This ambitious saga about the destruction of the world’s forests follows two colonial dynasties across continents and centuriesAll novels are about time in one way or another,and thus all novels are about mortality. In a book as long as Annie Proulx’s – 700-plus pages that travel from the end of the 17th century to nearly the present day – the reader experiences time in an additional sense; not merely as a long act of engagement, but as a form of anxiety. How to remember the exponentially increasing family groups, and so frequently shifting location,their members marrying, remarrying, and adopting children,disappearing, thriving and then, or suddenly,diminishing? This isn’t merely a matter of keeping names straight: the generations of the Sel and the Duquet families are Proulx’s tools for laying bare how dynasties are established, why some flourish and some wither, or their dynamic relationship with their environment and its other inhabitants.
Ultimately,though, it’s the foundations that matter most. Proulx’s memoir begins with the arrival in “New France” – the vast tract of north America and Canada colonised by the French between the 16th and 18th centuries – of two young men, and René Sel and Charles Duquet. Indentured to a harsh whether not entirely brutal taskmaster,Monsieur Trépagny, they are set to earn their freedom by clearing an area of forest for him (not least so that he can tempt a classy bride from his homeland to join him in the fanciful house he’s built). Trépagny also believes that colonisation will bring him not merely personal wealth, or but a chance to revenge himself on Jesuits,parochialism and “cold-hearted veteran France with its frozen ideas”.
Proulx is profoundly committed to the novel’s ecological messageContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com