A decade ago, I was camping on the shores of Atlin Lake, tucked in the north-western corner of British Columbia, just outside the sleepy, eponymous town that was founded after gold was discovered in Pine Creek in 1898. This remote area of glacier-blanketed mountains and vast wilderness is the site of the last great gold rush in Canadian history. Today, it is home to just 400 inhabitants.
Early one morning, we set off to explore the park. As we trekked through the woods along a trail dotted with makeshift shrines—courtesy, we speculated, of the local Tlingit First Nations—a husky appeared, blocking our path. Rather than running off, he accompanied us. Ever vigilant of the grizzlies that prowled the area, we were grateful for his company. Making our way along a creek, we spotted the remnants of cabins that once housed gold miners and now were mouldering away, as the wilderness reclaimed its own. Once we were safely back at our campsite, our guardian disappeared into the woods, heeding some call we could not discern.
This memory surfaced as I read Alexi Zentner’s extraordinary debut novel, Touch, the story of three generations of the Boucher family who live in Sawgamet, a fictional, one-time boomtown gone bust in northern B.C. After “the gold gave out,” it became a backwater logging community. The narrator, Stephen Boucher, has just returned to Sawgamet to take over Anglican ministry duties from his stepfather. Back in his childhood home, keeping vigil over his dying mother, he is overwhelmed by memories.
Flitting temporally between the present and the past, the narrative is structured as a series of stories within, and upon, stories. It is through recollecting and reflecting on these stories—and on the nature of storytelling itself—that Stephen come to terms with a family history founded in, and compounded by, tragedy.
Uppermost in Stephen’s thoughts is the day his grandfather, Jeannot, came back to the town he founded as a 16-year-old with his dog Flaireur (both marvellous characters) two years before B.C. joined the Confederation. He had come seeking gold, and when the gold did not pan out for him, he turned to sawmilling and settled into a fairly prosperous life. After the accidental death of his wife, Martine, he disappeared for almost three decades, leaving his infant son, Stephen’s father, in the care of his in-laws. The winter before Jeannot returns, when Stephen is ten years old, his father, who had followed Jeannot in the unforgiving work of logging, perishes. He was trying to save his daughter who had fallen through the ice in the river.
Asked why he returned, Jeannot explains:
“Return to me, and I will return unto you,” Jeannot said again, repeating the scripture. “What do I intend? Why have I come back to Sawgamet? Why now? I came back for Martine.”
He looked at me. “I’ve come for your grandmother,” he said. “I’ve come to raise the dead.”
This startling pronouncement, which closes the action-compacted first chapter, sets up the premise of the novel, which is a moving resurrection of a tragic family history and a convincing demonstration of a consciousness working through anamnesis to reconstruct an epoch of the birth and decline of a northern resource-industry town.
Zentner lucidly intertwines indigenous mythology and Christianity to delve into the psyche of a town founded on the pillaging of natural resources by “white man,” and the revenge that nature can take when taboos are broken. Taking the archetypal northern wilderness frontier as a springboard for the imagination, he explores an ever-shifting borderline between myth and reality. The narrator reveals:
I’ve had enough experience with telling others the tired homily that God works in mysterious ways, to know that there is no making sense of the workings of God. Though, if I were to be honest, I would admit that I think of my father and grandfather as gods themselves. I do not mean gods in a religious sense, but rather like the gods that the natives believed preceded us in these northern forests and brought civilization to Sawgamet, and in the stories passed down to me, it is impossible to determine what is myth and what is truth.
Foregrounding the peculiarity in the “cold remoteness of the village, that makes it feel like it exists in its own country … [with] its own internal logic,” Zentner constructs a mythicized world, wherein settlers turn to local indigenous tales to make sense of things and forces heretofore unencountered. Touch is full of tales of qallupilluits, sea witches who feel the greed for gold and call people to their deaths; of wehtikos, men turned into monsters “as a punishment for cannibalism”; of mahahas, snow demons who “tickle you until all your breath is gone. Leave you dead, but with a smile.” The stories dip into this great river bed of mythology, but are never entirely lost there.
The technique recalls magical realism, though Zentner (wisely) prefers the term mythical realism. Touch has been compared to Michael Crummey’s Newfoundland-based novel Galore. I might also place it in the vein of Bruno Schulz’s Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass, written in Poland’s borderland region. In these works, the reader bears witness to an act of mythical consciousness, which operates symbolically to free itself from a passive captivity to sensory perception and produce its own world governed by a spiritual principle.
Touch is unflinchingly matter-of-fact in its portrayal of the harsh reality of life in a remote northern Canadian settlement, be it the human being’s fortitude or folly in the face of Nature, or the fact of work in an extractive industry when there were no such things as safety standards. This is a land where constant vigilance is required, where if one misjudges the timing of the cold weather by even a few hours, one can freeze to death, or have one’s boom ice-locked, or starve.
The winter was coming early and fierce, troubling even for the few men who remembered the original rush and the year that Sawgamet had turned hard and lean; the boomtown had gone bust and rumors of desperate men eating their mules to stay alive through the snowed-in winter had been overshadowed by whispers of their eating more pernicious meat than what came from mules.
The matter-of-factness is underscored by Zentner’s spare prose, as in the winter bringing “the cold … [that] can break you.” The reader is right in the rawness of the place: it is an unforgiving land, literally.
By the time Stephen is all told out, the curious ending—tender and wistful for all the tragedy and devastation on the one hand, and all the love and faith on the other—makes utter sense. Stephen does not inhabit a linear, irreversible time into which historical fact and observable events fit to present the causal order of nature and narrative. Rather, past, present and future are levelled, interpenetrate and their transformation into the pure identity of the now opens up the world to a myriad of possibilities. Stephen relates, “Still, I want to think that with all of the stories I had heard, I knew of Sawgamet both as a place and as an idea, and I knew that my grandfather had returned with some sense of the magic that the woods still contained and all of the possibilities that entailed.” In this magical reality, parallel tracks of time can exist. And so when a 16-year-old boy walking in the woods sees his grandfather as a 16-year-old with his dog and calls out to him, a mystery of how a town is born is illuminated and the reader accepts that it cannot be otherwise.
Diana Kuprel is the online editor of the LRC. Raised in a northern sawmill town in British Columbia and in Vancouver, she is now based in Toronto. She is the translator of Zofia Nalkowska’s short story collection, Medallions and Ryszard Kapuscinski’s selected poetry, I Wrote Stone.
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