Your moshom never lied to me, but there were Cree legends he told me that I knew weren’t true, that represented something else. Like I know that Canada isn’t actually on the back of a turtle. I know that Wisakedjak didn’t create humans. He didn’t make mud out of dirt and water, mould that mud into a humanoid figure, dry it over fire, and breathe life into it. The theory of crows seemed equally tenuous, but provable, if you were to go to the place where you would be remembered.
Centred on a Winnipeg-dwelling Cree family disconnected from their ancestral lands, The Theory of Crows is a universally relatable domestic drama. When a middle-aged man finds himself suffering with anxiety and depression, and walls himself off from his wife and teenage daughter, a personal tragedy will send the father and daughter on a dangerous trek back to those ancestral lands; seeking the soul medicine that can only be found there, held in the memory of the crows and in the memory stored in the land itself. I found much to like in this story — even if I found the line-by-line writing to be a bit clunky — and as this is the first adult novel released by celebrated children’s author David A. Robertson, it holds out the promise for even greater things ahead. Rounding down to three stars for the clunky bits I didn’t believe.
Your grandfather used to say that you could remember the land, even if you’d never been on the land before. Your grandfather used to say that the land could remember you. It works the same way with crows, Hallelujah. They remembered him, they would remember me, and they remember you. They pass these things down through the generations.
From a young age, Matthew was awe-struck by the enormity of the night sky, and a fear of the void could send him into a panic; a panic only his father — an Elder, an ordained minister, a trained counsellor — could calm. As he grew older, Matt began to rely on Xanax (“as required”, and he required quite a lot), and between the anxiety and the meds, he began to zombie his way through life, ignoring and disappointing his wife and daughter. That sixteen-year-old daughter Holly (named “Hallelujah” at birth for her miraculous existence) is beginning to act out in reaction to her father’s emotional absence, and to make matters worse, she’s beginning to experience panic attacks of her own. Although Matt and Holly are both vehemently non-spiritual — neither believing in God or following Indigenous ceremony — they are forced to rely on the ways and beliefs of the Cree if they hope to complete a fraught trip to their ancestral trapline in northern Manitoba.
Robertson recently released a memoir, Black Water, which revolves around just such a trip he took with his own father, and in this interview with the CBC, he explains how he used learnings from that trip to deal with his own mental health issues that were affecting his relationships with his family (and especially with his eldest daughter). As quoted in the interview, writing The Theory of Crows “was a way for me to continue to heal, because sharing truths through story is healing for me.” I commend Robertson for his bravery and candour in sharing the truth at the heart of this story, but again, it wasn’t an entirely successful novel for me. I’ll include an example of why I felt this way: The scene where Holly and her friends are drinking and decide to test the local urban legend (will running around the church three times make Satan appear?) seemed like an interesting bit, but right from the beginning, I had a credibility issue: Would a Winnipeg-raised kid be thinking that “the snow was deep” if it was “up to her ankle”? And, OK, the snow was deeper around back, and they had been drinking, but would Holly the athlete not actually be able to circle the church more than twice? And even though it states that at least Charmaine did complete three laps, since Holly blacked out (I guess?) at some point, we never learn what Charmaine sees — I don’t think Charmaine appears in the rest of the book — and that made the whole scene pointless to me.
Regret covers everything. It’s like thick fog. It’s hard to see through. Your grandfather says that he doesn’t regret anything because you can’t change what happened. I don’t know if I believe him. I think we all wish that we could go back and do at least one thing over again…We can drown in regret.
The first part of this story — showing the disconnection growing between Matt and his family and Holly’s rebellious reaction — was absolutely relatable and I believed that this was a real family. The second half — a father-daughter canoe trip into the unknown — was undeniably tense and adventuresome, and the fact that Matt and Holly were city-dwellers attempting to regain something of their indigenous heritage also made this half relatable: they had no special skills or knowledge to carry them through and the dangers were real. But because they were from this land, and the land did remember them, they experienced a type of healing — a soul medicine — that wouldn’t be available to the settler population, and there is magic in that. The story arc and many of the specific situations did work for me, but this loses stars for the clunky bits that didn’t.
