In a world awash with books, Eowyn Ivey’s work is out on its own. Part nature writing, part magical realism, part social commentary, part romance, it draws on a heritage of folklore and the landscape, flora and fauna of Alaska. Ivey’s first novel, The Snow Child, was inspired by a Norwegian folk tale of medieval origin and transposed to 1920s North America. Black Woods Blue Sky owes much to that childhood favourite Beauty and the Beast.
In contemporary meta fashion, a character bearing witness to events muses, “Peculiar how similar they are, the stories about bears … Wild sows taking in abandoned human babies and raising them as their own. Women falling in love with boars. Girls being abducted by bears and giving birth to their children in mountain caves. Russia, Europe, North America, Japan.”
Arthur Neilsen is cursed with a dual existence, sometimes a bear and sometimes a man. As a man, he is short on social niceties, small talk and, as it turns out, foreplay. Ivey gives him animal eyes, an unkempt beard and a deep voice. He speaks as though English is his second language, formal, almost Germanic, with no contractions. If he asks a question it is given as a statement. As a bear, he has little memory of being a man, and vice versa. In this modern retelling, there is no wicked witch who has cast a spell. Ivey leaves the reason outside her narrative, though various of the older characters give recollections of him as a foundling child.
Central is wild-of-spirit Birdie, a single parent working at Wolverine Lodge, who finds Arthur fascinating. To her, he is “like a stuck zipper, an annoying knot she couldn’t walk away from”. She waits tables and works behind the bar, often by necessity leaving her 6-year-old daughter alone in their cabin for the evening shifts. Birdie likes a drink and a snort of cocaine, cigarettes and sex. If she wants someone she doesn’t waste his time or hers, liking “to catch a man off guard, to watch his eyes widen with astonishment”.
Little Emaleen is doted on by Della, who runs the lodge, and adored by various of the regulars. Arthur shows up now and again, away from his off-grid cabin high in the mountains at a place called the North Fork.
Emaleen, too, has her own way of talking, which is cute though it borders on tiresome. She knows, for example, that she could “fall into the river and get swept away and drownded because it was a powerful cold river, and wasn’t ever, ever supposed to go into the woods by herself”. Luckily for her, she is remarkably self-sufficient and blessed with a strong imagination, both useful attributes for what comes later.
When Birdie accepts Arthur’s invitation to go and live with him in total isolation, she takes her little girl with her. If one of the themes is that love can be found in the most surprising circumstances, another is how the demonstration and practice of maternal love can go horribly wrong.
As events unfold, Warren acts as a kind of outside eye, or witness. He is Arthur’s widowed father, a retired lawyer, gentle and thoughtful. He “does not see the world neatly split between perpetrators and victims but rather as a complex interchange of suffering. He had witnessed it again and again, people drawn to the very ones likely to destroy them.” He believes that, “For and bad, we are each bound to our own character.”
The novel is in three parts, the first set during Emaleen’s childhood and the third when she is a young woman. The first two are finely paced, compelling, but the third drags a little from Ivey’s perhaps unnecessary desire to tie off various story lines.
With its strong narrative tension, complex characters, wisdom and whimsy, this is a book many readers will want to devour in a single sitting, much like a bear with a hapless hiker or freshly caught salmon.
Black Woods Blue Sky, by Eowyn Ivy (Hachette, $37.99), is out now.
