Kate Pullinger, Forest Green

"Why," I wondered, "didn't I notice Kate Pullinger's novel Forest Green when it first appeared?" I was in the second-hand bookstore at the Coombs Market at the time, looking at the ARC of Forest Green (I do love an ARC, unaccountably) whose back-cover blurb advertises the main character's "reckless, nomadic working days in logging camps across British Columbia," and clearly this is a novel that I should have found earlier.

The publication date, I then notice on the back cover, was April 28, 2020. In other words, Forest Green was among a micro-generation of books whose fates were sealed by COVID-19, and Kate Pullinger among the many, many writers whose careers were at best muddled by what was happening in the spring of 2020. Pullinger is a faculty member at Bath Spa University, and it looks like her career since 2020 has gone pretty well, but I don't see that she's published another novel since Forest Green. (I see that she has something forthcoming in 2027 from Penguin-Random House, but it's not covering anything like the same ground as Forest Green.)

And it's a good novel, this, one that I wish I'd had on my mind before the passage of six more years, and I wish she'd had the chance, energy, or whatever to see another novel along these lines appear. In part, if I might confess, I say this because selfishly, I wish she'd been able to climb more deeply inside the places and ideas she's written about in Forest Green. This novel gives me characters and plot to appreciate, but not the minutiae that I crave in fiction about this place. (Possibly this is related to her own focus in writing the novel, since it's loosely based on the life of an estranged uncle, so she has a different obligation to the characters than she does to the other elements, but I don't like to extrapolate too much from biographical elements.)

The back cover actually sets up the novel well: as a boy in the Okanagan of the 1930s, Art Lunn ends up enmeshed in a crisis not of his making that colours the whole shape of his life, so Pullinger gives us a chronology of vignettes spanning almost all of Art's life, beginning in 1934 when he was 7. Through the vignettes, we see Art in WW2, then returning; working in the woods as a young man, then as an older man; losing his grip on his livelihood; and living for longer than he might have expected.

For me, it's fine, good, a decent read, but I would've appreciated a different approach. My guess is that Doubleday published it because it thought her UK location might make for international sales, but who knows? Generally I'm not reading for character, so if that's what the author and her editor(s) were focused on, then I'm not the target market anyway, and my assessment shouldn't count for much. Pullinger's comments to CBC about writing this novel do emphasize character, after all.

Forest Green will work really well for some readers, I'm sure, just not for me.