In the British author Paul Carlucci’s first dazzling piece of fiction, The Voyageur, the youthful main character, Alex, wakes to find a deer gawking at him. It’s spring in the year 1831, and Alex is misplaced in the wilderness near the north beaches of Lake Huron. His older partner, Serge, has been recently beaten to demise, leaving Alex entirely isolated. A deer’s appearance hints towards a possible shift in his fortunes.
However, the narrative shortly takes a dark turn; as the deer “huffed, stared at him with tender eyes, he stared back, suddenly part of its skull blasted apart and the sound of a musket filled Alex’s ears”. The scene is an early indication that this narrative detailing colonial Canada has little room for sentimentality; death’s shocking regularity is an overriding theme.
Canada’s vast northern region features prominently in literary history, ranging from Susanna Moodie’s frank Victorian era memoirs outlining a laborious life as a settler in dense forests, to Margaret Atwood’s unsettling depiction in her earlier book Surfacing (1972). The unfathomable and disruptive nature of the north is identified as instrumental in shaping, or potentially unsettling, the national identity.
Carlucci takes this theme and adds further layers of complexity: Alex is a Québécois; the boundary that separates British Canada and the emerging United States is precarious and leaky; the native Canadians are an empowered lot. The Voyageur establishes its credibility by rooting its narrative in historical accuracy: the “voyageurs” were Franco-Canadian traders known for their extensive travels across North America; and the character of Alex is inspired by the distressing real-life story of Alexis St Martin, who was subject to medical experimentation by American physician William Beaumont, while still alive.
Physical torment and its graphic portrayal is a core aspect of this book. The detailed descriptions of the experiments on Alex’s living body are quite graphic, as are the accounts of swarms of blackflies descending onto living and deceased faces, and the horrifying depictions of the brutal damage a bullet or boot can inflict on a human body. The author argues, however, that history often tends to conveniently exclude its tangible realities and repercussions. Acknowledgement of these is always a better approach.