- © 2007 Canadian Medical Association or its licensors
Consumption Kevin Patterson, Random House Canada; 2006; 400 pp $32.95 ISBN 0–679–31437–7
Consumption, the debut novel by physician and award-winning writer Kevin Patterson, begins with the statement “Storms are sex.” The book prominently features both of these phenomena, opening with the former and closing with the latter, within a fascinating set of characters and events in the Canadian Arctic.
Consumption addresses the convergence of northern and southern cultures in Canada and the effects of this interaction. Victoria, an Inuit girl aged 10, is sent from Rankin Inlet to a sanatorium in southern Canada to receive treatment for tuberculosis in 1962. She returns home 6 years later to find a family and community to which she no can longer connect. There, she meets and marries John Robertson, a Kablunauk (southerner) sent north by the Hudson's Bay Company to manage the town store. The challenges faced by them, their children and the community during a period of rapid transition in the north constitute this epic novel.
Patterson, a physician serving Rankin Inlet and other communities of Nunavut with the University of Manitoba's Northern Medical Unit, plainly knows that of which he writes. Descriptions of the people, history and geography of the Arctic are rendered in precise and compelling prose, while the frequent use of medical terminology and Inuktitut phrases wraps sentences tightly around subjects rather than simply adorning the page.
Consumption is a relentlessly moving novel, with skillfully realized characters moving through each other's lives in scenarios of passion, deceit, tenderness and violence. The hallmark of the book, however, is perhaps Patterson's aptitude for breathtakingly immersive description, which serves to establish the sheer natural force of the Arctic tundra, not so much a setting as a capricious (and often lethal) character. Patterson adeptly attunes the reader's senses to winds “slashing with icy ire” under a sky that is “riotously purple and orange” with “clouds like steel wool,” while passages speaking to the finer points of hunting and consuming tuktu and muqtuq (caribou and whale) bring the prose to bear on the olfactory senses.
As much (and as appropriately) as Patterson is romantic with respect to the setting of his novel, he is keenly incisive and at times cynical with regard to its inhabitants. Wry portrayals of the physicians (“a succession of odd-tempered men drawn by the isolation and potential for ego indulgence”) and police officers (“indoctrinated by American police dramas”) of the community leave the fine marks of a narrator who is passionate but not idealistic about the region and its history.
Not surprisingly, then, the novel is able to explore the complexities of its constituent conflicts without casting opinion upon the players. Throughout the book, marital infidelity, the arrival of a disruptive mining project and medical tragedy at the hands of Keith Balthazar, the kindhearted-if-semicompetent town doctor, are presented in a manner that facilitates deliberation without directing judgment. Thus, on one hand, Patterson realistically presents difficult questions without offering simple answers. On the other hand, however, this tendency to leave thoughtfully developed problems hanging occasionally results in what reads as hasty efforts to tie them up in the closing acts.
The story of Amanda, Balthazar's teenaged niece, growing up in a southern suburb and contending with the attendant issues of sex, drugs and domestic conflict, is pitch-perfect and a clever counterpoint to the lives of her northern counterparts. However, her character, defined largely through letters to Balthazar, functions as little more than an accessory to the narrative, adding little to what the reader knows of Balthazar and less still to the novel as a whole, which is otherwise remarkably cohesive.
The universal themes of this novel build magnificently upon the details of its hostile setting. Consumption represents the realization of Patterson's formidable talent, and the terrain mapped by this ambitious work will stand as a lasting contribution to the Canadian literary landscape.