Medicine Walk

Starred review from March 9, 2015
Canadian author and memoirist Wagamese (Indian Horse) has penned a complex, rugged, and moving father-son novel. Franklin Starlight, a 16-year-old Ojibway Indian, is summoned to the Canadian mill town of Parson’s Gap by his alcoholic father, Eldon Starlight, to discuss an important matter. Franklin goes reluctantly, since he has a dysfunctional and distant relationship with his dad. (Franklin was raised by a rancher identified only as “the old man.”) Eldon persuades Franklin to take him on a 40-mile journey to an isolated ridge to die (he suffers from a cirrhotic liver) so that he can be buried “in the warrior way.” Wagamese deftly weaves in the backstory as Eldon, racked with heartache and horror, relates different episodes from his past (when he’s lucid enough). Initially, Franklin is unsympathetic to his father’s plight, which seems to be caused by a lifetime of boozing and womanizing. However, as Eldon tells his tales, including that of his harrowing ordeal in the Korean War, which precipitated his chronic drinking, Franklin comes to see his father in a new light. Wagamese’s muscular prose and spare tone complement this gem of a narrative, which examines the bond between father and son.

February 1, 2015
Wagamese (Dream Wheels, 2006, etc.) sends young Franklin Starlight on a "medicine walk," a journey of knowing, in this story about the nature of manhood. Franklin's been called to western Canada's lumber-mill town of Parson's Gap by his father, Eldon, who has lived "a life with benchmarks that only ever set out the boundaries of pain and loss, woe and regret, nothing to bring him comfort in his last days." Eldon's dying. He wants Franklin to carry him into the mountains to "a ridge...sitt[ing] above a narrow valley with a high range behind it," a place Eldon once found peace. "I need you to bury me facing east...[s]itting up in the warrior way." His father ever absent, Franklin was raised by an old man with an unexplained connection to Eldon, a farmer who cherished him and taught him to cherish the land-centered ways of Franklin's Ojibway and Cree people. Franklin is only 16, "big for his age, rawboned and angular...grown comfortable with aloneness and he bore an economy with words that was blunt, direct." Wagamese is a keen observer, sketching places ("stars in the thick purple swaddle of the sky") or people ("He leaned when he walked, canted at a hard angle to the right as though gravity worked with different properties on him") elegantly, economically, all while gracefully employing literary insight to deftly dissect blood ties lingering in fractured families. During the trek, Franklin finally learns about his father, "the story of him etched in blood and tears and departures as sudden as the snapping of a bone"-his own father dead in WWII; how he nearly killed his mother's abusive boyfriend; his nightmarish Korean War experience; and his broken promises to Franklin's mother. A powerful novel of hard men in hard country reminiscent of Jim Harrison's Legends of the Fall.

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March 1, 2015

"Got raised to speak my peace and ask direct," says Franklin Starlight, and the same must be true of award-winning Canadian author Wagamese (Him Standing), whose latest novel unfolds in still, piercing language. A self-contained 16-year-old of mixed Ojibway and Scots descent, Franklin has gone looking for the father who abandoned him as a babe and is now dying of alcohol abuse. His father wants to be taken someplace special to die--"the only place I felt like I belonged"--and as they ride into the mountains he tells a sometimes harrowing story that brings them both peace. VERDICT A soothingly moving novel of rapprochement and family roots for all readers.

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