Waubgeshig Rice, Moon of the Crusted Snow

The thing is, Waubgeshig Rice's novel Moon of the Crusted Snow isn't for me, and that's fine.

I enjoyed it well enough, racing through most of it in a two-hour flight between Calgary and Yellowknife, and I imagine that I'll read the sequel Moon of the Turning Leaves eventually, but it's just not the novel I'd hoped it would be. Again, as I say, it's not written with someone like me in mind, but I can only speak for myself in commenting about it.

The plot is straightforward: in short order, an Anishinaabe community / reserve in what's currently known as northern Ontario loses power and all communication links to the south, with winter on its way. This turns out to be part of a much larger, catastrophic collapse of humanity's infrastructure, though we never learn how broad the collapse might be, or its cause. The novel maintains a tight focus on the question of how the community will handle the winter, and what form of community will emerge from the snows.

It's a great premise, and I'd absolutely trust the three blurbists I know of the back cover's four. Eden Robinson, Warren Cariou and Richard Van Camp are rock stars, both as writers and as readers. And yet here I am, complaining that the novel doesn't work for me. Why?

Spoilers!

Simply put, Justin Scott was an unnecessary character, and it drove me around the bend that his significance kept swelling to the point that this became his novel.

Honestly, I get that it's useful to have a concrete antagonist, someone to root against, so even if I'd rather Rice focus purely on the community's survival through winter, it could've worked well to include an antagonist. After all, Rice went some way toward making a villain out of the manager of the under-supplied grocery store, as well as doing the same for the main character's younger brother, before  he abandoned those threads in favour of Scott, and each of those threads had the potential for minor antagonism that could've risen to something systemic.

And obviously Justin Scott isn't the hero, merely an antagonist, and a late-arriving one at that. I appreciate that readers will object to my saying that it's his novel, so let me explain myself. 

Scott was such a cartoonish villain for me! Huge, physically powerful, armed to the teeth, bootlegging alcohol, selling drugs, taking advantage of (or worse) the women in this community: I don't need a cartoon villain to take the point that there's nothing redeeming about exploitive settler culture.

But then (serious spoilers now, stop reading if there's any chance you'll read this novel) to have Scott eating the Anishinaabe dead?!? Right, sure, you're right, yes, this might well be an echo of Jonathan Swift's classic "Modest Proposal." Settlers have been figuratively consuming Indigenous people and peoples for centuries. Swift had the English eating the bodies of Irish babies, so why shouldn't Rice have settler Canadians eating the bodies of Anishinaabe dead?

Well, this novel is 30 times the length of Swift's essay, and this detail was the key twist of Swift's satire. Rice had a larger canvas, more options, and a story--and message--that didn't need this wrinkle. That didn't need Justin Scott at all. That didn't need settlers to be represented at all (except possibly to be rebuffed at the border, as they are in the novel: an intriguing justice to be depicted there).

Evan Whitesky and his community deserved better from Waubgeshig Rice than to share the stage with Justin Scott, even if they do defeat him in the end.

Mind you, even there Scott's killed not by a member of the Anishinaabe community, but by a white settler woman who has been victimized by Scott (and is therefore avenging her own mistreatment, as well as the emasculation of her husband), so maybe he isn't in fact defeated by the Anishinaabe community at all. There's a message here about keeping one's own nest clean, I suppose, and another about the crucially overlooked power of women, but for me, her role underlines just how unnecessary to the community's story was Justin Scott.

After all this complaint, you might be surprised that I'm still recommending this novel, and that I'll be reading its sequel, but I do recommend it.

As I said at the beginning of this note, Moon of the Crusted Snow wasn't written for me, so what I take from it isn't the point for any readers for whom the book really was written. If it gets the notice of Eden Robinson, Warren Cariou, and Richard Van Camp, then it deserves notice from other readers as wlel. Especially in its meditation on apocalypse, during these times of climate change, this novel is an important read.

It's not what I wanted it to be, and I won't be rereading it, but that's fine.