Sunday 2 November 2014

The Back of the Turtle



He turned towards the eastern mountains, angled the drum to catch the rising sun, and began a memorial song. But the elk skin was too soft now, too damp. The beats slid off, and his voice was drowned in the rushing water. In the distance he could see the dog laid out on higher ground.

And in that moment, in that moment, he thought about retreating once again.

But the path back was only memory now, all safety choked off as the sea ringed the Apostles in ink and foam.

He began the song anew, picking up the beat and raising the pitch, so that his voice carried above the slicing surf. The sun was in full force now, the sky blue and polished. It was going to be a good day.
Thus are we introduced to Gabriel: a stranger new to Samaritan Bay, bent on suicide by ocean tide until his singing seems to conjure people from the waves that he must rescue; perhaps auguring a new beginning; a "time for the twins to walk the earth again and restore the balance that had been lost". And although The Back of the Turtle is told from the alternating points of view of five different characters, this book seems to be Gabriel's story most of all as he reveals and confronts his own past and the terrible results of his life's work. 

Samaritan Bay used to be a popular tourist destination on the B.C. coast, with people flocking to see the annual hatching of baby sea turtles. But then The Ruin happened: the Smoke River ran bright green and killed everything it coursed through; including the turtle nesting grounds; including a large swath of the ocean where the river meets the sea; including a Native Reserve which became so contaminated that those people who weren't killed were dispersed to other Reserves, their own land condemned in perpetuity. As Gabriel discovered back in his life as a biochemist in Toronto, it was an industrial accident with the uncontrollable defoliant he had developed -- known as GreenSweep and never approved for real world use -- that poisoned the Smoke River and eventually had devastatingly personal results for him; small wonder he turns up in Samaritan Bay, climbing the rocky pillars known locally as the Apostles, ready to make a sacrifice of himself. Having saved the sea people and lost the high tide for now, Gabriel gets to know some of the locals as he waits for it to return: locals like the curiously named Nicholas Crisp (with a bald head and "a red beard that floated around his face like a cloud on fire" making Gabriel fancy "the fellow had somehow got his head on upside down"), who speaks even curiouser, here in conversation with Gabriel:
"The Apostles is good exercise at low tide, if ye have no aversion to climbing about on carcasses and bones. But watch your back. The sea's a shifty slut. She'll tide in behind and suck ye up in a salty slurp."

"I'm not sure how long I'll stay."

"There's wisdom enough in that for shirts and pants to fit us all."
Gabriel also meets Sonny, the young proprietor of the perpetually vacant Ocean Star Motel, and as Crisp describes him, "The boy's poorly lit, but a sweet neighbour" (think of a cross between Norman Bates of Psycho and Tom Cullen of The Stand). Always on the lookout for salvage on "his beach", Sonny carries a pouch with a hammer, wire cutters and a multi-head screwdriver that jig-jig-jiggles against his thigh as he walks and picks up interesting items:
Sonny holds the drum to his nose and discovers that it smells like bacon. Not exactly like bacon, but something tasty that has smoke and fat in it. He can't wait to show Dad the drum. When Sonny shows Dad the drum, Dad will surely take him in his arms and say, Behold my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased.

Wham-wham, hammer-hammer.
Gabriel also meets Mara -- a Native woman who had been living in Toronto, working as an artist, when The Ruin happened, who has returned to the community to confront her own guilt about abandoning her mother and grandmother on the Reserve -- and Soldier, an apparently talking dog (if Crisp's translations are to be trusted).

Meanwhile, back in Toronto, we meet Dorian Asher: the cartoonish paragon of corporate capitalism; the CEO of Domidion (a villainous conglomerate -- part Monsanto, part BP -- housed in an underground concrete bunker); and Gabriel's former boss. Dorian responds to environmental and human disasters in terms of dollars and PR, and soothes stress with luxury shopping sprees. When Dorian learns that a tanker ship of GreenSweep has been lost at sea, he's happy that he won't need to keep looking for a Third World country to take it off his hands for containment (even though he's well aware of the devastation it will cause in the ocean and that there is a crew involved); when he learns that a tailings pond in Athabasca has failed, spilling heavy metals into the waterways, Dorian goes on a PR blitz (making a sordid comparison to the NRA's aggressive reaction to the gun control efforts after the Sandy Hook school shootings), and when he learns that the only human casualties resultant from this pollution are on Reserves, he's satisfied that he'll be able to blur the line of culpability by blaming the known high-mortality-rate-due-to-lifestyle among Natives; even flipping through a Sports Illustrated that recalls the Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction, Dorian comes to an odd conclusion:
World hunger can't make the back page of  TV Guide, but an almost bare breast can destroy the morality of a nation. Dorian shook his head. No wonder democracy and Christianity had been such failures.
A few implausibilities: I recall that in The Inconvenient Indian, Thomas King described "Christianity as the gateway drug to supply-side capitalism" and he had little respect for either -- and as a Native, that seems fair enough -- but would Dorian plausibly think that democracy and Christianity had been failures? Would an executive involved in extracting oil in Athabasca refer to them as the "tar sands"? When Mara looks at the abandoned Reserve where she grew up, she notes that it is ringed now with barbed wire, with a school bus parked to block the entrance, upon which someone had spray-painted "Indians go home". Would even the lowest of a low-life redneck ignoramus paint "Indians go home" at the entrance to a Reserve? Would the federal government really tell the on-Reserve Natives to go find somewhere else to live instead of transplanting them together?

I make the complaint about implausibilities because this book could have been more compelling without the exaggerations. Gabriel and Mara were both interesting and complex characters and their paths back from guilt and depression would have been more effective if their situations had been completely honest -- the over-the-top depiction of Dorian Asher (whose sections were often funny and bitingly satirical, arguably making him the most interesting character in the book) detracted from what could have been a powerful message: there certainly are environmental disasters occurring, which disproportionately affect marginalised people, but if the guy responsible is portrayed as Goldfinger or Dr. Evil, it's easy to dismiss his actions as either sensationalism or propaganda (which, perversely, gives him a free pass to behave as he likes). 

I wish that there had been more backstory for Crispin and Sonny -- as the only two white men portrayed on the West Coast, their eccentricities could have been better explained -- but I totally believed and empathised with Mara's story. On the other hand, there seemed to be blanks in Gabriel's history: I have no idea why he and his father moved to Minnesota together, leaving his mother and sister behind in Lethbridge (described as "small town cruel", which can also be explained by information in The Inconvenient Indian) or why the women would then disappear to B.C.; there are hints as to how Stanford educated the ethics out of Gabriel, but I would have liked more information about his job at Domidion, to learn if he was conflicted at all in the moment; and writing the names of man-made disasters all over the walls of his home before running away seems like the act of an unhinged man, but that's not really the Gabriel that we meet (despite the suicidal impulses).

Thomas King is certainly a gifted writer and I believe that he was sincere in his efforts to write an important message book here, but as so often happens with such projects, the ultimate value of the message is in the hands of the reader: those who agree with his politics (those who would say "tar sands" instead of "oil sands") will likely rate The Back of the Turtle higher than those who bristle at such usage. The plot here had many, many interesting developments (even if they weren't exactly surprising), fine characters, and King is positively lyrical when writing about nature. In the final analysis, I found this book to be flawed but human; an interesting contribution to the national conversation.



The 2014 Governor General's Literary Awards Shortlist, with my ranking:

English Fiction:

The 2014 Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction winner is The Back of the Turtle. Meh.


I was also surprised to see the title on this list of Finalists – 2015 Trillium Book Award

Margaret Atwood : Stone Mattress
Dionne Brand : Love Enough 
Kate Cayley : How You Were Born
James King : Old Masters
Thomas King : The Back of the Turtle
Edmund Metatawabin : Up Ghost River 


Of these, my favourite read was Up Ghost River, but congrats to Kate Cayley for the win.




*****

As a Native, Thomas King says he suffered racism while living in Lethbridge, and while I've no doubt that was true, it's sad that I never really recognised that while I was living there. I did enjoy getting his references to coulees, Whoop Up Drive and the Lethbridge Lodge Hotel, but couldn't really relate to him describing the place as "small town cruel". I thought I shared this story before, but since I can't find it, here's my only real encounter with a Native in Lethbridge (and I'll note that I attended a Catholic high school there, so maybe that's why I didn't have daily dealings with Natives -- after the horror of Residential Schools, who could blame parents for not voluntarily sending their kids for a Catholic education?)

One night, my friend Kevin and I had gone to see a movie (maybe Flashdance?) and it was late and dark when we came out of the theater, called his Dad to come pick us up, and stood around waiting. We were pretty much alone on this downtown street when an older Native man -- grey hair and deeply lined face -- came lurching around the corner, and when he saw us, began teetering our way. When he was just about upon us -- us, wide-eyed, frightened, and recoiling from the smell of alcohol and body odour -- he smiled and asked if we knew the time. Kevin looked at his watch, told him the time, and the man nodded, thanked us, and continued staggering down the street. When he was gone, we agreed that that had been a "close call" and Kevin admitted that he thought the man had been interested in stealing his watch. This was scary for us, but I can't say that we wouldn't have been just as scared by any other man approaching us, drunk, late at night. 

As I noted in my review for Born With A Tooth, the news I tended to see about Natives in Lethbridge mostly involved petty crime reports and I always felt more sad than scared when I thought about them -- which, I know, is a form of racism itself; the so-called white man's burden. I remember being told that the nearest Reserve was in a dry county (a status that its residents recently confirmed), so if those Natives who wanted alcohol didn't want to come all the way into Lethbridge, there was a convenience store just off the Reserve that supplied them with the fixings for "Indian Lemonade" -- Lysol -- which, as rumour had it, cost about a dollar a can in Lethbridge but five or six at this store: not only did the store's owners knowingly sell Natives a poisonous alcohol substitute, but they put a huge mark up on it. How could that not make me feel sad?

In The Back of the Turtle, King has Gabriel's father -- an RCMP officer on a police exchange in Minnesota -- shot and killed while on duty by a man who thought that he was a crazy Indian who had threatened to kill him, arguing that anyone can rent a police uniform, and getting off scot-free. Could that actually happen? If King made up that story, it's a terrible one that contributes to my argument that his over-the-top elements reduced the impact of his thesis. If that's based on actual events -- that's even more terrible. And, I can't help it, makes me sad to think of.

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