engrossing.  I like that, while not shying away from the problems that consume Canada's Native communities, this book is ultimately more about character and resilience than it is about circumstance.  Highly recommended.