He'd known what they were going to do. How did doing nothing make him the better man?
“What have I done?”
And there was a howl in him, and he knew it would break him if he ever let it out. He opened his mouth and far off he heard the sound of an animal crying and he wanted to help, but he didn't know how.
Deep River Night primarily focuses on Art Kenning: suffering PTSD from his service in Europe during WWII, it is now 1962 and Art dispels his ghosts with whisky and the opium he shares with Wang Po; another broken man on the run from his memories of the Rape of Nanjing back in China. The two unlikely friends have met at a remote logging camp in the B.C. Interior, where Wang Po is the camp cook and Art the first-aid man, and while the camp is teeming with loggers, sawyers, and labourers who brawl and carouse, Art and Wang Po keep themselves separate; chasing the dragon and quietly relaying their nightmares to one another. Art is mostly plagued by the memory of a time when his inaction led to tragedy, and when modern day events put him in a position to choose between doing what's right and doing what he's told, the past and present collide just as Art's mental state and addiction-raddled body feel too weakened to respond. Author Patrick Lane is primarily known as a poet, and the words and atmosphere of this book reflect that fact to his credit, but I found the plot to be a bit too crafted for me; too deliberate and maybe not entirely credible in its events and characterizations. Still, I loved the words and am rounding up to four stars to reflect my enjoyment of the reading experience. (Usual caveat: I read from an ARC and these quotes might not be in their final forms.)
The mill chains clanked and the treads of his tank ground through the mud of Holland. He wasn't on the push into Holland. There was no farm, no mother, no girl called Godelieve, no pig, no fire, no Tommy. And Paris was a dream too. There were no tanks anymore, no Marie. He was the first-aid man in a sawmill up the North Thompson River. He could feel the split wood under his hand. The film of sap sucked at his fingers. But the sounds of the chains in the mill banging were the treads of their Sherman Firefly on the road to Antwerp, the far-off rapids in the river the waves eating the beaches along the North Sea.Art is so messed up that his mind is constantly thrown back into the past: he is walking through the camp but also in Holland as the Canadians advance; in Paris on leave. This device is used a bit too often for my taste, but does eventually lay out everything in Art's present and past that cause his moment of crisis at the narrative's climax (which is part of what felt too deliberate to me). While we are mostly in Art's head, the POV does shift to other characters, and although this provided a lot of foreshadowing for what I thought was going to be the climax, things don't quite go the way I expected, and ultimately, most of these extra characters just felt...extra. (I did appreciate the character of Alice – a 14 year old Native girl bought from the Brothers at a Residential School to work as an indentured servant at the camp store – whose own PTSD explores a topic that needs exploring in our own time, but as other reviewers have said, like the few other female characters in this book, Alice didn't quite feel like a real person.)
Looking at Patrick Lane's bio and list of other works (born in Nelson, British Columbia, he has worked in First Aid “in the northern bush” and has written a book about his own addiction and recovery), it's easy to believe that the author intimately understands Art's character and the setting of the B.C. Interior; this writing was the most believable, and the detail of logging and addiction and the bush was precise and engaging, and therefore, valuable. And as a poet, Lane used many turns of phrase that gave me pause:
The cat was sitting on the windowsill finishing off the mouse she had caught in the field. The tiny bones crunching in her jaws were a distant clicking, an insect sound, the kind of tolling sticks might make in a land without bells.It was the word-by-word crafting that I enjoyed here more than the overall story, but that provides for its own kinds of pleasure. Four stars feels like a generous rounding up, but also feels like the appropriate rating.
I don't know why I'm drawn to paragraphs of long listy bits, but this one about stuff at the dump grabbed me; is probably why I uprated this book:
Pieces of abandoned machinery lay half buried in gravel and yellow mud, struts of iron rearing out of the wreckage, the pitted rust the bars wore like diseased emblems of decay, shafts, arches, and housings, worn tractor treads and engine blocks, bald tires, patches peeling from their innards, truck boxes, hoods of cars, a twisted flume, a wringer washing machine, a steering wheel bent into curved wings, a child's buggy without wheels perched on top of a Ford engine that was balanced atop a blasted cedar stump, the engine like an otherworldly space machine, below it the canopy of a front-end loader, a crushed hard hat hanging from a twisted strut. A blue blanket like a tattered flag hung tangled with a sheet of rotted canvas. Bush cable was wrapped around two twisted car axles with the wheels attached, the hubcaps long gone. Around the blue flag and mixed in with the detritus were discarded oil-soaked rags, ripped and patched clothing of all kinds, torn bits of sacking, rubber belts and pistons, shafts and transmissions, wheel hubs, engine blocks, cracked sinks and worn-out galvanized tubs and pails, tobacco cans, liquor bottles, and among it all cracked and broken sacks and boxes and scraped shoulder and leg joints sticking out, bits of desiccated sinew hanging from the scored skulls of dead beeves and horses, moose, deer, and bear, their many spines curved and twisted into fragile arabesques, their bodies torn apart by bears, random bones of all kinds, ribs, legs, and tails, rotted vegetables and bits of pebbled fat and marrow seething under a hovering film of flies, wasps, and hornets, the insects searching among the effluvium of village, farm, and mill for anything they could eat or suckle on, the flies to lay eggs in discarded skull pans creating bundled nests of maggots feeding on soft brains, and rib cages half filled with earth where tunnels had been dug for the hexagonal nursery cells to hold the eggs of yellow jackets, the baskets of paper hanging from under the scapulas of moose where hornets sang their grubs to sleep, the crows and ravens above them in murderous dozens screaming along with the gulls their stories of feasts and famines.
Maybe it's the contrast between the hard, engineered junk and the bits of bone and life, but there's poetry in that to me.