Novels about climate change usually take the form of science fiction – hence the in-vogue tag “cli-fi” – but Annie Proulx’s gigantic new book left me wondering if historical fiction might be the genre more pertinent to our ecologically jittery times. If Barkskins has a hypothesis, it’s this: assuming the damage is already done, the causes of whatever trouble lies ahead are as rich in drama as any of the apocalyptic consequences.
The story begins in the 17th century, in the part of New France that became modern Canada, where colonists – justifying their atrocities with high-handed Christian rhetoric – are unworried by the consequences of tampering with an environment that the local pagans hold in fearful respect. Two French labourers, René Sel and Charles Duquet, are chopping down trees for a settler who promises them land in return for three years’ unpaid service. While René does as he’s told – fathering several children with his master’s indigenous housekeeper in the process – Duquet scarpers, surviving a near-fatal trek to establish a logging dynasty.
The next 650 pages trace the bloodlines of these two men in an often grisly chronicle of deforestation, cultural erasure and international commerce. We sit in on vomit-strewn ocean crossings, shady business deals in Dutch coffee houses and fatal feuds between rival logging crews razing land wrested from the native population. The rags-to-riches rise of Duquet (always referred to by his surname) and the fortunes of his in-fighting heirs contrast with the fate of René’s mixed-race descendants, expropriated, exploited and scattered from New England to New Zealand in search of a livelihood.
Proulx’s publisher says Barkskins took five years to write and her allusions to the project in rare interviews suggest it was on her mind for at least five times longer than that. Best known for short stories, Proulx gets through an enormous amount of work here, but the novel suffers for her reluctance to delegate any of it to the reader. The first page tells us how someone’s eyes “falsely indicated a vivacious nature”; when we meet one of Duquet’s grandsons, two sentences hurry us from hair colour and appearance to how “he took a hard-headed and hard-handed stance to disguise an inner recognition of worthlessness”. We might have liked the chance to figure it out ourselves.
When Proulx does credit us with insight, it’s usually only to exploit the centuries-wide gap between what we know and what her characters know – witness the clanging dramatic irony of repeated declarations that the forests will last for ever. There’s quite a bit of cackling from the wings: when someone facing imminent doom cries, “I’m not done”, Proulx sets him straight (“he was done”). Someone else drinks water from a well that is ominously hailed as the freshest in town – and drops dead one page later.
Despite the flatness of the writing, and Proulx’s relaxed attitude to saturating us with detail about, say, advances in woodcutting technology, the book’s sheer tonnage of incident supplies an intermittent but undeniable thrill. I was overjoyed when a vile missionary got his comeuppance; more than once, I suppressed a pang as yet another character I’d been sentimental enough to root for wound up frozen or crushed or tomahawked to death.
While the cast’s dizzying rate of turnover partly reflects contemporary perils, the sense grows that something more than verisimilitude is at stake. Of the dozens of characters featured in these pages, many are little more than names, with some introduced only to show how they die. By making everyone so brutally disposable, Proulx invites us to care more about the context than about any individual story: the environment is at least as important as anyone in it, a view held by the book’s indigenous people but rubbished by almost all of its foreigners.
As survivalist epic wilts down to dreary sermon, with the novel ending in the company of a present-day ecologist, it gets harder to quell the thought that Dr Seuss’s The Lorax made a similar point in roughly 200,000 fewer words. That isn’t to say the message doesn’t bear repeating. But for Proulx to write it to a planetary scale rather than a human one risks ignoring an imperative of any campaign: don’t lose your audience, even – perhaps especially – when you’ve already lost the fight.
Barkskins is published by 4th Estate (£18.99). Click here to buy it for £15.19
