Reviewed by Rachel Carlson (originally posted Sept 20, 2013)
Both worldly and ethereal, Meredith Quartermain’s 2006 BC Book Prize for Poetry-winning collection, Vancouver Walking, explores metropolitan modernity and the confluence of past and present. Quartermain continues this examination in her haunting prose poetry collection, Nightmarker. For her first full-length novel, Rupert’s Land, she takes us on a historical and regional journey through the Canadian Prairies.
During the Great Depression two young people are attempting escape the oppression of their era. For Cora Wagoner, the constraints of gender tradition and church edicts are limiting her dreams of small-town escape and career fulfillment. Her religiously conservative father struggles to control her rebellion against the church and against gender norms, while the deprivation of the Great Depression encroaches on their lives. At the same time, a young aboriginal boy named Hunter George is struggling to escape the racist colonial institution of residential school. Torn away from his family, Hunter negotiates the harsh reality of systemic racism and the official Canadian government’s policy of Indian assimilation. In a fateful moment, Cora and Hunter are united in their struggle as Cora helps Hunter return to his family home. Fleeing through Rupert’s Land, a vast swath of the Canadian Prairies, Cora and Hunter embark on a journey that places them at the mercy of the elements, the law, and their fellow travelers; more importantly, they are on a journey of self-discovery that attempts to challenge the historical and societal foundations of colonial Canada.
Fittingly, the title cover of Rupert’s Land features two figures outlined on a grassy prairie landscape beneath a vast and imposing sky. Above them the novel’s title, adorned with a detailed map of the area looms large, seemingly pressing down upon the two watchful silhouettes. They are small relative to the landscape, but also to the societal and historical pressures that oppress and constrain them. As the back cover describes, Cora and Hunter come to “realize that they exist in a land that is simultaneously moving beyond history and drowning in its excess.” The novel does, indeed, drown in historical excess.
The title and the historical notes suggest a novel of epic scope and deep historical exploration. Indeed, Rupert’s Land represents a deep and abiding colonial appropriation of aboriginal land that becomes the Canadian prairie provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta. Focusing on the small town and surrounding area of Stettler, Alberta (a small portion of the 2.8 million hectare area that is Ruperts Land), the novel attempts to demonstrate how the particular can communicate the general.
Unfortunately, Stettler is not placed in any particular geographic or historical context in the novel, other than it is a place within Rupert’s land that has personal significance for the author. As such, I felt that the setting had little significance in a plot that is largely concerned with the history of, and connection to, place. The particularities of Stettler that could provide context and connection for readers are largely absent or overwhelmed by the geographical and historical weight of Rupert’s Land.
Indeed, context is problematic for the entirety of Quartermain’s novel, especially since the novel is concerned with challenging Canada’s official history. While the author does attempt to explore alternative versions of history, aboriginal historical figures are utterly absent. If the overly coincidental plot of Rupert’s Land allows for a gender outlaw female French teacher who presents the Northwest Rebellion and figures such as Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont as heroic rather than treasonous, than the author probably could have found a plot device that allowed for the meaningful inclusion of Big Bear and Poundmaker. Instead, events like the Frog Lake massacre are left adrift in the text unchallenged, unexplored, and without qualification. In this respect, the prologue (which is nothing more than an excerpt from the novel) stands out as a missed opportunity that could have provided readers with some historical and colonial context and insight.
While Rupert’s Land contains some fairly large historical blind-spots, it does attempt to challenge some of the myths and stereotypes that support colonial ideology. As Cora and Hunter travel together Cora contemplates the images and the history of Indian people that she has read about in school and at her local library. Her interactions with Hunter do not fit with the so-called facts she has been taught: “Maybe, she thinks, Hunter doesn’t know any Indian secrets. Maybe Indians like that only live in books and she’s a booby and should just shut up and stop pestering him…” Their relationship is complicated further by emerging power imbalances as the author draws parallels between the authority of the government and the general authority of white people: “When she looks at him her eyes are like the government man looking across his table at Dad.”
But it is difficult to say the extent to which this work challenges colonial myths as it also seems complicit with the narrative of the disappearing Indian who eventually submits to white authority (as when Hunter decides to complete his residential schooling after which he imagines he will “be free”). This narrative brings to mind the hotly contested work of Rudy Wiebe, particularly The Temptations of Big Bear, that has been both praised as anti-colonial and anti-racist, and maligned as white appropriation of aboriginal voice (a debate that is worth more than the few hundred words I could provide).
Disappointingly, Quartermain’s prose is often confused and clumsy, although there are moments when the lyrical beauty of her poetry does surface. When Cora’s “voice disappears into porches and windows of bungalows with pyramid roofs, chimneys poking up from their squared-off peaks,” for instance, or when Hunter is as “silent as a tree-shadow sliding.” And very occasionally, the imagery is both poignant and baffling at once:
She feels weightless, timeless, as though Arrow started a leap and never landed, his lost hoof-beats stuck inside her, waiting to come down—circling around, turning her insides to jelly because they can’t come down; there’s no more ground to land on, only another highway running into the one they just crossed.
While the text is occasionally rendered with luminous detail, it is more often confusing to read. Conversations between characters are muddled by undifferentiated speakers and several passages must be re-examined to determine which characters are in the scene. Text that slides between scenes, actions, and emotions without segue in Quartermain’s prose poetry creates a fluid effect that guides the reader through confluent events, images, and tenses; in her novel this approach creates confusion and frustration.
While Rupert’s Land is an ambitious work that experiments with style and form conventions, the plot fails to “hang together.” There are too many historical, geographical, regional, and cultural threads that are not bound together tightly enough or explored deeply enough to be engaging (or credible). I think that the author takes a huge risk by assuming a first person narrative of an aboriginal character, a risk that is not always warranted given the many excellent aboriginal Canadian authors such as Thompson Highway, Thomas King, Lee Maracle, Joseph Boyden, and Eden Robinson, who explore the particularities of First Nations experience and history in Canada. In Rupert’s Land Quartermain has taken a risk that hasn’t paid off.
NeWest | 280 pages | $20.95 | paper | ISBN # 978-1927063361
‘Rupert’s Land’ by Meredith Quartermain
Book Reviews
Both worldly and ethereal, Meredith Quartermain’s 2006 BC Book Prize for Poetry-winning collection, Vancouver Walking, explores metropolitan modernity and the confluence of past and present. Quartermain continues this examination in her haunting prose poetry collection, Nightmarker. For her first full-length novel, Rupert’s Land, she takes us on a historical and regional journey through the Canadian Prairies.
During the Great Depression two young people are attempting escape the oppression of their era. For Cora Wagoner, the constraints of gender tradition and church edicts are limiting her dreams of small-town escape and career fulfillment. Her religiously conservative father struggles to control her rebellion against the church and against gender norms, while the deprivation of the Great Depression encroaches on their lives. At the same time, a young aboriginal boy named Hunter George is struggling to escape the racist colonial institution of residential school. Torn away from his family, Hunter negotiates the harsh reality of systemic racism and the official Canadian government’s policy of Indian assimilation. In a fateful moment, Cora and Hunter are united in their struggle as Cora helps Hunter return to his family home. Fleeing through Rupert’s Land, a vast swath of the Canadian Prairies, Cora and Hunter embark on a journey that places them at the mercy of the elements, the law, and their fellow travelers; more importantly, they are on a journey of self-discovery that attempts to challenge the historical and societal foundations of colonial Canada.
Fittingly, the title cover of Rupert’s Land features two figures outlined on a grassy prairie landscape beneath a vast and imposing sky. Above them the novel’s title, adorned with a detailed map of the area looms large, seemingly pressing down upon the two watchful silhouettes. They are small relative to the landscape, but also to the societal and historical pressures that oppress and constrain them. As the back cover describes, Cora and Hunter come to “realize that they exist in a land that is simultaneously moving beyond history and drowning in its excess.” The novel does, indeed, drown in historical excess.
The title and the historical notes suggest a novel of epic scope and deep historical exploration. Indeed, Rupert’s Land represents a deep and abiding colonial appropriation of aboriginal land that becomes the Canadian prairie provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta. Focusing on the small town and surrounding area of Stettler, Alberta (a small portion of the 2.8 million hectare area that is Ruperts Land), the novel attempts to demonstrate how the particular can communicate the general.
Unfortunately, Stettler is not placed in any particular geographic or historical context in the novel, other than it is a place within Rupert’s land that has personal significance for the author. As such, I felt that the setting had little significance in a plot that is largely concerned with the history of, and connection to, place. The particularities of Stettler that could provide context and connection for readers are largely absent or overwhelmed by the geographical and historical weight of Rupert’s Land.
Indeed, context is problematic for the entirety of Quartermain’s novel, especially since the novel is concerned with challenging Canada’s official history. While the author does attempt to explore alternative versions of history, aboriginal historical figures are utterly absent. If the overly coincidental plot of Rupert’s Land allows for a gender outlaw female French teacher who presents the Northwest Rebellion and figures such as Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont as heroic rather than treasonous, than the author probably could have found a plot device that allowed for the meaningful inclusion of Big Bear and Poundmaker. Instead, events like the Frog Lake massacre are left adrift in the text unchallenged, unexplored, and without qualification. In this respect, the prologue (which is nothing more than an excerpt from the novel) stands out as a missed opportunity that could have provided readers with some historical and colonial context and insight.
While Rupert’s Land contains some fairly large historical blind-spots, it does attempt to challenge some of the myths and stereotypes that support colonial ideology. As Cora and Hunter travel together Cora contemplates the images and the history of Indian people that she has read about in school and at her local library. Her interactions with Hunter do not fit with the so-called facts she has been taught: “Maybe, she thinks, Hunter doesn’t know any Indian secrets. Maybe Indians like that only live in books and she’s a booby and should just shut up and stop pestering him…” Their relationship is complicated further by emerging power imbalances as the author draws parallels between the authority of the government and the general authority of white people: “When she looks at him her eyes are like the government man looking across his table at Dad.”
But it is difficult to say the extent to which this work challenges colonial myths as it also seems complicit with the narrative of the disappearing Indian who eventually submits to white authority (as when Hunter decides to complete his residential schooling after which he imagines he will “be free”). This narrative brings to mind the hotly contested work of Rudy Wiebe, particularly The Temptations of Big Bear, that has been both praised as anti-colonial and anti-racist, and maligned as white appropriation of aboriginal voice (a debate that is worth more than the few hundred words I could provide).
Disappointingly, Quartermain’s prose is often confused and clumsy, although there are moments when the lyrical beauty of her poetry does surface. When Cora’s “voice disappears into porches and windows of bungalows with pyramid roofs, chimneys poking up from their squared-off peaks,” for instance, or when Hunter is as “silent as a tree-shadow sliding.” And very occasionally, the imagery is both poignant and baffling at once:
She feels weightless, timeless, as though Arrow started a leap and never landed, his lost hoof-beats stuck inside her, waiting to come down—circling around, turning her insides to jelly because they can’t come down; there’s no more ground to land on, only another highway running into the one they just crossed.
While the text is occasionally rendered with luminous detail, it is more often confusing to read. Conversations between characters are muddled by undifferentiated speakers and several passages must be re-examined to determine which characters are in the scene. Text that slides between scenes, actions, and emotions without segue in Quartermain’s prose poetry creates a fluid effect that guides the reader through confluent events, images, and tenses; in her novel this approach creates confusion and frustration.
While Rupert’s Land is an ambitious work that experiments with style and form conventions, the plot fails to “hang together.” There are too many historical, geographical, regional, and cultural threads that are not bound together tightly enough or explored deeply enough to be engaging (or credible). I think that the author takes a huge risk by assuming a first person narrative of an aboriginal character, a risk that is not always warranted given the many excellent aboriginal Canadian authors such as Thompson Highway, Thomas King, Lee Maracle, Joseph Boyden, and Eden Robinson, who explore the particularities of First Nations experience and history in Canada. In Rupert’s Land Quartermain has taken a risk that hasn’t paid off.
NeWest | 280 pages | $20.95 | paper | ISBN # 978-1927063361