I have a sneaking suspicion that Victoria Glendinning read Shandi Mitchell's Under This Unbroken Sky as one of the 100 works of Canadian fiction she was commissioned to examine for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. It is entirely possible that Mitchell's bleak and somewhat heavy-handed novel prompted Glendinning's nasty comment about “the muddy middle range of novels .. with multiple points of view and flashbacks to Granny's youth in the Ukraine.”
Unfair? Absolutely. And dismissive, too, but the unsophisticated reader of Canadian literature might indeed respond to a novel like Under This Unbroken Sky in this way. It is a story of Ukrainian immigrants told with multiple points of view, and using flashbacks to amplify the back story of the characters. But the knowledgeable reader, one who understands Canadian context, will regard this book differently and read it with rapt attention.
Under This Unbroken Sky, by Shandi Mitchell, Viking Canada, 354 pages, $32
This is a tale about a family whose members are utterly subjugated: by their history, their immigration, their poverty and their dreams. The Mykolayenkos have somehow managed to escape Stalinist Ukraine and through a combination of luck and dogged determination have made their way to Alberta in the 1930s. Among the many immigrants in “sheepskin coats” who were to provide agricultural muscle in the West, they rented a piece of land and waited for a homestead entry, eager to build themselves a home and a future.
The Mykolayenkos embody the clash that occurred so often between British law and authority and the expectations of those who came from other cultures. After working for two years, the father, Teodore, has been arrested and detained for stealing his own grain, having unknowingly signed a contract that entitled his landlords to everything he produced. After a year in prison, he returns to his family, and tries to begin again.
Because he now has a prison record, Teodore is unable to file for a homestead, but his sister, Anna, has filed on his behalf. The work of proving up (the summary of improvements that must be made to complete a Homesteader's Agreement) is unrelenting: They must break and plant 25 acres with a horse-drawn plow, build a house and outbuildings, dig a well and erect fences. Somehow, with no money and no other resources, scrabbling in the hard soil, this family must survive.
These are earthy folk whose apprehension of the world is elemental, immediate
The pressures that accompany this imperative are inevitable. Homesteading was a harsh school. While the land itself was rich enough, the weather and other natural hazards could bring disaster quickly. Insects and rodents, fire and flood, served relentless notice, as if every one of Job's trials were transported to this new place.
Under This Unbroken Sky tells that quintessentially Canadian story. It is the story of thousands of immigrants who came to Canada with nothing in their luggage but hope, and no resources but willpower and brute strength. Used by a government seeking to occupy the West, treated with contempt by anglo settlers who had access to money and better lands, and isolated from their own religion and family, it is only surprising that more did not go utterly mad.
This novel weaves that tapestry with a determined rather than a skillful hand. The situation is recognizable and the genealogy of the settler novel in Canada well-established: Frederick Philip Grove, Laura Goodman Salverson and Martha Ostenso all wrote novels that deal with the same subject. Time has now relegated the courage and the challenges of settlers to a hazy historical era, and there is a desire to pretend that agricultural settlement is merely part of a quaint and thus dismissible past.
