The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline
234 pages, Paperback
Published May, 2017 by Dancing Cat Books
This is the first novel that I read inspired by reading about it in the Routledge Co-Futures textbook, there were many excellent ideas in the article Indigenous Young Adult Dystopias by Graham J. Murphy coming from this novel. This novel is a weird apocalypse novel from an Indigenous point of view, but more specifically a Canadian perspective. That interested me as does pretty much any novel that explores the end of the world with a weird plot hook. I also enjoyed her story Tick Talk in the anthology Never Whistle at Night.
This book won many prizes and for starters let me start rubbing my chin in confusion as to why this novel was marketed as YA. I mean it is a coming-of-age novel, with young protagonists but there was nothing about it that felt like a young adult read, I mean it just felt like a novel to me. If anything, it is an intense experience that I feel would have more meaning for grown-ups. Cherie Dimaline is an excellent writer and she overcame my inherent dislike for the form of first-person narrative which mostly faded into the background.
If there is any weakness to the novel, I was murky about the narrator early in the novel, not aware that it was a young man and it resulted in me having to look up the character's name after finishing it. Frenchie, oh yeah. The Marrow Thieves is an excellent Cli-fi novel that uses the weird apocalypse as a metaphor to tell a story about one of the darkest stains in Canadian history. The boarding schools were forced on indigenous peoples. This history haunts the pages of this book, but the destruction of the lands are as much of this novel as the exploitation of the people
In this new climate change-wrecked future matters are made worse when people lose the ability to dream. As ecology collapses the lack of dreams and good only leads to more chaos as madness sets in. It may seem unrelated but I like the idea that the lack of connection to land kills the subconscious imagination.
Interestingly the narrative breaks a major rule of Science Fictional writing in a way that ends up being one of the best elements of the book. Proving that you can break the rules if you have a good reason for it and know what you are doing. Info-dumps where a character explains and tells rather than shows the story are normally are clunky, terrible, and considered off-limits in good SF. This novel has entire chapters told around a campfire and it works because it is woven into the native oral history tradition. These are powerful chapters in the book that end up giving the book a lived-in feeling.
In this world, only one thing can help the powerful and elite get the ability to dream back. They steal the marrow of Indigenous people.“You are born with them. Their DNA weaves them into marrow like spinners,” Miig's answered. The flames tried to settle, and he prodded them to dance again he added “That's where they pluck them from.”
The telling of the back story around the campfire setting give the revelation early in the novel a haunting feeling. The heat of the flame on the cold night, the snapping embers feel real as if learning how the world as we know ended. The setting of these conversations is so well drawn it adds weight to how the story is told. These moments in the novel help the reader visualize the storyteller and in the end the tale itself. It makes the reality of the greater Cli-fi universe more tangible.
“And then, even after our way of life has been commoditized after our lands were filled with water companies and wealthy corporate investors, we were still hopeful. Because we had each other period new communities started to form, we were gathering strength. Then the church and the scientists who were working day and night on the dream problem came up with their solution and everything went to hell.”
The wider dystopian elements are contained mostly in these campfire re-tellings. The ending of the world goes beyond the high concept of the plot and expresses the reality climate is changing. “Closer you get to the coast,” Clarence whispered, pointing east West, and then north,”the more waters left that can be drunk. “The middle grounds?” He made his hands stiff and made a striking motion. Nothing. It's like where the bomb landed and the poison leached into the banks, everything's gone in all directions till you get further out.”
The devastation is something the characters are always escaping, or running from. This is important to the story as the marrow-deep in their bones means no matter how far they run, no matter how collapsed society becomes, they will be hunted. The road trip survival angle is where most of the action takes place but the whole thing is taking the story of what happened to native children in Canada and reinventing it with the SF angle.
“They asked for volunteers at first. Put out ads asking for people with ‘indigenous bloodlines and good general health’ to check in with local clinics for medical trials. They give you room and board for a week and a small honorarium to pay for your time off work period but then our distrust grew stronger, they didn't get many volunteers from the public. So they turned to prisons. Prisons are full of our people. Whether or not the prisoners went voluntarily who knows?”
Written long before the latest pandemic hit the world, the idea that the solution becomes the source of exploitation of native people is pure horror. Their marrow not even their blood, something as deep inside them as possible, the very marrow of their bones.
“It began as a rumor, that they had found a way to siphon the dreams right out of our bones, a rumor whispered every time one of us went missing, a rumor denounced every time their doctors sent us to hospitals and treatment centers never to return.”
The Marrow Thieves is one of the best horror or sci-fi novels by an Indigenous author I have read. It has a purpose and intensity. Well-defined characters and it has a message and point of view. It is the pure essence of the tradition of what science fiction has done best before the genre had a name. The awards nominations and prizes that it has won are deserved.
“He looked up, and it wasn't so hard to see his nation there. It was there in his light eyes, the way they angled down and avoided roundness just slightly. It was in the right corners of his high cheeks and the smooth flatness of his lips. It was there and the question he posed back with just the movement of his eyebrows.
“I mean what does it sound like?”
“Come again? “
Besides, I hoped he wasn't in the mood to stall.
“What language do you dream in?”
Fantastic novel no matter what language you dream in.
1 comment:
Great to see a review of a Canadian book
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