“Indian River” by Jake MacDonald

Indian River, Jake MacDonald’s first novel, opens with its protagonist, Dom Chambrun, crossing the fifty-sixth parallel of latitude into wilderness country in a haze of drunkenness. Since this novel studies the clash of native and white cultures, depicts the ravages on virgin land effected by rapacious and unscrupulous southerners, the hangover serves a symbolic purpose. Before Dom has passed a day north of fifty-six he has become the object of northern contempt and its attendant brutality. As he stands on his first night contemplating the vast and awesome northern heavens, his vigil is interrupted by an Indian enraged that Dom has cast oblique eyes toward his sister. Before he even hears the approach, “Cracked Joe, with all his might, struck Dom on the back of the head with a full Labatt’s Blue. Light exploded brilliantly in Dom’s cranium, and he was unconscious before he hit the ground.”

This opening sequence, with its mixture of the beauteous and the banal, the wondrous and the savage, is typical of a book that should gather considerable praise for honesty and clarity. The author, Jake MacDonald, appears to be working out of immediate experience. His situations carry both conviction and exactitude to time and place, and his evocation of character is accurate. He is especially successful in dramatizing the collision between the indigenous and the new; in showing through Dom white culture’s resolute blindness and the violent consequences that succeed this attitude.

Dom Chambrun is that most conventional of protagonists, the innocent abroad. He has escaped southern society and the clutches of bill-collectors and menacing friends for that one last chance forever proferred by the receding frontier. But, we discover, he has come north motivated by more than the need to slip his past, with its predictable pantry of scorned women, offended parents, and jaded friendships. For Dom has a vision. And not surprisingly for a weary urbanite, he articulates the idyllic dream of the simple life sustained by honest labour in the purity of untouched expanses, where with a dusky native girl, he can settle down to a life of charming rusticity and exotic sex:

As long as he could remember he’d had a dream of disappearing into the far north, marrying an Indian girl and building a log cabin way back in some enchanted valley…that shining hair, that black-eyed, primitive, and unspeakably beautiful face…

The dark native beauty, Elena Thunder, haunts and eludes Dom throughout the novel. The object of his most fervent fantasies, with her dark hair, translucent skin, and pendulous breasts she remains beyond his grasp, but in the secluded fishing lodge where they toil side by side, forever within reach. She is, in fact, tantalizingly, vexatiously present, and one of the frustrating—if psychologically appropriate—aspects of this book is the way MacDonald teases us with the imminent conjunction between Dom and this “dark-haired madonna.”

But that is not to be. Like the north, which she symbolizes, Elena Thunder does not conform to Dom’s fantasies or expectations. He came anticipating what all wide-eyed southerners do: open spaces, an uncluttered lifestyle, a new beginning. Instead he finds a landscape on the verge of ruin, its resources exhausted, its rivers polluted, and its peoples in a state of collapse. The Indian River suffers from decades of pollution. A paper mill has systematically dumped into the river “Acid Red,” a bleaching agent used in finishing paper. And this substance, when mixed with others—especially alcohol-based varieties such as whiskey, beer, and wine—combines to produce traumatic effects in animals. Principal among these is virulent brain damage. To his horror Dom discovers that the north is not a land of refuge but devastation.

He encounters that ruin face-to-face in Cracked Joe, the brother of Elena Thunder, who also works as a guide at the lodge. Dissipated and deranged from the outset, Cracked Joe disintegrates before Dom’s eyes as his drinking provokes the vitiating effects of “acid red” in his body. At the same time as he is dying, so is the lodge where he and Dom work, for southern sportsmen have begun to hear about Indian River and abandon it for more pristine territory further north.

Doom and death cast an uninterrupted shadow over most of this novel. Almost before Dom can formulate a plan to leave the lodge, health inspectors force it to close; before the health officials can get to him, Cracked Joe steals a fisherman’s gun and goes on a rampage; before Dom can persuade Elena to flee further north with him to trap and raise horses, Cracked Joe surprises Dom with a knife. Toward its conclusion Indian River is a fast-paced book which brings its elements to sudden and violent climaxes, perhaps hinting at probable resolutions to the clashes between white and native cultures in our society.

The finale, in which Dom dies cruelly and shockingly at the hands of Cracked Joe, seems unconvincing. It is not that MacDonald has not prepared us for violence, for he has from the earliest moments. And in many respects Dom’s death seems appropriate: the representative of incompetently innocent but exploitative southerners, Dom and his death are justified in the face of the sociological and historical evidence marshalled in the book. But removed from the abstract issue of justice, even poetic justice, the death is clumsy, and even gratuitous. If deaths such as this do occur in actuality they have a very tenuous place in fiction. For fiction requires even more believability than fact, even greater coherence and consistency than real life. Moreover, the death of the protagonist, while perhaps symbolically just, sweeps the novel’s central issues—south/north relations, white/native exploitation—under the fictional rug with his body. It is as if Dom’s death resolves his life, and hence, somehow resolves these issues, and that is first untrue and second unfair to the serious-minded among MacDonald’s audience.

Fortunately, Indian River transcends its conclusion. Among its many pleasures are plain language, a sure pace, and a fine imaginative sympathy for a range of characters. It is especially to MacDonald’s credit that he displays throughout the book a zest for language and the courage to risk new metaphors, a courage regrettably absent in most local writers. At his most winning he pushes the reader into pleased admiration, as in the following example: “Round and round the glassy teeth of the broken window snowflakes whirled, and the snowy breath of the night sighed into the room.” Such passages, and they abound delightfully in this novel, confirm MacDonald as a serious writer and promise much in the future from this beginner. ■

Wayne Tefs is a Winnipeg writer and teacher. An excerpt from his first novel appeared in the winter edition of Arts Manitoba.