Sparrow

"Sure. I just finished reading this one, and I thought it was fantastic. It’s more of a depiction of a cultural and a historical moment via characters than it is a specific event. The protagonist never really gets a firm name; he’s a slave boy in a brothel, and he’s named after various tasks that he performs, as are the other slaves. Broadly speaking, you could call it a coming-of-age story. It’s really gorgeous and engrossing, and you can smell and feel the setting, a city on the Iberian peninsula in the dying days of the Roman Empire. Beautiful sentences just come one after another, effortlessly. And it’s also interesting because it flies in the face of a piece of conventional writing advice, which is to make your characters active, or else you’ll bore your readers. This character never really has any agency—he’s a slave. He doesn’t make any decisions for himself. But it’s still such a compelling story and such a compelling character, and I’m sure this book will be considered a classic in a few years from now. Lots of people have responded to it like I have. And yet, the protagonist is really passive! So it’s interesting— Sparrow shows how you can mess around with narrative orthodoxy, take something out but replace it with so much more. It’s a great book. I really enjoyed it. Yes. And there’s a really interesting part in this book, a discussion between the cook, Focaria, which is Latin for “cook,” and this slave boy, whose name at this stage is Pusus, which is Latin for “boy.” She explains to him the ways of the world, particularly why people hit them. She goes all the way up the hierarchy, starting off with the Pope. He hits somebody, and then that person hits somebody lower than them, and off they go to hit somebody lower still, and on and on until eventually someone hits Focaria, after which she hits Pusus. She’s like, “It’s just hitting all the way down,” like that turtles-all-the-way-down expression. Everyone’s squirming under some higher power, with the hierarchy seemingly infinite as far as slaves are concerned. Yes, I had a lot of problems. The Voyageur was initially supposed to be published by a small Canadian press. About a year into the process, George Floyd was murdered. Around the same time, in Canada, there was sonar confirmation of a lot of unmarked graves around former residential school sites. The atmosphere was really charged. My publisher had always wanted to use a sensitivity reader, but initially, they said it was just to confirm cultural accuracy. For example, when I have Miigwan refer to his manitou and to Gitche Manitou—the publisher said they wanted to make sure I had stuff like that right. I did too. But as the political atmosphere grew more intense, the editing got more and more difficult, with the publisher picking at almost everything, and when I would push back, they said we’d have to wait to see what the sensitivity reader thought, a person they hadn’t even recruited yet after almost a year. The whole thing just got more and more ridiculous, and when they finally brought in not one but two readers, both of whom were completely anonymous—I still don’t know their names—the readers couldn’t discern characterization from authorial voice, basically ascribing the traits of villainous characters to me personally. They kept on getting the characters’ races confused, and they made numerous factual errors, like saying the Algonquin are not a specific people. They even made inaccurate and kind of insulting judgments about aspects of my own identity. “As the political atmosphere grew more intense, the editing got more and more difficult” And they hated Miigwan, who’s Odawa, part of the broader Anishinaabe people. They didn’t have anything to say about cultural accuracy, nothing about manitous or Gitche Manitou or anything like that. One of the readers self-identified as Metis, even though the publisher told me the readers would be Anishinaabe, so because indigenous cultures are pretty different, I guess that reader just didn’t know whether I was being accurate or not. I didn’t get to see the other reader’s notes, and I don’t know what culture they come from. Either way, what bothered both of them was the Miigwan has moral complexity. He’s caught between his traditional culture and Western capitalism, and to survive, he plays fast and loose with other characters’ perceptions. Everybody in the book is stuck under this same capitalistic force and trying to gain agency within it however they can. Miigwan is just acting out the same theme. And we see stuff like that today: groups stuck between their traditions and global capitalism. They sometimes have to make compromises to survive. I was trying to make Miigwan a crystallisation of that—but the readers thought the character was appalling and super offensive. They said he couldn’t be morally complicated, only white characters could be. Basically, I couldn’t write an indigenous character unless he was a moral role model, the kind of character you might find in children’s fiction. The publisher told me it was not a time for subtlety, actually said that, and then dropped the book. If I knew all that was coming in the first place, I would’ve declined the deal. The whole process and its fallout took years out my career."