Consumption" "is a haunting story of a woman's life marked by
struggle and heartbreak, but it is also much more. It stunningly
evokes life in the far north, both past and present, and offers a
scathing dissection of the effects of consumer life on both north
and south. It does so in an unadorned, elegiac style, moving
between times, places and people in beautiful counterpoint. But it
is also a gripping detective story, and features medical reportage
of the highest order. In 1962 at the age of ten, Victoria is
diagnosed with tuberculosis and must leave her home in the Arctic
for a sanatorium in The Pas, Manitoba. Six years will pass before
she returns to the north, years she spends learning English and
Cree and becoming accustomed to life in the south. When she does
move home, the sudden change in lifestyle leads sixteen-year-old
Victoria to feel like a stranger in her own family. At the same
time, Inuit culture is undergoing some equally bewildering changes:
Cheetos are being eaten alongside walrus meat, and dog teams are
slowly being replaced by snowmobiles. Victoria eventually settles
back into the community and marries John Robertson, a Hudson's Bay
store manager, and they raise three children together. Although
their marriage is initially close, Robertson will always be
"Kablunauk," a southerner, and this becomes a point of contention
between them. When Robertson becomes involved in arrangements to
open a diamond mine in Rankin Inlet, the family's financial
condition improves, but their emotional life becomes ever more
fraught: their son, Pauloosie, draws ever closer to his hunter
grandfather as their daughters, Marie and Justine, develop a taste
for Guns N' Roses. Severalother richly imagined characters deepen
Patterson's unsentimental portrait of both north and south. They
include Dr. Keith Balthazar, a flailing doctor from New York whose
despairing affection for Victoria leads to tragedy, and Victoria's
brother, Tagak, who finds that the diamond mine allows him a
success and maturity he could never attain within his traditional
culture. The novel deftly tracks the meaning of "consumption" in
both north and south. Consumption is tuberculosis, an illness
previously unknown among the Inuit that wrenches Victoria from her
home as a child, changing her family relationships, her outlook on
the world and her entire future. As such consumption is a harbinger
of the diseases of affluence, such as diabetes and heart disease
that come to afflict the Inuit over the four-decade span of the
novel. Consumption also defines the culture of post-industrial,
urban North America, captured here through Keith Balthazar's
troubled relatives in New Jersey. And when the diamond mine opens
in Rankin Inlet, its consumption of northern natural resources
seems to symbolize Canada's relationship with the Arctic and
southern encroachments on the Inuit way of life. Consumption" "is a
sweeping novel, of the kind one rarely encounters today: it is an
essential book for Canadians to linger over, learn from, and
remember. "From the Hardcover edition."
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