Final Season
By Wayne Arthurson
Thistledown, 253 pages, $18.95
In Edmonton writer Wayne Arthurson's debut novel, the lakeside village of Grand Rapids, Manitoba, becomes the forlorn hub of a native fishing community negotiating the shocks of a massive hydro-electric project.
We begin with a man and a boy carrying a body in a blanket. The dead man is Albert Apetagon's longtime friend, Fency. The boy is Fency's son. "They had to get the body out to the boat and then out to the lake before anyone realized it was gone."
We leave this enigmatic scene with Albert "questioning his motives," joining him two years later as he slides into a commercial dock with his day's catch of Lake Winnipeg whitefish. The dock manager is a former fisherman turned company man; his idle patter while Albert shifts heavy crates of fish is a daily irritation, compounded by the increasing strain of the work on Albert's aging body.
Change is catching up with Albert. Since the hydro dam was built, the lure of secure income from government jobs has drawn many from their traditional livelihood on the water. Rejecting his friends' advice that he apply for a "treaty number" proving his Indian status, Albert stubbornly puts himself at the end of the queue for work that could ease him comfortably into retirement.
Grand Rapids, consisting of a few dozen houses, half of them abandoned, offers little to boost his spirit. Cross-border hunters keep a small motel and restaurant from tipping over the brink of failure. The spark of life in this community -- and the easy charm of Arthurson's characters -- resides in the jokey exchange of complaint and prickly affection that keeps despair at bay.
Native status, native identity, is the novel's thematic heart. Albert and his neighbours are the descendants of Crees and the Shetland Islanders who settled among them more than 200 years ago. Tradition and assimilation flow together in their veins, neither quite fulfilled. When Albert visits his brother Leo, they stumble through a heart-to-heart about their troubles, while Albert quietly ponders a puerile but telling irony: Leo is an Anglican priest, and they're sitting on a bed covered with a quilted image of Christ. "Two feet separated the two brothers as they sat on the face of Jesus."
Arthurson's haphazard narrative structure sadly undermines worthy themes and some strong characters. Late in the story, we briefly flash back decades, meeting Albert's wife of 40 years for the first time. Then, for 25 pages, leaving us eight pages from the novel's end, we get to know her and their adult daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren. They are new characters, and at this stage, inevitably minor ones, wedged into the book at a point that begs to have the principal players gathered onstage for climax and resolution. When at last we learn what's in store for the body in the blanket, it's possible to feel only a hint of Arthurson's intended catharsis. Jim Bartley is The Globe and Mail's first-fiction reviewer.