Conflict-ed

Three Day Road
Joseph Boyden
Penguin Canada

My second year of university, my fellow English majors and I had to take a ModernLit class that covered works from the early twentieth century. I didn't particularly love the period and for me, it was tough slogging. Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, Mansfield, Yeats, ... they seemed to be such an unhappy lot and very little of what they wrote inspired me. The group of individuals known as the War Poets, however, moved me to such an extent that I have never been able to shake the images of what they had to endure.

Boyden's descriptions of trench warfare in Three Day Road reminded me a great deal of the poems of Wilfrid Owen. His prose is brutal, minimal and utterly devastating and it will be some time before I can get it out of my head. The novel itself tells the story of two Cree snipers, Xavier and Elijah, and the horrors they endured on the battlefields of Europe. Woven into the narrative is the the back story of Xavier's youth as well as that of his Auntie, Niska, a bush dweller, a receiver of visions, and a windigo killer.

Conflict is central to this novel and its relationships. And not just war -- Boyden raises many issues that are worth discussing, not the least of which is the collision between red and white culture at the turn of the century. This novel is beautifully written and while the reader is certainly impacted by Boyden's grim depiction of the Great War, he/she is not blinded to the greater themes/truths that the author has conveyed. Three Day Road, like Dulce et Decorum Est, will stick with me forever. Five MMs out of five.