Annie Proulx returns with a powerful elegy for lost forests

ANNIE Proulx’s Barkskins is a multi-generational epic that laments the lost forests of North America and lays the blame at white men’s feet.

Annie Proulx’s new novel, Barkskins, was 10 years in the making

Ten years in the making and 714 pages long, Annie Proulx’s monumental new novel is an indictment of human profligacy and a powerful lament for the forests of the world. In 10 parts it stretches from 1693 to 2013 and is dedicated not only to all who depend on trees, from loggers and ecologists to picnickers and “the rest of us”, but also to a high school teacher who excited in the young Proulx “a lifelong interest in historical change and shifting disparate views of past and present”.

The story starts with two illiterate Frenchmen, René Sel, a logger from the Morvan, and Paris street urchin Charles Duquet who take ship to the North American colony of New France and sign on to work for three years for a feudal seigneur, after which they will supposedly receive their own land. Their job, according to their master, is “to subdue this evil wilderness... To be a man is to clear the forest” and replace it with cabbages and vineyards.

Duquet, who soon runs away and finds a more profitable pitch as a fur trader, will change his name to Duke and father a logging dynasty; Sel will be tricked into a surprisingly satisfying marriage with an elderly Mi’kmaw healer and start a mixed race lineage in which Mari’s respect for the forest as source of medicine, food, shelter and tools will be at odds with René’s conviction that the land must be cleared before it will become useful.

Proulx follows the fates of these two families for generations as the Dukes become wealthy and obsessed with trees as profit for their company, and the Sels, also still at work in the timber industry, are increasingly pushed out, persecuted and pillaged by the growing numbers of individuals and companies “opening up” the land and intent on clearing it of its aboriginal occupants along with its trees.

Proulx keeps before us the heart-rending and cautionary fate of some of the most majestic forests in the world — white pine in Michigan, kauri in New Zealand — as they are cut for masts and railroad sleepers, housing and paper, or simply burnt to clear the land, as the seasons alter and the denuded soil washes away down hillsides: “the whitemen always take everything until it is gone” mourns one of Sel’s descendants as he tries to think of one place in the world where tribal lives like those of the Mi’kmaw continue unspoiled.

The characters who people this saga are multitudinous and wonderfully realised but disorientingly short lived: the reader has just settled comfortably into the well-told history of a logging Sel or a mariner Duke when he is taken in an accident or drowned in a shipwreck.

One of the most enduring and engaging is Lavinia Breitsprecher nee Duke, who runs the 19th century Duke company with acumen and passion, but who can’t resist the financial lure of a magnificent, ancient kauri forest — or, one supposes, the stress of her position, as she succumbs to death as abruptly as any careless lumberjack.

Barkskins is set vividly and intimately in North America, with a short, sad sojourn in New Zealand and side trips to Europe and China, but the Australian reader cannot avoid the parallels that spring constantly to mind with the situation in our own past and present, not only in regard to logging, land clearing and the treatment of the nation’s first peoples but in all sorts of attitudes to “development”, to natural resources and native species.

Proulx’s conclusion is equivocal: the last gasp of the Breitsprecher-Duke empire is creative rather than destructive, but the somewhat condensed and chaotic final Sel section confounds with a further swingeing horror and a shattering glance at what is happening to the Greenland ice — ice that like the North American forests was once considered “infinite and permanent”.

Barkskins

Annie Proulx, 4th Estate, $32.99*

*$19.99 at News Shop, 31 Waymouth St, Adelaide

Originally published as Annie Proulx returns with a powerful elegy for lost forests