The idea of wilderness usually has North Americans looking west to the wide-open spaces and jagged, wind-scraped rocks that rise above the tree line.
Joseph Boyden's first book, "Three Day Road," swiveled the reader's mind back to the Northeast and the closer, spookier arctic realms around the eastern Hudson Bay area. His heroes came from two Cree families who hunted and trapped in the region's dark forests. The Canadian author's follow-up book is called "Through Black Spruce," and the shadowed forests are still there, but they are harried, hurt and weary -- the trappers have to go around to the back of big-box stores to sell marten pelts, and the town's one grocery store is full of obese and diabetic shoppers buying second-rate goods at inflated prices. The book's two heroes -- descendants of the first novel's main character -- are similarly battered by urban detritus and torn between town and country.
In two entwined story lines, a local bush pilot, Will Bird, lies in a coma and narrates a tale of a vicious family feud, while his beautiful bush trapper niece, Annie, describes her journey through the northern cities on the trail of her missing sister, Suzanne. These two stories run alongside each other and connect, but unfortunately, they don't run neck and neck.
While Will is a rounded character and his voice and adventures leave no room for doubt, Annie is a bit mythical -- dangerously close to an embodiment of the "Indian Princess" cliché that Boyden derides.
As stunning and tall as Suzanne, she finds herself modeling in New York City, doing battle with coke-dealing bikers, vicious socialites and other avatars of soulless materialism. She herself is a first-rate wilderness hand and clear-souled soothsayer. While tempted by the glamorous life, she has no trouble discerning its ultimate lack of worth. Unlike her uncle in a coma, in other words, she is flawless. Her best friend is a fat woman with a heart of gold and the men around her are in total thrall to Annie's strength and beauty. In New York City, the walls come tumbling down before her and she's a top-earning fashion model in no time.
Back home, she streaks over the icy landscape on her snowmobile and it's easy to imagine her long black hair flying in the wind: a silhouetted icon of beauty like you'd see on the side of a van. Her inner monologue is smart and cynical -- but these days, that's a default attitude.
If Annie's story seems a little too pat, Boyden's other narrative more than makes up for it. Anguished, angry Uncle Will's revenge drama is almost perfect in pitch and execution. Tragedy and comedy unspool together in a startlingly casual manner when Will speaks, the way they do in life.
When Boyden is at his best, as he often is here, he is matchless. Readers should use their mental snowmobile to skim swiftly over the slick parts of Boyden's tale, then slow down when he writes from the bush pilot's point of view, because it's there that his words take flight.
