north york, toronto; three day road

Joseph Boyden's Three Day Road bears the potentially dubious distinction of being selected for both Canada Reads! and its local-to-a-faculty offshoot, FES Reads! I jest, mostly, about the dubiousness; the FES offshoot was a stimulating way of incorporating the importance of reading literature into a department that, while remarkably interdisciplinary, is still heavily populated by aspiring planners. Further, the specific texts chosen showed an interesting imagination of "the role that fiction writing can play in advancing our understanding and skills as environmental researchers," as described in the event outline. I'm inspired to read the rest and expand on this imagination in the future, if I can retain a sense of what everyone was saying!

The panelists, faculty and a graduate student representative, chose the title Boyden, Anne Michaels's The Winter Vault, Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, and Daniel Suarez's Freedom^(TM), to compete, and the process seemed an exercise in theatrics—as it should be, though the audience could have been a bit more energized in its catcalls. Boyden was defended primarily as full of action, which description all three non-Michaels panelists deliberately contrasted against The Winter Vault. But the tale's treatment of First Nations issues was also foregrounded, and its distinctly Canadian WWI battles, as well as a brisk narrative pace and resonant vocabulary.

I am also in a course taught by the day's conceptualizer and facilitator, Dr. Cate Sandilands, where this text is assigned (and, indeed, we were due to discuss it the following week), so I found it a fascinating debate. I hadn't read through yet, and found when reading the text in the wake of this discussion that I was expecting more from it, at least in the first half. Not that I was disappointed, per se, but as I rather enjoy Michaels, who made it to second place, I was inclined to assimilate the two rather more than I should have—which perhaps demonstrates just how topical the text really is for me.

Once I had drifted away from the impressions I'd received in FES Reads!, I found myself struck by Boyden's repetition of words, particularly the colour red. Indeed, I kept mentally comparing it to my (admittedly rather hazy, as I read it in the first year of my undergrad) recollection of Timothy Findley's The Wars. This comparison was fostered by both texts' complicated relationship with horses, and in what I would argue are similar ways. Findley's descriptions of red are multifoliate, using a wide range of Anglo-specific terms for the different reds of the battlefield. The section on horses, too, is very tightly bound to the subjective experience of the protagonist, whose relationship is, though not Schaeffer-complicated, still quite tangled and extremely personal. Red for Boyden, though, is consistently left in this three-letter word that calls to mind not only poppies and bloodshed, but also the outside racialization of the Cree protagonist. This red is described in myriad ways, but retains its complicated universalization, adding to the alienness of the English language for Xavier and to the enforced familiarity with his displaced landscapes. Horses are an essential part of these landscapes, as he and Elijah wryly observe that they will likely be mistaken by visual association for Plains Cree and expected to ride.

So, in the end I have to agree that this text is a great selection for both Canada and FES, even if it is initially useful in self-confrontation.