Barkskins
When I picked up Barkskins (2016) by Annie Proulx, I anticipated a well-crafted novel, as one might when reading prize-winning authors (she has won a Pulitzer, a National Book Award, a PEN/Faulkner Award, and more). As for content, I expected a book about trees. And trees there most certainly are, growing among its pages (although not in the Richard Powers’ The Overstory sort of way); trees are not characters and the tree-inspired figurative constructs with which Proulx crafts her novel differ greatly from Powers’. What I found was something more than trees but certainly relating to them both as a subject and a metaphor. Proulx’s multi-generational story spans the course three and half centuries. In that sense, it is tree-like; many arboreal species live much longer than that. Spread over so much time, this hefty novel (it exceeds 700 pages) comes to life with a large cast of characters, so large that the family trees at the book’s end are useful, even necessary. At the heart of all their stories is a familial link to trees. That connection to trees metamorphizes from wood cutters to timber barons, foresters, and botanists as the centuries pass. This novel, then, a human story with trees and bloodlines at its center. In the end, Barkskins itself becomes a tree of sorts with each generation, each individual, providing new growth and branches.
The novel begins with the story of two poor young men who make their way to New France (what will become northeastern Canada) in the late seventeenth century. Charles Duquet and René Sel debark (see what I did there) the same boat and find themselves indentured for three years to the same feudal lord, albeit in the backwoods of the New World in 1693. Just as these young men’s lives before the cross-Atlantic voyage differed greatly, so too their life paths quickly diverge in the wilds of New France. If the notion to emigrate to North America is the seed of the story, then two trunks emerge from that seed in these characters. Their stories interweave with the expansive, seemingly endless forests of the New World (focusing on Maine and northeastern Canada) and with the stories of its indigenous people, particularly those of the Mi’kmaq tribe. Charles Duquet, who fled the streets of Paris, while René Sel left after his brother’s premature death; René’s family had a tie to forests in the Old Country. Charles, then, represents the urban youth who aspires to wealth and prestige (he goes so far as to change his surname to Anglo-friendly Duke in time), while René embodies the rural, at home in the wilds of untamed forests. As such their motivations lead them in different directions and their descendants’ lives are equally different (except, the reader will see, when they are not); after all, every character’s story emerges from that singular seed.
In Barkskins Proulx unravels the ways that families often demonstrate a propensity to specific labor, generation after generation. As I drew nearer to the book’s conclusion, I found myself considering that funny habit of history repeating itself within families: the way that children often find themselves called to similar work as their foremothers and fathers. In the case of Barkskins, that work is forest-based, both as laborers, businesspeople, and ultimately scientists. As the generations pass on, and the narrative draws closer to present day, Proulx’s novel pinpoints the tension between the love of forests and the destruction inherent to all extractive industries. Humans, Barkskins illustrates, spent centuries bewildered at the forest riches of many continents on the one hand, and voraciously destroying those very spaces in a matter of mere decades.
Suffice to say, Barkskins is as rich a novel as it thick. It leaves the reader contemplating historical moments, realities, and larger concepts. It transports the reader to the wild forests of North America, the seventeenth-century trade port of Guangzhou, China, New Zealand’s great kauri forests, and the astounding biodiversity of the Amazon basin. As the story develops, all in a chronological order more or less, characters spend time in cities in China, Europe, and the United States. In these ways it is historical fiction that takes its reader far beyond the setting of her reading chair, up to the (near) present moment. Along the voyage, through time and place and generations, Barkskins plants plenty of seeds in the reader’s mind; seeds that will likely sprout, surface, and stretch ever upward, branching in places, for many years to come.
Bibliography:
Proulx, Annie. Barkskins. Simon & Schuster, 2016.
A Few Great Quotes:
“For a moment he was frightened; if miles of forest could be removed so quickly by a few men with axes, was the forest then as vulnerable as beaver? No, the forest returned with vigor, resprouted from cut stumps, cast seeds, sent out mother roots from which new trees grew. There forests could not disappear. In New France they were vast and eternal” (118).
“The decision began a welding of their lives and work as they angled north through the forest, leaving behind them a world of chopped and broken trees, woodland changed to cornfields and pasture. They yearned to go to a place where the trees still stood thick and wild” (312).
“When he came on a secluded stand of kauri, their great grey trunks like monster elephant legs, he touched bark, looked up into the bunched limbs at the tops of the sheer and monstrous stems. He imagined he felt the tree flinch and drew back his hand” (427).
“They accept the natural order of the world. And although they choke in the fumes of the city they do not make a connection with the purer air in the forest. ‘Why is the air clean and fresh near the forest but not in the city?’ one can ask. The answer is ‘Because Got made it thus.’ So extensive are the forest here that Americans cannot see an end to them. Therefore, they have no interest in preserving them” (480).
“[I]n Europe people consider the past and the future with greater seriousness. We have been managing forests for centuries and it is an ingrained habit to consider the future. Americans have no sense of years beyond three—last year, this year, and next year. I suppose I keep to my old ways, I like to know that there will be a forest when I am gone” (553).
“I had ideas and feelings similar to yours when I was young but over the years I learned that the entrepreneurial spirit of this country could not be dampened. We can’t be wild animals. We are humans. We live in a world that is a certain way and forests must adapt to the overwhelming tide of men with axes, not the reverse. I came to believe that planting trees was a kind of forest continuation, not perfect but better than stumpland” (645).
