Oh my heart. I want to start by saying that author Tom Stewart reached out to me and, based on the kinds of books I appear to like, suggested that I just might enjoy reading his first novel, Immortal North. And: yes, yes, yes; this is the sort of thing I like. That I love. It’s about nature and about people and about how a person attempts to live in the world and create the meaning he cannot find there. The story of a widower, a trapper in the northern wilderness doing his best to raise a ten-year-old son alone — to make him tough enough to survive while protecting the sweet kernel at his core — written in prose both lyrical and meaty, the plot is intelligent and propulsive and touched my jaded heart. I also want to note that I wasn’t given a review copy — I bought Tom’s book in order to support an indie author and can say that the novel didn’t feel amateurish or unpolished — and I want to stress my purchase because I am not beholden to the author for anything and my opinions are my unencumbered own, and saying that, I would encourage others to pick this up. Absolutely recommended.
There’s language to the woods and it’s speaking to those capable of listening, to ears taught to decode meanings mild or malignant. Geese flying, bees buzzing. Howl of a wolf, height of the clouds, face of the moon, colour of the night and the morning sky, movement of game, snowfall heavy or light — things mostly lost on most people. Where others heard the winds in the maples, the trapper smelled the sap on the breeze. A wind veered northerly and where another might think the evening cold, he knew frost was coming early and the temperatures would stay cold for a week and the bears would feed heavily before the berry bushes died and the deer would be more active at dusk, at dawn. Inflections of the forest, cadence of the wilderness, language of the North.
In the hospital of the small town when she gave birth and he saw for the first time this new little human they had made, crying eyes and flushed skin and fingers and toes and everything so tiny that they couldn’t even be real at all, in this newborn boy he saw those same divine contours as his wife’s, the artist’s telltale style and signature apparent at this second unveiling of holy work. Though he’d mostly lost his belief by that time, seeing the child being born nearly returned it like a dam broke and that belief came flooding in. So what did that make him? Some keeper of godly artifacts. And that was his working definition of father, of husband. So carve him in stone and give him a sword and set him outside the walls.
Immortal North is primarily the story of the trapper and his son — with memories of his wife and how she died and how that shrank his tender heart; with memories of the family line that was on this land before him and the lessons that they passed down for him to impart to his own child — and every bit of it worked for me. I was enthralled by the detailed (not graphic or lurid) hunting scenes, I was charmed by the father-son interactions, and it actually brought a heart-touching mist of parental relatability to my eyes when he gathered his sleeping child, “picked up the noodleboy somehow gone limp in every muscle and cradled him with the crook of his own elbow supporting the boy’s head and gently carried him up the stairs to the loft.” The mix of tough and tender and thoughtful consideration of a child’s quest for understanding his world made me love the character of this trapper; this man who read from his dead wife’s bookshelf because “he got some respite from the heartache by reading her favourite books, his eyes moving over the same words hers once had, being moved by what she’d been moved by.” The trapper may have been a backwoods survivalist, but he’s literate and contemplative and discusses seriously with his young son the ideas of god and fate and reality:
“I asked your mom something similar. I asked her if she thought things happened for a reason. That’s what you and I are talking about here. She said to me yeah but not the way people mean it. The reason might just be something big exploded a long time ago and we’re bouncing around like marbles now. Complex marbles that somehow feel things...But she thought the world was beautiful too, regardless if someone was writing it. Regardless of chaos and marbles. Not always. But in lucky places. That’s what she believed.”
“What do you believe?”
“That’s what I believe too.”
“Yeah, me too,” said the kid.
I was emotionally affected at many points during this story, and the author’s writing style — coming slightly sideways at an idea and making me think for meaning — is exactly the kind of writing I admire, but if one is simply looking for an adventure tale, Immortal North doesn’t disappoint on that score either: my heart was thumping as the story reached its climax and the ending felt inevitable and true.
In the North that night blew a mean wind in the mean woods where trekked a snowshoed man looking for violence. Walk back the steps of how it grew up within him and eventually there’d still be the question of why. Because the boy, but the boy because the bear, but the bear because this, and this from that, and eventually we’re back to a time we never knew and it’s turtles standing on turtles all the way down. Some causal never-ending story of infinite regress, or some circular one like a world of Penrose stairs, or could be beginning-and-end and time itself are human constructs, or there are many worlds or one infinite one. Regardless of where it all started and who’s guilty and who pushed whom first, he was pissed off and his intentions were cruel ones.
Oh my heart. Rounded up to five stars because, yes, this is the sort of thing I like.
