Crucial connections

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 25/08/2018 (2935 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Richard Wagamese died last year at the age of 61. He was still young, but not so young that he missed beginning to experience a level of recognition achieved by few authors. The film adaptation of his novel Indian Horse premièred at Sundance six months after his passing, and its theatrical release was just this past spring.

That same novel, about a residential school survivor poised to become a once-in-a-generation hockey star, began to raise the Ojibwe author’s profile a few years earlier, when it started being nominated for awards and best-of lists, winning over critics after its 2012 publication. But the editors of McClelland & Stewart think Starlight will prove to be his greatest work.

They may be right. The prose has the direct yet immersive quality of Ernest Hemingway, perhaps because Wagamese, too, started in journalism. The character of Frank Starlight, reflective but taciturn, suits a spare style, yet his still surface hints at unseen depths, and there’s a poetry in what is left unsaid.

The story of Frank Starlight, like the very different story of Saul Indian Horse before him, draws on a personal history and philosophy that touches on the author’s own at least at a few points.

Starlight is Indigenous but was raised mostly by his white adoptive father. He “(doesn’t) know about Indian stuff,” but did learn to live, breathe and work the land in a way that connects him to the man that raised him and the deepest part of himself.

As an adult, Wagamese himself made an active effort to reclaim the First Nation teachings that had been denied him his entire life, to connect with the blood kin he never knew, but his protagonist does not. Instead, Starlight identifies himself as a community member, a friend, a farmer and son of a farmer and a cousin to the wild creatures.

He is asked whether his amazing connection to the backcountry — the ability to run with wolves and tame the spirit of a half-broke horse — is “some kind of ‘Injun thing.’” Indeed, it would be easy to go all mystical and invoke racial memory or the “magic Indian” trope. But Wagamese makes a different point: connection to the land we live on is the birthright of the entire human species, a healing medicine for any who seek it.

To this end, when a badly abused woman and her traumatized daughter come crashing into Starlight’s life, clearly running from something, he offers the two of them the same healing, opening his own heart a little wider in the process.

Sadly, Wagamese died before completely finishing the novel, and his original text ends just before the climactic chapters.

Rather than enlist someone else to complete the story, the publishers opted to let the work stand just as it is: the main narrative, about 85 per cent complete, some story notes summarizing what the author’s intentions seem to have been for the last 40 or so pages, and excerpts of two related works.

The first of these is a scene from an unpublished novella that provided somewhat of a road map for the book, the same scene he was expected to adapt as the final scene of the completed novel.

The second is an essay that illuminates how Wagamese’s personal experiences connect to the themes of the unfinished novel.

Posthumously published works, especially incomplete or early draft texts, are often of more interest to literary scholars than the general reading public. But Starlight should not be so easily dismissed.

This is an important story to know and to experience, from an artist cut down at the height of his powers. Very likely it, too, will end up on the big screen, complete with ending, perhaps sooner than later.

But readers should not wait that long.

Joel Boyce is a Winnipeg writer and educator.