It was raining birds. When the wind came up and covered the sky with a dome of black smoke, the air was in short supply, and you couldn't breathe for the heat and the smoke, neither the people nor the birds, and they fell like rain at our feet.
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| Fire Swept Algoma by Frank H Johnston |
And the Birds Rained Down is a small and quiet book, but it captures a bit of magic nonetheless. It reminded me of a Group of Seven painting put into words, by way of Margret Atwood's Survival: a classical interpretation of Canada, made modern. As author Jocelyne Saucier won the prestigious Prix des Cinq Continents de la Francophonie for this book (the first Canadian work to do so), I reckon it has appeal to those not familiar with our tropes and iconography; on any level, this is simply a finely-crafted and appealing read.
The whims of a fire cannot be explained. It can climb the highest peaks, rip the blue from the sky, spread in a reddish glow, swelling, whistling – good god, it can leap onto anything that lives, jump from shore to shore, plunge into ravines soggy with water, devour peatlands, but leave a cow grazing in a circle of grass. What is there to understand? Fire, when it achieves this power, obeys no one but itself.As the book begins, we meet a photographer (unnamed throughout, this is apparently a common device in Saucier's work) as she makes her way deep into the Northern Ontario wilderness. Having spent the previous two years tracking down and photographing the elderly survivors of the local Great Fires of the early twentieth century, she is hot on the trail of the most famous and elusive survivor of them all: Ted Boychuck; the Miracle Boy who featured in the memories of so many others; he who walked through a wall of flame, and half-blind, wandered for six days with a bouquet of flowers in his hand before disappearing for years. When she stumbles upon a hidden camp, the photographer finds both more and less than she was hoping for: Boychuck has apparently died recently, but left in camp are two other octogenarians; two old men who, alongside Boychuck, had decided to live out their natural lives on their own terms, far from the family or social workers who might think it a kindness to lock them away. With nothing but a tinbox of strychnine and mutual promises to avoid unnecessarily painful ends, what looks to the photographer like a deathpact is actually a lifepact: with a minimum of interaction between these three reclusive old men, they have been keeping each other alive for years (along with the financial and material contributions of two younger guys who grow an annual crop of marijuana in their woods). When they enter Boychuck's cabin together, they discover that he had spent his time painting impressionistic scenes of smoke and fire – over three hundred canvases in all – and while the photographer is disappointed to have missed out on meeting the man himself, she realises that she has found so much more.
Are you this interested in the lives of others because you don't have one of your own?Several times the photographer – who can't stay away from the hidden camp and its cache of paintings – is accused of not having a life of her own, and while we don't really get to see what her life back in Toronto is like, we are introduced to two other characters who could be accused of the same: Miss Sullivan of the Matheson Museum is a spinster whose life was so empty that she took to following residents of her small town around, keeping notebooks on love affairs acknowledged and secretive. She became so attuned to the habits and subtle actions of others that she could read volumes into footsteps and sighs. As she wasn't above steaming open people's letters at the Post Office, she also was the only one who knew why Boychuck wandered with his bouquet; what sent him to live in the woods. We also meet Gertrude/Marie-Desneige: institutionalised at sixteen, she has spent a lifetime interpreting the actions and mental states of everyone around her. When her nephew (one of the pot growers) rescues Marie-Desneige and brings her to the hidden camp, the old woman is the only one who can “read” Boychuck's paintings; pointing out the screams and bodies where the others had only seen brushstrokes and squibbles. It wouldn't seem an accident that it's the old women who didn't live lives of their own while the old men had the freedom to live any way they liked; the fact that the photographer is repeatedly described as not particularly feminine likely explains why she straddles the two worlds.
There is nothing more beautiful than an impossible love.Ah, but you can't introduce a fragile old woman into an all-male wilderness camp without it shaking things up. Described several times as birdlike, as a fledgling who could easily be blown from her nest, Marie-Desneige (who wasn't locked away for no reason) is in need of protection, and one of the old men steps up; igniting a very touching late-life love story. And just as these old people demonstrate that they can fend for themselves outside of the hospitals and nursing homes they ran away from back home, there's something very poignant about an octogenarian love affair: everything about this book is about living life on your own terms. And, yes, even dying on your own terms.
A smile for death is the final courtesy.From the historical underpinnings to the rock and bog and blackfly nature writing, this book follows steadily in the footsteps of classic CanLit. But by modernising the characters, Saucier evolves and elevates the tropes: there is subtle magic here beyond the base plot and I found it touching, thought-provoking, and worthwhile.
