Cherie Dimaline, The Marrow Thieves

I'll never know, but I wonder how Cherie Dimaline's The Marrow Thieves would've hit me if I hadn't blasted through it the day after similarly blasting through Waubgeshig Rice's Moon of the Crusted Snow.

My verdict on Rice's book--a verdict no one needed or called for--was that readers far more notable than me appreciated it a lot more than I did. It's a polished and well-written book, and I'll read the sequel with interest, but that's as far as it goes for me.

Cherie Dimaline's The Marrow Thieves, on the other hand, grabbed me and barely let go. It's not written for me, as I said also about Rice's book, so I'm confident that there's lots I'll never get about The Marrow Thieves. It's Indigenous fiction, YA fiction, and speculative fiction, and I claim no authority to speak decisively on any of those genres or modes. Still, I found myself gripped by every character and event in Dimaline's novel. (Except that the Recruiters are dressed like retro gym teachers, and I couldn't get past that detail. Probably that's because I'm too much an outsider, too old, too unable to relax, but it was jarring.)

The Marrow Thieves succeeds for me because of its propulsive narration, one page and word and footstep after another: drama is never far away. The characters come alive, and the settings are intimately drawn, and the apocalypse makes you ache, but for me it's the narrative flow (and the occasional strange loop) that I'll carry forward.

In The Marrow Thieves, set in a 2060s world ravaged by climate change, settlers have lost the ability to dream. This leads to widespread mental breakdown and death, piled messily atop all the other deaths from climate-change disasters (including catastrophic coastal earthquakes, and I think also a massive bombing campaign? Or at least one enormous explosion?), until the settlers realize that Indigenous people still dream.

And so, drawing consciously and conspicuously on the history of residential schools in Canada, the settlers begin methodically to capture, exploit, and finally consume any Indigenous people they can find who've survived this far through the world's disasters, as well as their own private disasters. (The central plot point of consumption reminded me of Douglas Coupland's Generation A, even if the two novels have almost nothing else in common.)

We follow throughout the novel a fleeing group of resisters, thrown together by circumstance, as they try to keep surviving and to build a genuine community from the shards of nine people. One thing leads to another and back again, and I refuse to give away anything of the plot, but my goodness, what a tale Cherie Dimaline weaves.

The trouble is, though, that because I was so wrapped up in the novel's plot and narration, it's a short comment when I won't talk much about that.

It's a fascinating concept, this idea that because individual communities have been shattered by the settler response to the dreamlessness crisis, Indigenous peoples within the novel choose to form a broader community rather than splintering further. I really appreciated Rice's intense focus on community in his book, so the further I get from Dimaline's, the more I've found myself worrying about the gaps and overlaps between these two visions of what it might take to survive an apocalypse. There's no reason to decide whether one's more correct, and besides, these two authors are imagining different forms of apocalypse anyway. In case of a large enough emergency, literally ALL of the tools will be needed, too, and so both of these novels have plenty to contribute.

And there are sequels! This is great news, except that I'm getting even further from ever reading all the books I've committed myself to reading....