This book caught my eye because it’s heroes are from the coast of Hudson’s Bay, a nostalgic place for me. Two Cree lads from Moose Factory fight in the trenches of World War I. Boyden writes beautifully, is familiar with Cree culture, and researched WWI trench warfare with a historian’s skill. The book compares well with the classic Canadian novel of WWI, Timothy Findlay’s The Wars. The Great War of 1914–1918 had a tremendous impact on Canada — far more than on the United States. Canada was involved during the entire length of the war, had twice as many soldiers on the front per-capita as the U.S., and one Canadian family in five suffered a casualty. The war ended the desire of most Canadians to keep any serious political ties with Britain, and scarred an entire generation. So it isn’t surprising that WWI novels continue to be written, and loom large in Canadian literature. This is a worthy example.
Aboriginal Canadians from remote wilderness reserves, some of whom had never seen an automobile or spoken much English or French, were disproportionately represented on the front. With their spartan upbringing, hunting skills, and familiarity with extremes of cold, heat and discomfort, they made a reputation for fighting like tigers. Boyden notes that he was inspired to write the novel by the life of Francis Pegahmagabow, a famous Ojibway sniper. But heroics are not the focus of his novel. In almost every part of the book, you find yourself simultaneously in the trenches of Belgium and the bush of Northern Ontario. Elijah Whiskeyjack and Xavier Bird think in Cree throughout their ordeal in the trenches. Look at this brief passage, from the beginning of the book, where the narrator first comes to the front:
Green fields and pretty girls waving to us from windows and doors in the towns we marched through. Then we were shipped further north on old trains and walked through towns smashed to pieces as if by giant children. I saw my first dead body in one of those places, not the body of a soldier but of a small boy, naked and bloated in the sun, a great chunk of his head gone. The child confused me. What did he have to do with any of this? Where was his mother?
This is prose written in English, but the thoughts are Cree thoughts, expressed in a Cree way. Boyden has to have thought this out carefully. My admiration for him, as a writer, increased with every page I turned after reading those lines. I was never disappointed, never jarred by a false note. Boyden did something very difficult. He recreated, not only the alien landscape of the Great War, but the Moose Cree world of 1918, a place not only remote to a writer in 2005, but remote to a Cree living there today.
0 Comments.