Book of the Month - The Orenda by Joseph Boyden

Here's a little book blurb I wrote recently. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is presenting a series called Canada Reads in which five notable personalities are chosen to each offer a book which which might help change Canada. The book mentioned below is one of them. I just finished it. It was a powerful experience. Will it help change Canada? I don't know but I think it is an amazing book.

The Orenda – Joseph Boyden. Hamish Hamilton, Canada, 2013.  490 pages. 

The Orenda is Joseph Boyden’s latest novel, part of a loose three-part trilogy including Three Day Road and Through Black Spruce. The Orenda, Huron for ‘lifeforce’, is set in the early years of the French settlement of Canada and chronicles a fictional encounter between the native peoples and the French Jesuits sent to establish a mission in the New World.  Three main characters illuminate the relationships and conflicts between people groups – Bird, chief of the Huron(Wendat) people, Snow Falls, the Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) girl kidnapped as act of  vengeance, and Christophe, a French Jesuit priest who together with two fellow ‘crows’ (called that because of their long flapping cloaks) is at the vanguard of the French colonial conquest of the New World in North America. Based loosely on the missionary work and martyrdom of Jean de Brebeuf in 1649, this novel is an imaginative, brutal and deeply human book all in one.

The book is an imaginative work of art. Boyden’s wonderful use of language and style conveys the very different worlds of both the Huron and the Jesuits. Each of these peoples have their own worldview and see the other as both dangerous and admirable. The Orenda is brutal. Western human sensibilities are assaulted in the clash between the Huron and Iroquois peoples. The struggle for supremacy, customs and beliefs about the afterlife are the backdrop to horrific tortures and slow deaths perpetrated on the losing side after battle in order to gain the strength and valour of those selected to undergo the ‘caress’ of the victors. "Brutal" also are the effects of the “sickness” most likely brought by the French from Europe, which decimate the Huron villages, rendering them nearly defenseless against the Iroquois. Finally, The Orenda exhibits a deep humanity. Though the worlds of the Huron, the French and the Jesuits are so different, there are the common human traits of love, joy and respect, sometimes between the different, clashing cultures but certainly within their own.

My own personal interests focussed on the different spiritualities at work in the novel. The French Jesuit and the Huron appear as two solitudes unable to really understand each other. Their commonalities are birthed in the human connections made in the heat of tremendous stress and suffering. The Jesuits are at first tolerated because the Huron know that they are the first of many come to stay in their land. The Huron are targeted because of the powerful spiritual drive of the Jesuits to save souls from eternal torment. The Jesuits come to admire the Huron people for many reasons, not least for the respect they show to their dead, carrying their remains from place to place as they move their settlements. The Feast of the Dead, the function of dreams, the guidance and healing of spirits evoke in varying degrees respect and bewilderment from the Jesuits. The commitment of the Jesuits, their bravery and sheer doggedness in placing themselves completely at the mercy of an unknown people in learning their language, living with them, refusing to give up their mission in the face of little overt reward and then remaining with them in the face of certain death wins the grudging respect from the Huron. 

Was there ever understanding? Can there ever be acceptance? Can these two solitudes ever be bridged? The question of the significance of what happened following those ground-breaking opening moments of the European invasion of North America is still being answered today. Nominated as one of the books in CBC’s “Canada Reads 2014” series, The Orenda is a powerful attempt to understand Canada’s past. I think it helps.