For Starlight the farm was his heritage and culture, the plainspoken earnestness of his neighbours all the language he needed, and the feel of the land beneath his feet all the philosophy and worldview that fed his sense of purpose. A night sky brimmed with stars, the snap and crackle of a fire behind him in the darkness, and the howls of wolves on distant ridges were all the spirituality he'd ever needed. He was not displaced or dispossessed. He was home. In that, he felt keenly alive.
It's almost unfair to give a rating to an unfinished novel – Starlight does come off as a first draft, but with some very lovely passages that were probably exactly what Richard Wagamese would have sent out into the world had he not passed away while writing this – so while I'm pleased that this was polished up enough to release (and appreciate the material included at the end that points to how Wagamese wanted to tie everything up), as it is, this isn't really up to Wagamese's standard and I'm going to weasel out with a noncommittal three stars.
After a brief scene that reintroduces Frank Starlight from Medicine Walk, we meet a woman and her young daughter as they escape from the violent drunkard that they have been living with. Emmy and Winnie drive a stolen truck deep into the backcountry of British Columbia, hoping to become lost enough before they run out of gas, and end up in the small town near where Starlight and his handyman, Roth, are now working the old man's farm. There are many scenes of the two men doing hard and honest labour, and this sets up a steady rhythm in contrast with Emmy and her daughter's desperate flight:
They were weathered men. Their clothes were the tough and simple fabric of the farm, the field, the wilderness, and they stood together in that hushed silence, smoking and considering nothing but the gathered evidence of their industry. Above them the congress of stars pinwheeled slowly and a knife slice of moon hung over everything like a random thought. They could hear the sides of cattle shunted against the whitewashed planks of their pens and somewhere far off the skittering soliloquy of a night bird addressing all of it in plaintive, melancholic notes that rose and fell in counterpoint to their breaths, huffed with smoke. Then they nodded, each to himself, and turned in concert and began the slow, slumped walk to the porch and the house and the rustic simplicity of a bed, a quilt, and dreams wove from the experience of passing through a day, satisfied at the scuffed and worn feel at its edges.In a turn that was expected, but not quite believed, Starlight takes Emmy and Winnie into his home, and at the urging of a childcare worker, he and Roth take the broken pair repeatedly into the wilderness to try and make them whole again. Again, there is very lovely and moving writing about nature and humanity's role in creation, and as Starlight has become a noted wildlife photographer, there is much on the artist's role in trying to capture the wild for those who can't see for themselves (and several asides about how Starlight – half-Native but raised in a white home – resists the label of “Indigenous” photographer; an artist is an artist, and it feels like Wagamese is talking about himself here). Meanwhile, the man that Emmy ran away from, Cadotte, along with his sidekick, Anderson, have sworn to find her and have spent these months travelling from workcamp to inner city flophouse to track her down. In contrast to Starlight's steady industry, Cadotte is a nasty piece of work:
He found that he could lose himself in savagery. That thick coil of vengeance he carried in his gut could unsnake itself and take on the quality of fists and kicks and hammer blows to heads and bellies and the cracking and breaking of teeth and ribs and other bones. So that he found a grim satisfaction in pushing men to fight. In those booze-filled nights in working men's towns, such contests of will and rage were easy to start and he let the vehemence of his shattered ego rain punishment on men in ones or twos or threes. He was thrilling to watch. For such a bulky man he was light on his feet and lizard fast. He punished men. He knew precisely how hard and often to attack and hit, and he toyed with them, bloodying faces and battering knees and hips and shoulders so that in the end his adversaries became limp, defenceless rags of men who dropped at his feet eventually, and he'd raise his fists and face to the ceiling of the sky and howl in a basso keening imbued with every ounce of hate he carried for the woman he hunted unceasingly. She would be his ultimate triumph.Like I said, I didn't quite believe the happenstance of the reclusive Starlight bringing strangers into his home (even if he is well known for helping out neighbours), and I didn't quite like that everyone is always asking this man of few words to try to describe how he finds communion with nature. On the other hand, the setup creates an interesting plotline (and especially with the violent menace tracking ever closer) and Starlight's grasping attempts to describe his processes and experiences are filled with wisdom and insight; he is obviously relaying the lessons that Wagamese wants his readers to learn. I reckon that my complaints would have been dealt with had Wagamese been able to complete (and participate in the editing process for) this book and I am still happy to have been able to read his final project, in any form.
