BARKSKINS by ANNIE PROULX (2016)

This is a novel with an agenda; it wants to convince us that it was always and is still a mistake to go around clear-cutting forests and destroying whole environments, whether prompted by plain ignorance of the consequences or by greed for the profits. Proulx takes 713 pages to convey her message. Dr. Seuss got the same message across in 72 pages in The Lorax, plus his book rhymed and had quirky illustrations. Despite the fact that Barkskins carries an important truth, despite the fact that it is a much praised book (although not universally lauded), despite the fact that Proulx is a Pulitzer Prize winning author (The Shipping News), I had to slog my way through. I was tempted to give it up after the first 200 pages.

The plot follows two families from 1693 through 2013, beginning with the arrival in Canada from France of two indentured workers, Rene' Sel and Charles Duquet. Rene' stays to fulfill his contract and becomes a land owner, eventually marrying a Native woman. Charles runs away and becomes a fur trapper and later begins a timber business. Generation after generation, the Duquet descendants (with the family name changed to Duke) grow richer and richer as they exhaust forest after forest, moving from Canada to Maine to North Carolina and even to New Zealand. Meanwhile, the mixed-heritage Sel descendants struggle as their environment is destroyed, ironically often accepting work as tree cutters out of their desperation to survive.

Proulx tells story after story of the lives of the men and women from these two families, with some being given more space to develop than others. The Duke family members are always on the look-out for new ways to make money from the timber business, for new forests to cut. Then they die. The Sel family members are always attempting to remember their past while finding a place for themselves in what has become a white-man's world. Then they die. Time after time, just as I became involved in a character's life story, the author killed him (or her) off. After a couple of hundred pages, she pretty much lost my interest as essentially the same stories were told again and again, with only the names and the details changed.

In my opinion as a reader, a more effective method of imparting a message would be to concentrate on one specific situation and cast of characters rather than to attempt to cover hundreds of years with such a large number of characters that family trees have to be provided to keep track. I believe Proulx lost the effectiveness of her intent in the tedium of her telling.

--------------------------------------------------

In addition to The Lorax, Ron Rash's excellent novel Serena carries the same environmental message and, in addition, tells a fascinating story.