Winter Brothers
Real Life Book Review.
The Winter Brothers, by Ivan Doig is a book, and a journal and a way of looking at time, writing, journals and history all rolled into one. It picked me up and grabbed me by the collar and hauled me over the mountaintops towards the early years of the West Coast of this country and Canada.
It was at times a surreal experience.
Imagine yourself in a cozy 2nd floor apartment, simply furnished. Looking through the floor-to-ceiling windows , your eyes trace snow-covered mountain tops. You can name each one and there’s a fondness arising in your heart as you watch the weather move across them each day. The gas heater breathes warmth into the space and that particular stillness of deep winter and many feet of snow has quieted everything inside and out. Even your dog padding around the place is subdued by the quilt of snow outside, as though she sees herself slowly treading deer-worn single-tracks in those same mountains.
You sit on the sofa, cup of tea nearby. The book is open on your lap and you read the narrator’s experience of reading the diarist’s tale all the while he is narrating his experience of that reading the same way you regularly look up, gaze towards the mountains and notice similarities and differences in all three existences.
Once there I was pulled ever deeper into a multi-layered story of a writer, reading a journal written by James Gilchrist Swan, a diarist in 1849, who, over the course of the winter, comes to respect and love the people who have lived in the Pacific Northwest for centuries and works to thwart the inhuman behaviours of the New Americans whom he comes to understand, are driven by fear and an almost complete lack of understanding of these original peoples.
There is another layer threaded through the story- that of the writer, (essentially Doig), who is reading this journal in the winter of 1978, and penning his thoughts about the diarists daily entries. What wended its way into my psyche most deeply was the method by which Doig achieves this layering. As the reader, I was reading a diarist, writing about a diarist reading another diary. Each of us separated by decades in time and connected at times by weather. (I read this the first time, in the midst of winter while living in the Eastern north in the Adirondacks)
At times I lost myself in Swan’s notations and experiences. At other times I was drawn into Doig’s narration and the intertwining he felt with Swan. Weaving through all of this like an Escher drawing, was my own experience of reading and awareness of the winter just outside.
When asked about the genre for this book, Doig describes the difficulty he has created for librarians and booksellers. I offer the term “Escheresque” as a possible fit. The convolutions and connections which twist, turning the narrator into a reader; which pulled me into the story as a reader who was led to become an observer of my own life, my own winter, all of these creating a linguistic maze of a novel which continues to defy categorisation.
And I think that’s a marvellous thing for a novel/bio/history/expression to have accomplished.
How about you? What’s one book that let you experience something in your life in a totally new way?
