‘And then, as she emerged from a slow rightwards bend in the river’s course, she saw, as if laid out as a gift, her find: a long line of protruding nodules in the riverbed shale. It could only be the spinal column of some enormous creature long-dead, buried, slowly exposed again, and now ready to be seen.”
Anna Silowski, a 39-year-old paleontologist, goes on a prospecting trip on Vancouver Island with two colleagues, Mike Swenson and Colin Gordon, and happens upon the spinal column of a giant flying reptile from the Cretaceous era. She calls the two men back to share her exaltation at the find and Colin spots another fossil on the underside of a cliff. Almost right from the start, the “find” precipitates a territorial conflict between Anna and Mike, who, despite his 56 years, has failed to learn that no means no. His manipulative aggression, though immediately apparent to the reader, is opaque to Anna because of her anxieties about her health and passionate focus on bringing the fossil to light.
The Find, by Kathy Page, McArthur & Company, 296 pages, $24.95
By the time the dig starts, almost a year later, the professional conflict has been exposed and an academic tribunal has ruled that there be two separate digs, one run by Anna to unearth the first find and one run by Mike across the riverbed, but within sight and earshot of the hers, to unearth the second. The stage is set for dramatic confrontation.
The clash of conflicting desires, subterfuge, uncomfortable triangling and a profound difference in values with regard to the past, all keep us turning the pages.
Into this tense arrangement, Anna invites Scott, a young man whose dead mother came from a nearby native band and who is caretaking a severely alcoholic father. Scott makes Anna feel safe, and she entrusts him with the job (in addition to chief cook and bottle washer) of making sure she is not showing signs of Huntington’s disease, an illness she has a 50-50 chance of inheriting, as she tries to stand up to Mike Swenson’s aggressive challenges. Anna has chosen not to have the genetic test that would reveal if she carries the HD gene.
The introduction of a potential fatal illness adds poignancy to the story – a nice twist on the title – and allows Page to counterpoint the personal consequences of science with the vast mystery of the Cretaceous era.
Page is at her best developing the political and personal nuances of conflict, so when a group of protesters shows up beating drums and claiming that the dig is on their ancestral land, the story soars; the media arrive and Swenson calls in the RCMP. The clash of conflicting desires, subterfuge, uncomfortable triangling and a profound difference in values with regard to the past, all keep us turning the pages.
Page creates a vivid cast of secondary characters, from Anna’s aged artist mother to Alan Coxtin, the leader of the protest. Less successful are her main characters. Scott is quietly powerful, introspective and shown to be a young male because he uses online porn, smokes pot and is waiting for something “big” to happen to him. He never really comes alive. And Anna, as a female scientist who avoids intimacy, worries a lot and isn’t assertive enough, is a character that feels a bit too familiar. Page’s villain, Mike Swenson, able to blind people to his actions through aggressive use of words, is a more compelling presence.
The novel’s short chapters, easy on attention spans compressed by the push-button delights of the Internet, work very well and carry the story along at a good clip, but Page’s temporal transitions to back-story, telegraphed by phrases like, “Years ago,” or, “Another thing Anna avoided recalling,” are somewhat clunky.
The Find is a plot-driven novel tightly packed with interesting elements. It would be a good choice for a book club just coming off Bleak House or War and Peace. Although we can still see some of the rough joins in the creation of the main characters, the writing is cleanly evocative. And the abundance of information about pterosaurs, archeology, native political struggles, academic rivalry, alcoholism and Huntington’s disease is woven into the story seamlessly, only adding to the pleasure of its satisfying, unclichéd conclusion.
Vancouver writer Claudia Casper's most recent novel is The Continuation of Love By Other Means.
