This was many years ago, back in the first land, when my grandmother was still alive and I was a small child. I would be sent to visit her in the woods, and while she was cooking she would tell me stories of the Bone Mother. The little girl came up to the Bone Mother's house and knocked on the heavy wooden door. It opened all by itself and the little girl, who was very much like you, saw the Bone Mother at her giant wood stove. There she stood, throwing handfuls of vegetables in a big black pot made of iron, just like her teeth. And then my grandmother would smile with her teeth made of iron, and I would giggle and shiver.According to the “About the Author” blurb, David Demchuk “has been writing for theatre, film, television, radio, print and other media for more than thirty years. The Bone Mother is his first novel.” As a collection of twenty-five short stories (some as short as a couple of pages and all broadly considered “horror” stories), I don't know if I'd really label this a novel. I also find it an odd selection to discover on this year's Giller Prize longlist – but because I can glean a spark of deeper meaning, and because I happened to have read it in the days leading up to Halloween, I'm happy to have picked this book up; yet, wouldn't necessarily recommend it beyond to other Giller completionists.
Most of these stories take place somewhere in the Ukraine and primarily center on the three villages that neighbour “The Thimble Factory”. We learn that they who inhabit these villages must serve a mandatory five year stint working at the factory, and if they survive, they will have earned a pension that can support themselves and their families for life. If they don't survive, well, the factory has its own graveyard and funerary services. Whatever the work that really happens here, it's so important that we learn in a late story that during the great famine, or Holodomor, these villages are singled out for food relief shipments (guarded by starving soldiers who might risk their lives for a stolen apple). Interspersed with these more “realistic” tales about the Thimble Factory are fables and ghost stories, horrifyingly populated by the strigoi (undead), rusalkas(knife-toothed water nymphs), nyavkas (forest witches), but most perilously, by the Nichni Politsiyi: the Night Police who come knocking on doors in the dead of night, disappearing people without warrant or protest.
I now know that no matter how far or how fast we run, our ghosts and demons run with us, and are always close at hand.And this is what I eventually determined to be the deeper meaning: With a long history of war and famine and iron-fisted government control based far away, the people of the Ukraine have suffered more than their share of actual physical horrors – no wonder they have such a rich lore of spooks and monsters. Even when characters have been forced to move away from their villages – to larger cities or even different countries – their ghosts and demons follow; a remote farm in Manitoba isn't beyond the reach of the Nichni Politsiyi.
I liked that most stories started with an old photograph – attributed to Romanian photographer Costică Acsinte and taken between 1935-45 – there's not much more spooky than an old black-and-white photo of a stern-faced Slav as it decomposes around the edges (think Miss Peregrine without the costumes). And the stories themselves could be chilling, with horrifying creatures unfamiliar to me. (Also chilling when it's implied that the plummeting birthrate during the Holodomor might not have been a natural process.) I might have enjoyed this reading experience more if I had dipped into these tales one or two at a time, but the bang-bang-bang of short, short story after short, short story became a bit monotonous – and if this is to be considered a “novel”, then I guess that's the way it's meant to be read.
The 2017 Scotiabank Giller Prize Longlist:
David Chariandy: Brother
Rachel Cusk: Transit
David Demchuk: The Bone Mother
Joel Thomas Hynes: We'll All Be Burned in Our Beds Some Night
Andrée A. Michaud: Boundary
Josip Novakovich: Tumbleweed
Ed O'Loughlin: Minds of Winter
Zoey Leigh Peterson: Next Year, for Sure
Michael Redhill: Bellevue Square
Eden Robinson: Son of a Trickster
Deborah Willis: The Dark and other Love Stories
Michelle Winters: I Am a Truck
After finishing reading the longlist, I'll rank the shortlist (according to my own enjoyment only):
I
Am a Truck
Minds
of Winter
Son
of a Trickster
Bellevue
Square
Transit
