The book begins in 1995 with a homeless man on the streets of
Vancouver. Via flashbacks, we are told
the story of how he came to be in this situation. The first flashback is to 1934 when Arthur
Lunn is seven years old and living with his family in the Okanagan Valley. His family is largely unaffected by the Great
Depression, but there is an encampment of unemployed men nearby. Art and his sister Peg encounter a man at the
camp and that meeting leads to a tragic event which leaves Art with feelings of
guilt for the rest of his life.
The novel examines how childhood trauma can shape a person’s life. Because Art feels responsible for a tragedy,
that “what had happened was his fault,” he feels others are always judging him
so he makes a major decision about his life “to stop people thinking of him as
the boy whose idiocy led to that terrible night.” When another tragedy occurs, Art feels even
more guilt and even less able to escape “the pressure of the past” which he
feels most strongly when with his family.
He begins a nomadic existence in logging camps because “Being with his
family made Art restless . . . always wanting to leave as soon as he’d arrived.” He is rescued by love but when yet another
tragedy occurs, he is unable to recover.
Art spends much of his life as a logger so the book does provide
glimpses into the logging industry in British Columbia and how attitudes to
forestry have changed. Art thinks of
trees “as a resource to be taken from the land, always there, infinite” even
when the province looks like “a patchwork, as though it’s been scalped by a
no-good barber who kept cutting off more hair in the hope of fixing his
mistakes.” But then he encounters the
forest green, the rainforest in the Queen Charlotte Islands (now Haida Gwaii),
and he finds peace; he wants “to stay there, rooted, breathing the rainforest
air.” And he realizes that “When you
felled one of those trees, you were bringing hundreds of years of living to an
end. . . . And it turned out that those trees, well, those trees were not
infinite. That got to Art a little at
the end.”
In the end, the forest serves as a metaphor for human life: “trees in a forest are all connected via their
roots, that the forest floor is a kind of communication network made of moss
and insects and fungi and all manner of life, and the forest itself a single
organism, like a living soul regenerating through an endless cycle of rot and
regrowth.” Art feels like a solitary
tree until he re-connects to the forest.
And the message is that we are all part of a single living soul.
Art emerges as a complex character.
His life is not easy. Though readers
will not agree with some of Art’s choices, they will understand and
empathize. Though Art’s is only one
story, it reminds us that there are many such stories among the homeless and
addicted. A book that can inspire people
to have compassion for the downtrodden is a good book.
The book is not especially lengthy, and the plot seems simple and
straightforward, but it is thought-provoking and emotionally compelling.
Note: I received a digital
galley from the publisher via NetGalley.
No comments:
Post a Comment