In her latest novel, Giller Prize nominee Pauline Holdstock has taken on a tragic and little-known chapter in Canadian history. Into the Heart of the Country explores the relationship between the English fur traders in Churchill, Manitoba, and the native women on whom they relied on for their survival. It is a vivid literary interpretation of the historical research begun by Sylvia Van Kirk into the complex role played by women in Canada's fur-trade culture. However, unlike Van Kirk, Holdstock eschews notions of "tender ties" in favour of presenting the crude survival tactics employed by both men and women.
Into the Heart of the Country is a multigenerational tale that follows the real-life, 18th-century exploits of Richard Norton, his mixed-blood son Moses, and finally the explorer and naturalist Samuel Hearne as they govern the Prince of Wales Fort. It is a makeshift society, dominated by fur interests, whaling attempts and long, brutal winters. Native men and, especially, women keep the English traders alive, both physically and commercially, by providing them with meat, berries and other foods, furs, interpreting with northern tribes, guiding them across the frozen land, and keeping the men warm at night with sexual favours that often resemble downright orgies.
Holdstock's writing manages to be both heartbreakingly poetic and densely detailed. She intersperses the telling of the goings-on at the fort with Molly Norton's dream sequences. Molly is Samuel Hearne's fictional love interest, and Holdstock depicts their relationship as mostly reciprocal, even romantic. Except we know from the beginning of the novel that the relationship meets a tragic end, as will most of the members of Molly's family. These sad passages, ghostlike recollections, written almost from the vantage point of the present, establish the book as a great work of fiction.
It is hard to decide if it is European ignorance, greed and disease, or simply the unforgiving climate of the Canadian north that is most responsible for the tragic outcome in the lives of these characters. What is clear is that eventually each of them succumbs to one or the other.
Holdstock does present a message of hope, but we need to look quite hard to find it. Perhaps Molly Norton's words in one of her remembrances best sums it up: "We are all our lives from the moment we are born on the way to our deaths and a bitter journey it would be without thanks for the gifts that lie on the path."
Holdstock manages to create sympathetic characters, even in the men who wrench children from the arms of their mothers to send them away to England for education in an early foreshadowing of Canada's residential schools. Matonabbee, the Chippewayan leader, is shown as a figure both terrible and compassionate, although it seems Holdstock struggles to understand this man's motivations, as his character does not seem as multi-dimensional as those of the fort's governors. Perhaps the most tragic character is Moses Norton, son of an English governor, who is taken from his native mother and brought to England at the age of six, which leaves him with a void an entire lifetime cannot fill.
But ultimately, the greatest sympathy lies with the novel's female characters - Molly Norton, Nêwositêkâpaw, Jane, Abigail - whose fate is both intertwined with and at the mercy of the men they keep alive. Pauline Holdstock has made an impressive and moving attempt to bring these women from the footnotes of the Hudson's Bay Company's records into the forefront of our imaginations.
Suzanne Desrochers lives in Toronto and is the author of the historical novel Bride of New France.