New fiction: Magic realism in the Saskatchewan wilds

Etta and Otto and Russell and James

Author: Emma Hooper

ISBN-13: 978-0214-00332-9

Publisher: Fig Tree

Guideline Price: €0

‘I’ve never seen the water so I’ve gone there. Don’t worry, I’ve left you the truck. I can walk. I will try to remember to come back. Yours (always) Etta.”

And with that short note Etta Gloria Kinnick, an octogenarian, sets off on a mammoth trek across Canada. Early dementia has started to cloud her mind, and Etta knows this is her last chance to fulfil a wish to swim in the sea.

From her prairie province of Saskatchewan, the shorter journey – only 1,000km or so – would be west, to Vancouver. Etta is not one to cut corners, though, and opts instead for Canada’s eastern coast. Her supplies include a rifle, cookies, 10 carrots, four pairs of underwear, paper and a pencil. Joining other elderly literary pilgrims, such as Rachel Joyce’s Harold Fry, or the Swedish writer Jonas Jonasson’s eponymous 100-year-old man, Etta takes the reader on a dreamlike adventure as she seeks out the bigger picture while she still can.

Etta picks up a travelling companion along the way. James the talking coyote seems threatening at first, but Etta comes to depend on the likeable creature and his wily ways to battle the wilderness: “That night James did not eat Etta, just slept a little bit away from her feet. The next morning he ate a gopher while Etta ate mayonnaise on crackers.”

Memory

Fairy-tale and real worlds converge in Emma Hooper’s debut novel, a moving story about a love triangle spanning 60 years. Pasts, presents and almost futures reveal themselves through Hooper’s clear and restrained prose, offering fragments of lives that might have been, fragmenting further as memories are erased.

Otto is not the only man Etta has left behind. Their neighbour Russell, best friends with Otto since childhood, is also deeply affected by her disappearance. Otto is content to let her go, corresponding with her through letters that have little hope of reaching her, but Russell the deer hunter sets out on her trail, determined to track her down. Sixty years later it is finally his turn.

Mixed with the fable-like narrative of Etta’s journey are the more realistic, and more interesting, backstories of the three characters.

The poverty of depression-era Canada is vividly depicted: “So families were trying and trying, for every five pregnancies, three babies, and for every three babies, one child.” Otto’s family is the exception, with 14 children helping to man the farm. They welcome their lonely neighbour Russell into the fold. The friendship that develops between Otto and Russell is cemented after an accident with a tractor maims Russell’s leg for life.

Etta appears when the boys are 15. Only a little older than them, she becomes their teacher at Gopherlands School, outwitting her more experienced peers to snag the role. When Otto enlists to fight in Europe some months later, the trio are split up. Letters between himself and Etta deepen the relationship, but back in Saskatchewan a second attachment is also forming between Etta and Russell.

This age-old story of two men, one woman and a war is elevated by Hooper’s magical-realist tale, which tries to look forward as much it looks back.

With Etta beginning to forget who she is, the theme of memory is central to the book. Hooper plays with form, using blank spaces and snippets of text – sometimes a line or two on a page – to highlight her theme. What is not there, the author seems to suggest, is as important as what is. And what did not happen, in the case of Russell and Etta, is much the same.

As Etta’s quest continues, garnering national attention and thousands of fans across Canada, the narratives become more disjointed, with characters and storylines blurring into each other.

Russell catches up with her but, in a strange twist that is never fully explained, decides to leave her starving in the wilderness at her request. A metaphor for dementia, perhaps, the illness that puts those who suffer from it beyond reach.

There is a natural rhythm to Hooper’s prose that suits the experimental layout of the book. The Canadian author (and acclaimed musician) is a research lecturer at Bath Spa University; she is published in forms from poetry to short fiction and libretti.

The overlap between the fairy-tale and real worlds can confuse at times. Radio tales about war children who float off to safety seem odd against the brutal depictions that Otto offers in his letters. Elsewhere characters such as Bryony, who magic themselves in and out of the narrative, add little to the overall plot. The story belongs to its three intriguing leads and the triangle turned circle that has been their shape. “It’s a loop Otto,” Etta realises towards the end of her travels. “It’s just a long loop.”