Thomas King likes turtles. He writes and talks about them a lot. I like them too, though prior to encountering King, maybe for different reasons. I like that they’re slow but they get the job done. And carting around that big shell on their back. I like that they put up with that without complaint. It’s just what they do.
You’ll find King talking about turtles in his lecture, The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. It’s also a clue to his novel’s title, The Back of the Turtle.
That’s neither here nor there, but it’s interesting that turtles are not just in the novel’s title, but in the story too. Take Big Red, for instance. (You need to read the book to know who that is.)
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Strangely, The Back of the Turtle reminds me of a lot of the science fiction I’ve read, though King’s story is not science fiction. (It has a scientist or two in it though.)
There are two reasons for this. First, back in the 1970’s, I was reading a lot of sci-fi and a good deal of it was about the environment and commercialization. They had their sights set on a corporatized world and the ensuing ruin. The name John Brunner comes to mind and his book titled The Sheep Look Up.
There are thematic echoes in Thomas King’s book. But his book contains much more.
The second reason the book makes me think of science fiction is that the story is set in a dystopian world, though it’s not as dystopian as a lot of books I’ve read. And in King’s hands, that dystopian world becomes utopian—maybe. Let’s say, kind of.
It leaves us with a choice of which ending we’d prefer to go with: nice or not so nice. King tells us, as the story winds down, that turtles like happy endings. He gives us, as readers, the option of choosing how the story will end. Maybe we’ll be like turtles. Maybe we won’t. He doesn’t provide a dogmatic conclusion.
What he gives us is a lot of fun and a lot to think about and he does it with a wonderful mash-up of indigenous this and that, Christian this and that, and a lot of other this and that—political, social, economic, environmental, mythic, and culinary.
I think Thomas King is just one of those people with a lot of ‘stuff’ in his head. A lot of it comes out in his writing and I find it amazing that he can make it both coherent and comic. And very engaging.
I won’t summarize his story. We’d both be bored, the book would be poorly represented and, besides, you can find a summary just about anywhere. I’ll just tell you about some of the things I like.
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There’s a passel of characters in the book. My favourites are Nicolas Crisp and Sonny (“Wham wham. Hammer hammer.”). Crisp is the funny-as-hell wise old man (kinda) and Sonny is innocence (pretty much). There’s also a bad guy who’s pretty engaging, Dorian Asher. He’s a wealthy bit of nothing, the CEO of a fictional corporation called Domidion, and has an enigmatic, sexually vague assistant named Winter Lee. There are a couple of times in the book when a cipher smile appears through the bland efficiency of her face. But you’re never really sure what it’s about. It puzzles Dorian too.
And then there are the main characters, Gabriel and Mara, two indigenous people with a few things in common. Both are lost. Both left their homes. Both are returning to their homes, though only one, Mara, consciously. Even then, the home she thinks she’s returning to isn’t the home she’s actually returning to. But that’s also true of Gabriel, I suppose.
King plays with contradictions in his novel. Gleefully. And it makes for great humour.
One of the more fascinating elements of King’s story is the story of The Woman Who Fell From the Sky, an indigenous creation tale. In a certain way, The Back of the Turtle is a version of that, though it’s more re-creation than creation, and maybe more accurately described as a restoration.
Both Mara and Gabriel, the latter in particular, have to hold their breath and dive deep into the water and bring back the mud from which the world will be made (or re-made, in this case).
In another way, they are the Christian creation story except, rather than Adam and Eve being thrown out of Paradise, they are Gabriel and Mara, both of whom chose to leave for something better. They’ve both come back and both have to restore what was lost.
They have to kick-start the world. And they do, but only with some help.
Which leaves us with one of King’s wonderful contradictions—us, people. It takes a community to make a world but communities are made up of individuals and, as the novel shows us, they come in all shapes and sizes and variations of personality and history (though there’s really just one history). Sometimes they work together well; sometimes they don’t. And that’s where all the problems come from.
Somehow, we have to find a way to make it work. So, do we want the nice ending or do we want the other one, which isn’t so nice?
Thomas King’s wonderful novel invites us to choose.
May 1, 2018
