Deep River Night
A motley collection of men work at a lumber mill in central British Columbia. Caring for their physical ills is Art, first aid man who, still in 1960, remembers the brutalities of WW2 in Europe. When whisky fails to obliterate his memories, he joins Wang Po, the Chinese cook who uses opium to help him forget the atrocities of the Japanese occupation of Nanjing.
The mill workers are from many countries and of all ages, the youngest being Joel, the lad Art salvaged from an open freight car in a snowstorm. Part of the story centres around Joel’s coming of age, which brightens a novel that mostly reveals suffering.
If Art’s anguished dreams and futile efforts to quit drinking are not enough, there are men in camp who are cruel for the sake of being cruel, men who do evil from ignorance, and a man driven to evil by matters beyond his control. The manager of the mill is himself morally numb, his decisions driven by expediency.
The ancient stories of a boy becoming a man, and good men trying to sustain a community against the powers of evil, are set in the harsh and uncompromising environment of a small isolated community in a land both beautiful and austere. Having some knowledge of this environment I was able to appreciate the author’s penetrating eye for detail. He not only reveals the exquisite beauty of leaf and dragonfly, of river pebbles and mouse’s ear, but also the clanging metallic detail of mill machinery as well as the intimate detail of grizzly and man face to face at the dump.
Despite the overwhelming sense of suffering, the author reveals the hope of redemption and rebirth that remain as constant and inevitable as the flow of the mighty river beside the mill.
