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I’d sell this book to anyone
Book Review
By Derryll White
Harun, Adrianne (2014). A Man Came Out of A Door in the Mountain.
This is Adrianne Harun’s first novel, having previously published a book of short stories. She has a nice, magical perception that puts the reader on Highway 16 travelling west from Prince George into an unknown country – Fraser Lake, Endako, Telkwa – all points on a wriggling line stretching to Prince Rupert and the Pacific Ocean. But also a ‘Highway of Tears’ with as many as 43 missing young women, many of them Native, having vanished along this road.
Harun creates a mythical geography out of senseless tragedy. “You see, here’s a place where a singular story won’t suffice, if one ever could.” She weaves along creeks, canyons and through golden fields of the mind. And always, with the passage and accretion of myth, rumour and religion, the question remains – what shape does evil take and what trail does it travel?
Adrianne Harun walks a fine line here between good and evil, the known and the unknown. Her anchor is a very defined sense of story that keeps her brilliant, magical language just in reach of the reader’s capabilities.
Her geography in this novel is one every small-town B.C. young male and female knows. Fights, a sense of sex, a need to escape – most of all, a need to find and define oneself as other than the town environment one is caught in. As she says: “Inference and interpretation – these are what matter.” Consistently the book has echoes of Terrace, B.C., a tough town and one some are happy to be far from.
This is a very fine book. It took me outside of myself, back in time to things which I chose to let define me. I hadn’t visited there in a long time. I would sell this book to anyone.
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SEEING – Her mother always said no fellow would romance their Ursie without first taking her fishing or shooting. That was the way to true love with their girl. They’d have to see her, her words suggested, not as a mere big-boned girl, a quick shot, but instead as the marvel she was, wither uncanny ability to ignore the rules of this world and transpierce its narrow limits.
DEVIL’S WORK – You’ve heard of this place. The news was all over it for a while. And they’ll be back, Uncle Lud guesses. That’s the thing about places like this. People come here to get lost, but all that means is that they want to do whatever they’d like without anyone interfering, and eventually, someone else is going to get in the way.
EXTREME LANDSCAPE – Dry lightning and willfully stupid campers were in season along with the unusual heat and the tindered grass, but I wasn’t sure that things would have been different if the heat had held off. Then we might have had landslides or tremors or a spate of death-by-bear. You couldn’t live here all these years and not feel as if the mountainside itself had a soul that flared and suffered and must find its own way of exploding.
SNOW WOMAN – When Snow Woman finds you, unless you are the strongest of souls, the most skeptical, or the most protected, the world no longer belongs to you. She has found a particularly easy berth in young Indian men, so eager it seems to flash out of this life into any other. Suicide sounds so desperate; it really does. But following Snow Woman can be damn near noble, irresistible. It is, the rumor goes, an act of pure magic; a disappearing act directed by the devil himself.
STORY – The stories of the dying have nothing to do with dying. They are all about past adventure. An inexpert listener might think the dying man is holding on to the hem of life, desperate to feel its weight and value, to make a kind of peace before moving onward. But the truth is, the dying man is opening a door for the living. You have to find out how to live; that’s his parting advice.
BELIEF – Imagine maps laid upon maps, all translucent, all imperative, soul trails developing, real space, real people.
Light folds and wind buckles in the field that is Uncle Lud’s talk.
Look here, Leo, he says, bending down to caress an insect with mottled wings, a crenulated leaf, a tiny sentient stippled rock whose tin and copper colors deepen with pleasure at his touch.
Despite all evidence to the contrary, I can’t believe he’ll leave us. I can’t believe I won’t find my way to Uncle Lud. Because even now, I know where Lud will be.
In a deep, wide field in a town overlaid on this one. as long as I remember every story, I’ll know just where to find him, and maybe there, too, I’ll find what I believe in.
LIFE – Nobody paying attention. It’s an illusion, of course. We are always watching one another. All of us in our private worlds, peering out as if no one can see us, but we’ve got the front row, you bet.
– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them. When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.
Lotus Books is pleased to sponsor book reviews by Derryll White. If you are interested in a book that Derryll has reviewed you can shop online at http://lotusbooks.ca/, call us at 250-426-3415 or please visit us at 33-10th Ave. S. Cranbrook, and we would be happy to help you find a great read.
