Roger Brunyate's Reviews > Afterlands

Displaced Persons

The book opens with a simple image of surprising potency: a piano recital in Connecticut in 1876 at which a ten-year-old girl plays some pieces by Mendelssohn. The girl, known as Punnie, is the daughter of an Inuit couple (here called Esquimaux, in nineteenth-century fashion) who have been taken to England as curiosities, presented to Queen Victoria, and most recently brought back to the Arctic as members of a near-fatal expedition in which a group of nineteen starving people marooned on an ice-floe drifted for six and a half months before being rescued. The de facto leader of that group, Lt. George Tyson, has written a book about their ordeal and is popular as a lecturer. Punnie is thus a local celebrity, but the skills which the audience applauds are not those of her native culture. The theme of displacement sounds throughout Steven Heighton's magnificent book as a powerful undertow.

Much of the novel is based on fact. In the central section, a 200-page description of the ordeal on the ice, Heighton quotes long excerpts from Tyson's actual book. But his main focus is on another character, a German immigrant named Roland Kruger, who served as second mate on the expedition. Once a minor celebrity also, Kruger becomes a pariah after the publication of Tyson's book, which portrays him as the villain of the piece, stealing from their precious stores, fomenting the men to near mutiny, and having inappropriate relations with Tukulito, Punnie's mother. But by skillfully contrasting excerpts from Tyson's journals with his published account, and setting both against his own storytelling, Heighton creates a shifting texture of overlapping narratives in which sympathies will change and change again.

Though led by an American, the expedition is peopled by expatriates: four Germans, a German-Russian, an Englishman, a Swede, a Dane, a Negro cook, four adult Esquimaux, and several children. It is chilling to see how, once the normal lines of authority break down, the men revert to their former nationalism, dominated by the German contingent (though not including Kruger), and rehearsing the history of the next seventy years in miniature. But eventually conditions on the rapidly-shrinking ice-floe take precedence over everything, and the moral lines shift again in the light of several striking acts of individual heroism.

Despite Heighton's excellent powers of description, this middle part can be tough going. But the most original part of the book is its extended final section, Afterlands, which traces the later story of Tyson, Tukulito, and especially Kruger, who moves as far away from the Arctic as possible, to live among the Sina Indians in the Western Sierra Madre of Mexico. Here, the theme of displacement takes on a different meaning as he (himself an emigrant from two countries in succession) encounters a kind of ethnic cleansing, as forces loyal to the central government or commercial interests attempt to exterminate the indigenous people from their lands. Kruger will find reserves of moral heroism that he did not know he had, and reach a kind of personal redemption. The ending of the book is as satisfying as it is sad.

Though written earlier, Afterlands has many similarities to Richard Flanagan's Wanting, which also links a story about arctic exploration to another about an aboriginal girl (in this case Tasmanian) brought to London as a curiosity. I have long recognized the theme of displacement as a major concern in Australian literature—both the displacement of the emigrants making a start in a new land, and the tragedy of the native inhabitants whom they displaced—so it is not surprising to see it in Canadian writing as well. It gives the literature of both countries a profound moral sensibility. I am also in awe of the many Canadian novelists who are also poets*—Michael Ondaatje, Anne Michaels, and Jane Urquhart also come to mind—and who not only write beautiful prose, but find in poetic structures new ways to organize a novel. This book by Steven Heighton is as allusive and thought-provoking as they come.

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*See my review of Heighton's recent poetry collection, The Waking Comes Late.