Review by New York Times Review
NOT FAR INTO Richard Wagamese's "Medicine Walk" - his ninth novel, and one that, given its earnest embrace of legend and myth, feels less written than painstakingly etched into something more permanent than paper - we learn that its young protagonist, an Indian named Franklin Starlight, is a master outdoorsman. Among other things, Frank knows "the value of ammunition. He never wasted a shot. He tracked and waited and bided his time until the animal offered the best possible target. He never rushed." For Frank, a "hunt was a process." And so is the way Wagamese pursues his story: biding his time, never rushing, calibrating each word so carefully that he too never seems to waste a shot. But he isn't after the kill. Rather, it's something more complicated - finding a way to honor or at least acknowledge a life ill-lived as it enters its final bitter days. Frank's father, Eldon, escaped a hardscrabble childhood in mountainous western Canada by enlisting to fight in the Korean War. Shattered by what happened there, he spent the subsequent decades falling in and out of work, and in and out of different lovers' arms, with the help - and relentless harm - of alcohol. Hope briefly flared in the form of a beautiful Indian woman. Frank was the result. But then a tragedy occurred, for which Eldon could never forgive himself. Sixteen years on, however, it's Frank's forgiveness Eldon seeks. Ruined by drink, Eldon knows he's dying, and he wants his son to take him into the wilderness so that he can be buried in the "warrior way." Will Frank do it? Eldon long ago entrusted the care of his son to a farmer who tends a lonely homestead outside town. (The taciturn farmer, incongruously named Bunky, fortunately goes by "the old man" for most of the book.) School and Frank have never gotten along. He has "no mind for books," and his classmates ostracize him: "He was the only Indian kid and they didn't trust him. He didn't hold out much trust for them either. They were mostly town kids who'd never gutted a deer or cut a dying heifer out of a tangle of barbed wire." Frank knows (and shows) how to do all this and more, including how to stare down a bear. More fascinating, and perhaps more provocative, it's Bunky, Frank's white foster father, who teaches the boy Indian customs. After Frank kills his first deer, the old man dips his fingers in the deer's blood and smears some on Frank's face, "a pair of lines ... on each of his cheeks and another on his chin and a wavy line across his forehead." When he's done, the old man announces, "Them's your marks," and Frank replies, "Because I'm Indian." "Cuz I'm not," the old man answers. "I can't teach you nothing about bein' who you are....All's I can do is show you to be a good person. A good man." But over the course of the book, Wagamese slyly scuffs the idea of what, or who, a good man is. Frank agrees to his father's request, and as they journey deep into the mountains, Eldon tells story after story, a mixture of confession and family lore. And Frank performs feat after feat, ably navigating the wilderness as his father's health grows ever more precarious. And here's Wagamese's feat. Though death saturates these pages, not a word here is lugubrious. Though revelations abound, there are no cheap surprises. "Plain says it plain around here," the old man cautions Eldon at one point. And yet there's nothing plain about this plainspoken book. LIAM CALLANAN is the author of the novels "The Cloud Atlas" and "All Saints." His latest book is "Listen and Other Stories."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 10, 2015]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Canadian author and memoirist Wagamese (Indian Horse) has penned a complex, rugged, and moving father-son novel. Franklin Starlight, a 16-year-old Ojibway Indian, is summoned to the Canadian mill town of Parson's Gap by his alcoholic father, Eldon Starlight, to discuss an important matter. Franklin goes reluctantly, since he has a dysfunctional and distant relationship with his dad. (Franklin was raised by a rancher identified only as "the old man.") Eldon persuades Franklin to take him on a 40-mile journey to an isolated ridge to die (he suffers from a cirrhotic liver) so that he can be buried "in the warrior way." Wagamese deftly weaves in the backstory as Eldon, racked with heartache and horror, relates different episodes from his past (when he's lucid enough). Initially, Franklin is unsympathetic to his father's plight, which seems to be caused by a lifetime of boozing and womanizing. However, as Eldon tells his tales, including that of his harrowing ordeal in the Korean War, which precipitated his chronic drinking, Franklin comes to see his father in a new light. Wagamese's muscular prose and spare tone complement this gem of a narrative, which examines the bond between father and son. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
"Got raised to speak my peace and ask direct," says Franklin Starlight, and the same must be true of award-winning Canadian author Wagamese (Him Standing), whose latest novel unfolds in still, piercing language. A self-contained 16-year-old of mixed Ojibway and Scots descent, Franklin has gone looking for the father who abandoned him as a babe and is now dying of alcohol abuse. His father wants to be taken someplace special to die-"the only place I felt like I belonged"-and as they ride into the mountains he tells a sometimes harrowing story that brings them both peace. VERDICT A soothingly moving novel of rapprochement and family roots for all readers. (c) Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Wagamese (Dream Wheels, 2006, etc.) sends young Franklin Starlight on a "medicine walk," a journey of knowing, in this story about the nature of manhood. Franklin's been called to western Canada's lumber-mill town of Parson's Gap by his father, Eldon, who has lived "a life with benchmarks that only ever set out the boundaries of pain and loss, woe and regret, nothing to bring him comfort in his last days." Eldon's dying. He wants Franklin to carry him into the mountains to "a ridgesitt[ing] above a narrow valley with a high range behind it," a place Eldon once found peace. "I need you to bury me facing east...[s]itting up in the warrior way." His father ever absent, Franklin was raised by an old man with an unexplained connection to Eldon, a farmer who cherished him and taught him to cherish the land-centered ways of Franklin's Ojibway and Cree people. Franklin is only 16, "big for his age, rawboned and angulargrown comfortable with aloneness and he bore an economy with words that was blunt, direct." Wagamese is a keen observer, sketching places ("stars in the thick purple swaddle of the sky") or people ("He leaned when he walked, canted at a hard angle to the right as though gravity worked with different properties on him") elegantly, economically, all while gracefully employing literary insight to deftly dissect blood ties lingering in fractured families. During the trek, Franklin finally learns about his father, "the story of him etched in blood and tears and departures as sudden as the snapping of a bone"his own father dead in WWII; how he nearly killed his mother's abusive boyfriend; his nightmarish Korean War experience; and his broken promises to Franklin's mother. A powerful novel of hard men in hard country reminiscent of Jim Harrison's Legends of the Fall. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
