The Sel barkskins saw the poll ax give way to the double-bitted ax, the double-bitted ax give way to the crosscut saw, the old up-and-down gangsaws give way to circular saws and double circulars, to immensely long steel band saws that could cut the moon in half if they loaded it on a conveyor.This is what you should know about me: I am a huge Annie Proulx fan (having loved everything she's written, from The Shipping News to her wonderful short story collections); I was so excited to finally get a copy of Barkskins (a book that Proulx was apparently working on for fourteen years); my own grandfather was half Mi'kmaq (like the Sel family) and spent his career as a forest ranger at Kejimkujik (the National Park mentioned in the book [although Proulx refers to it as a Provincial Park]); my parents retired to the woods of Nova Scotia where the saw mill is still the nearby village's biggest employer; my Dad has taken me out on the water to show me where the logs used to be floated down: all this to say that I am the most interested and sympathetic of readers of both Annie Proulx and this specific material, and I found the whole thing a little dull. In excess of seven hundred pages took me a week to read because I was never excited to pick this book up again, and by following two families for over three hundred years, seven hundred pages felt both too long (couldn't Proulx have tightened her focus?) and too short (with so many characters, settings, and time periods, the reader never gets to know any of them very well). Because of my particular interests, I feel grateful for what Proulx has preserved with this book, but as an overall reading experience, I'm left a bit disappointed.
Nothing in the natural world, no forest, no river, no insect nor leaf has any intrinsic value to men. All is worthless, utterly dispensable unless we discover some benefit to ourselves in it – even the most ardent forest lover thinks this way. Men behave as overlords. They decide what will flourish and what will die. I believe that humankind is evolving into a terrible new species and I am sorry that I am one of them.As Barkskins opens, two young French men are led into the wilds of New France, where they are to work for three years for the local seigneur who had paid their passage from the old world. Finding conditions more primitive and the work more punishing than he could have imagined, Charles Duquet soon runs off, and after many years of learning the ways and limitless opportunities of the unowned continent, Duquet (eventually Duke) founds a logging empire that will slash and burn and clearcut its way across the virgin forests of the world. By contrast, the other young man, René Sel, will fulfill his commitment to the seigneur, and by consenting to marry “the old Indian woman” (that he's not given much choice about), Sel founds a dynasty of his own: a line of Mi'kmaq woodsmen (or barkskins) who will in time only vaguely remember that there's a Frenchman in the family tree. Through the Sels, the decline and near elimination of the Mi'kmaq and their ancestral homelands is recounted, and there is irony in the ways that the two families' paths will unknowingly cross throughout the centuries.
It's apparent that Proulx did extensive research for this book, but little facts and stories she uncovered felt inorganically crammed into the narrative, and with many generations of two families to follow, it seemed that every time I was getting to know someone, the character would suddenly take a club to the head or drop dead of a heart attack; I found all of this jarring. With a book of this length, I also didn't really understand why Proulx felt the need to have members of each family make the years-long voyage to New Zealand (or China, or the Netherlands, or Brazil...). I didn't mark many passages of great writing in this book, but Proulx has always had a way of capturing characters with a brief description:
The governor was a haughty snob, un bêcheur with a cleft chin and a bulge of throat fat. He gave off an air of having hung in a silk bag in the adjoining room until it was time for him to emerge and perform the duties of his position.Proulx definitely has a point-of-view in Barkskins; this is not an impartial history. Despite the rapacious greed of the Duke family, there is always one person in every generation who worries about conservation (yet Capitalist self-interest always seems to win out). There are also gay characters throughout the generations of the two families (which is fitting coming from the author of Brokeback Mountain, but occurred so often as to feel like a political statement). I'm no defender of the former Residential School system here in Canada, but can't quite go along with, “Few parents knew of the atrocities practiced on their boys and girls by genocidal nuns and priests”: genocide has a very specific definition and using it in this sense is also political. Of the ending, Ron Charles in The Washington Post says, "If the novel’s contemporary finale decays into preachy pulp, well, that hardly stains the previous 700 pages, which constitute a vast woods you’ll want to get lost in". So, yeah, if a five star glowing review labels the ending “preachy pulp”, one can imagine my own reaction.
The bottom line is that I really wanted to like Barkskins, but I found it dull and bloated; both interminable and superficial with some heavy-handed overtones: Proulx not so much reported history here as attempted to shape it. And yet, as a descendant of the Mi'kmaq, I'm really glad this book exists. Go figure.
