"An elaborate tale of family and the paths people take to understanding." --Seattle Times "[This] mix of well-researched history and contemporary fiction makes for a fine, sad read." --Minneapolis Star Tribune "Hauntingly honest and emotionally resonant." --Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Gregory Spatz's prose is as clean and sparkling as a new fall of snow." --JANET FITCH, author of White Oleander and Paint it Black "At its heart Inukshuk is about family. But Spatz has transfigured this beautifully told, wise story with history and myth, poetry and magic into something rarer, stranger and altogether amazing. A book that points unerringly true north." --KAREN JOY FOWLER, author of The Jane Austen Book Club and Wit's End John Franklin has moved his fifteen-year-old son to the remote northern Canadian town of Houndstitch to make a new life together after his wife, Thomas' mother, left them. Mourning her disappearance, John, a high school English teacher, writes poetry and escapes into an affair, while Thomas withdraws into a fantasy recreation of the infamous Victorian-era arctic expedition led by British explorer Sir John Franklin.
With teenage bravado, Thomas gives himself scurvy so that he can sympathize with the characters in the film of his mind--and is almost lost himself. While told over the course of only a few days, this gripping tale slips through time, powerfully evoking a modern family in distress and the legendary "Franklin's Lost Expedition" crew's descent into despair, madness, and cannibalism aboard the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror on the Arctic tundra. Gregory Spatz is the author of the novels Inukshuk, Fiddler's Dream, and No One But Us, and the short fiction collections Wonderful Tricks and Half as Happy. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and recipient of a Washington State Book Award, he teaches at Eastern Washington University in Spokane and plays the fiddle and tours with Mighty Squirrel and the internationally acclaimed bluegrass band John Reischman and The Jaybirds.
Inukshuk is a book that is worth reading. On the surface it is a story of teenage angst - a son (Thomas) trying to become the person he wants to be, living with his teacher father (John Franklin), who is coming to terms with separation from his wife and life in a new community. But the book also contains a parallel story from real life of the ill-fated Franklin expedition to find the North-West Passage through the Arctic.
Thomas believes that he is directly descended from the historical Franklin, and in his mind and his notebooks he is constructing the story as a movie. He also wants to feel he is part of the story, so he is experimentally trying to give himself scurvy. Through food deprivation and some illicit drug-taking he has hallucinations of some of the Franklin crew.
The book is well written and keeps moving at a regular space, weaving together the stories of the main characters from today with the stories of those from the past. The writing is very descriptive and you can almost feel the chill of the arctic and the pain and despair of the ill-fated sailors, being drawn into the dark depths of scurvy, starvation and cannibalism.
It's not a long book and there are no wasted words. The ending was good, in that the reader is left with a sense of wondering what comes next, but also knowing that, in some sense, there is the feeling that things will work out well for the main characters.
It was the parallel story of the Franklin expedition that drew me into this book because over the years I have had a fascination with this story. I grew up in Orkney, the birthplace of John Rae, who discovered the fate of the Franklin expedition. Unfortunately, he never received the recognition he should have in his lifetime, because of some of the suggestions he made following his discovery. Inukshuk has inspired me to go back to some of those stories and to read up more on this fascinating chapter of history.
I'd heartily recommend this book. If nothing else it is a well-written story, but, as I have written, it is a lot more and is a great weaving together of history and fiction.
