These lands were given to us by the Lord Himself. They are ours to live on and prosper from. This entire wilderness is ours for the very purpose of celebrating and honouring the glory of God. He is the answer to our poverty, for how can we know poverty in His love? And in return we need to dedicate our success and wellbeing to His holy light. This entire empire of wild is ours in order that we may rejoice in His name.
In Thomas King's The Inconvenient Indian, he describes Christianity as “the gateway drug to supply-side capitalism”, and although Cherie Dimaline's Empire of Wild reads a bit like a supernatural thriller and a lot like a love story, it would seem that Dimaline's goal here was, ultimately, to prove Thomas King's point for him (or else why take the book's title from the Christian sermon, above, designed to trick Indigenous folks out of their traditional lands for the benefit of greedy capitalists?) As with The Marrow Thieves, I think that Dimaline has some fascinating lore to share from her Métis culture, yet also like with that earlier work, I wasn't blown away here with her writing style. This was, overall, just okay for me.
Long after that bone salt, carried all the way from the Red River, was ground to dust, after the words it was laid down with were not even a whisper and the dialect they were spoken in was rubbed from the original language into common French, the stories of the ragarou kept the community in its circle, behind the line. When the people forgot what they had asked for in the beginning – a place to live, and for the community to grow in a good way – he remembered, and he returned on padded feet, light as stardust on the newly paved road. And that ragarou, heart full of his own stories but his belly empty, he came home not just to haunt. He also came to hunt.Joan (of Arcand) was raised in a traditional Métis community in northern Ontario, and for the past year, she has been desperately hunting for the love of her life – her husband, Victor – who uncharacteristically disappeared after a mild argument. When Joan discovers Victor in a most unexpected situation, and he insists that he has never seen her before, Joan must pull together all she knows about her husband, her people's beliefs, and her own skills and courage to attempt to bring him back home again. I liked everything that happens in the local community – the interplay with family and elders, Joan's backstory as a child and with Victor – and the legend of the ragarou promised to add an intriguingly otherworldly dimension. But I didn't much care for how Joan's world intersected with the mostly unChristianlike white fundamentalists that Victor had become entangled with and it felt like a copout to have the Métis monster, the ragarou, somehow controlled by a white man; even if he is a Wolfssegen and old Ajean helpfully made the point about the various world cultures that have wolf-based legends, it would have been a braver choice to not have a white man – a greedy resource extractor at that – be the ultimate bad guy. But, plot points aside, I want to note that this is quite an explicit read – in language and deed – and I was often wondering just why Dimaline decided to include so much sexy time. And on the other hand, the love story between Joan and Victor is really very sweet and I became invested in wanting them to find each other again:
Stitch by stitch, loop over loop, Victor was made for Joan. He knew that the day he met her in Montreal, in the bar, with her quick mouth and face flushed with drink, standing with a hip thrown forward, rubbing her eye to a grey smoke of mascara and bourbon. He could feel her now the same way he felt her that night – as inevitable, as necessary. His job was to exist so that she could keep running that mouth, keep kissing him with a thousand little kisses in the oddest spots: inside of the elbow, back of the neck, above the belly button, on the exact spot where the zipper on his jeans began. There was no other reason for him to exist. And it was enough.Even so, despite admiring many of these touching bits, there were many passages and word choices that kind of baffled me:
The seated figure gave a deep laugh. The sound filled the clearing like vomit, like a menacing growl. And the sky grew darker for it. If he were capable of regular functions, this is when Victor would have pissed his pants.(I read that out to a few people and no one could really imagine what it would be like for a deep laugh to fill a clearing “like vomit”.) The material here is more adult than that found in the YA-categorised The Marrow Thieves, but the writing isn't any more sophisticated or nuanced; and while I left The Marrow Thieves thinking that I'd pick up a sequel if Dimaline decided to extend that story, I'm not left wanting more from the world of Empire of Wild. Just okay.
