Barkskins

"Barkskins begins in 1693 with the arrival of two young Frenchmen in America, and traces the paths of their descendants as they rise and fall across more than three centuries. But while the story is told through the lens of the families, its real subject is the destruction of the forests of North America, and the environmental and human cost of that process, especially for the indigenous peoples, whose lives and culture are shattered by the process. Its depiction of the latter is absolutely unflinching. Rather like Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian , another novel concerned with the destruction of cultures, Barkskins is incredibly violent, and its characters are routinely slaughtered, maimed and tortured. This kind of violence isn’t new in Proulx’s work, but where in her earlier work it occasionally shades into what feels uncomfortably like misanthropy, in Barkskins it becomes a kind of strength, capturing not just the violence of implicit in the colonial process, and later capitalism, but also the indifference of time and history to individual lives, which are swept away over and over again. “ Barkskins captures the violence and indifference to individual lives, which are swept away over and over again” This process allows the novel to focus on the forces underlying the destruction it documents, and the degree to which they can be seen as an inescapable part of our economies and cultures. As one of the characters declares early on, “to be a man is to clear the forest.” The temporal sweep of Barkskins also allows it to break free of a human timescale and glimpse other, larger timescales. This is something you see in a lot of fiction dealing with climate change. At a practical level it probably reflects the difficulties of dramatising the incremental nature of climate change, but I suspect it’s also about something deeper, and reflects a need to get a handle on the geological scale of what is taking place around us. The reality is that as soon as we talk about climate change we’re also almost always talking about time, and to do that we need frameworks that step outside an individual perspective. That decentering of the individual is one you see paralleled elsewhere by a larger decentering of the human and a focus on other ways of being in the world. That’s something you see quite a lot of in British and Irish literature at the moment, both in the rise of a sort of anti-pastoral focused on the disturbance and unsettlement of traditional landscapes, and in novels focused on animals like Sarah Hall’s The Wolf Border and Paula Cocozza’s How To Be Human . In the case of Hall’s book, which centres on a rewilding project intended to reintroduce wolves to northern England, you have a novel that is intensely, almost meditatively aware of the landscape, but in which the wolves themselves are incredibly powerful presences, their wildness both tangible and somehow unknowable. Likewise How To Be Human is haunted – possibly literally – by a fox, and centres on a character who is losing her grip on the human world because of her relationship with it, a process that’s echoed in Sarah Hall’s astonishing short story, ‘Mrs Fox.’ It’s something you also see in Jon McGregor’s fabulous Reservoir 13 . This takes the idea of a landscape unsettled by human violence and tells the story of that landscape over 13 years, eliding the distinction between animal, human and landscape in intriguing ways. But in all of them the movement away from a human perspective makes it possible to break free of our fairly solipsistic (and instrumental) relationship to the natural world and glimpse other ways of understanding it. Yet despite the wrenching violence of the early sections of Barkskins , I actually find the final sections the most affecting. As the novel enters the present day the legacy of the history it depicts becomes inescapable, refracting out through ruined landscapes, poisoned water, cultural loss in ways that are horrifyingly tangible because they are real and present now. But as you reach these sections you also feel the narrative itself foundering, unhinged by grief and the weight of this past. This makes for incredibly confronting reading, but there’s also something weirdly salutary about the way it demands we reckon with the enormity of the catastrophe we have made."