Book Review
The New World
- Virginia Frances Schwartz (Author)
Initiation. Fitzhenry & Whiteside (purchase at Amazon.ca)
Reviewed by Beverley Haun
The young adult novel Initiation invites the reader in through a title page that states “The New World, Northwest Coast.” Immediately, with this descriptor, the reader is cued to a Eurocentric point of view. The novel fulfils this expectation by fusing a pre-contact Kwakiutl transformation myth of human sacrifice with conflicts rooted in contemporary issues of class, gender, power, and patriarchy, set in a 1440s coastal village. It is told in alternating chapters by three children, as they pass from childhood obedience to adult independence: the village Chief’s male and female twins Nanolatch and Nana, and Nana’s slave, Noh. The highly stylized and descriptive first person narration evokes past times and places, holding the reader at a distance from the emotions normally associated with the themes at play in the text: identity and fulfilment, hero and victim, forbidden love and sacrifice, intense initiation ritual and death. Such distance is welcomed in the face of the bleak existence of the female protagonists in this androcentric world. They are constructed as victims seeking escape. “Success in war depends upon the women at home.” Loveless marriages are arranged for political expedience. Class or captivity determines occupation regardless of desire or talent: weaver, fishwife, or slave. Nana finds herself with a choice between a forced marriage and a sacrificial suicide for her village. Noh cues us to Nana’s fate early on: “I have heard that salmon sometimes travel unknown streams and lose their way, die without spawning far from home. . . . She is just like them.” This morbid vision and its fulfilment is countered by Noh’s memories of her own village life before her capture when her gentle father shared power with her Shaman mother. The novel ends with hope: Nanolatch as the new chief chooses Noh and Noh’s “Way.”
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MLA: Haun, Beverley. The New World. canlit.ca. Canadian Literature, 8 Dec. 2011. Web. 21 May 2013.
This review originally appeared in Canadian Literature #185 (Summer 2005), (Stratton, Compton, Morra, Wylie, Gordon). (pg. 180 - 180)
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