Dawson’s Clique

Emmanuelle Pierrot’s debut novel, La version qui n’intéresse personne (The version no one cares about), has all the ingredients to be terrible. It follows Sacha, a young Montrealer who winds up in Dawson City, doing drugs, fooling around, and becoming deeply attached to her dog. At some point, her new punk friends begin to shun her. Yet rather than sinking into melodrama, the book has the immersive energy of a Beat narrative, one that subtly shifts from celebrating to critiquing its milieu. The disintegration of Sacha’s social capital is at once a deeply felt disaster and a case study of how misogyny reproduces itself.

The story is largely chronological, with a first section labelled “Paradise.” An ominous prologue, however, signals that all will not be well: “One day, the village no longer wanted me. It trapped me, crushed me, and it spit me out.” This simple structure proves effective, as it primes readers for warning signs that the protagonist blows right past. She and her best friend, Tom, are thus introduced as “two incarnations of the same entity, an unviable two-headed alien,” their teenage bond both strong and suspect. Neglected by their parents in Montreal, they snort coke, eat Fudgee‑Os, and worship The Lord of the Rings alongside the controversial Quebec comedian Mike Ward; the evidence of their youth makes their cynicism all the more jarring. Female celebrities are exclusively targets for ridicule. As Sacha observes, “We hated all women and pretended not to know that I would become one and he wouldn’t.”

At eighteen, the pair strike out for the West and end up in the Yukon, settling in Dawson City, with its tourist-packed summers and year-round population of 1,500. There they become part of the “folk punk” scene: a rebellious, bohemian set who organize music festivals and anti-capitalist protests with the authority of the rarely employed. Pierrot presents this lifestyle without condescension, blurring the lines between liberation and dysfunction. Drug and alcohol use can get out of hand for the group, but more often it’s a source of fun. Sexual permissiveness is the order of the day, as people cheat and swap partners and embark on casual threesomes. Refreshingly, Pierrot does not treat any of these behaviours as problems, in and of themselves. The issue instead is that even this counterculture is shot through with social norms that punish women and protect men.

The cause of Sacha’s fall from grace is thoroughly banal. After years with Tom as her roommate, she falls in love with another man. Tom becomes jealous and complains to whoever will listen. Soon the rumour mill converts his old confidante into “Sacha Drama,” a manipulative and promiscuous stealer of boyfriends.

Pierrot has described the inspiration for her book as partly autobiographical. Luckily, the result reads less as an exercise in self-justification and more as an exposé of how people tear one another apart. Sacha is quietly dropped from a group chat, maligned on Facebook, and insulted in the village bar by strangers who have been served up her reputation as juicy gossip. Her situation gets progressively darker, until she is trapped in pandemic quarantine with a man who might assault her. Meanwhile, these same folk punks disown the singer Jesse Stewart over accusations that he abused his girlfriend. “I felt a wave of admiration for our community, we stuck together, we didn’t compromise our principles, we didn’t let ourselves be impressed by a woman-beating punk just because his video had seven million views on YouTube,” Sacha observes. The irony is multi-faceted. On the one hand, these seemingly feminist political beliefs lure Sacha into a false sense of security, as her social circle will not hesitate to call her a whore. On the other, the book informs us that the shunned musician later overdoses in Edmonton, turning Stewart into a parallel example of how quickly this community abandons its own.

Part of the attraction of La version qui n’intéresse personne is its setting in a part of Canada more often mythologized than experienced. Pierrot eschews references to Jack London in favour of Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Kurt Cobain. But there are still plenty of Nordic tropes mixed in with the whisky and ketamine, including the northern lights that appear at emotionally dissonant times, a treasured white dog that may be half wolf, and a “typical early spring evening” at twenty below zero. As Pierrot details the relationship between Dawson City’s “cheechakos” (the summer residents) and “sourdoughs” (those who brave the winter), her own account straddles the line between insider and outsider. Sacha spends five years as a tour guide, and some expository passages read like promotional copy, describing the town’s “washed-out coloured facades, stripped of logos, that gave us the impression of walking in a western.” Most of the clichés are kept at bay by this tale’s contemporary edge, which sends characters to the century-old Westminster Hotel to use the Wi‑Fi.

Pierrot opens the novel with a kind of land acknowledgement that details the Klondike gold rush from the perspective of the area’s Hän Hwëch’in community. This nod in the direction of political correctness works because Pierrot goes on to thematize the ideological inconsistency of Sacha’s social group. These early passages also introduce Sharon, an Indigenous woman who occasionally rents a room to Sacha on the condition that she not drink or do drugs. Sharon provides a sober counterpoint to Sacha, treating the youth with a mixture of compassion and exasperation as her social situation unravels. As the true local, Sharon warns Sacha about the “omertà surrounding violence against women” in Dawson and encourages her to leave. Yet she also reads as a real person who shocks her guest by mentioning that she is “not totally against pipelines or totally against hard rock mining,” later mentioning a nephew set to visit from Fort McMurray. With such details, Pierrot hints at the range of complex lives in the North that lie just outside the view of Sacha’s clique.

La version qui n’intéresse personne was a breakout hit in Quebec this year, and a film adaptation is already on its way. Unsurprisingly, this accessible book about the social dynamics of young rebels earned the Prix littéraire des collégien·ne·s, assigned by college students. But Pierrot also received the Prix des libraires, which leans more literary. The combination testifies to an unusual balancing act. Like the dive bar built on the permafrost where its characters congregate, this novel has coarse aesthetics and a sturdy foundation.