Book review: Boundary Waters by Tristan Hughes

Niall Griffiths

You know what you’re getting with a Tristan Hughes novel (or, if you don’t, you really should: he’s been a central figure in contemporary Welsh writing in English for two decades now) – wilderness, water in various forms and states, Wales and Canada (the country of his domicile and the country of his birth, respectively), questing, secrets and forgettings, loss, occult mystery, the bafflements of the past.

The tone and the narrative voice is generally elegiac, intensely observant, finely attuned to the luminous beauties of the natural world and the aching, uglifying effects of human encroachment upon it.

Yes, you know what you’re getting with a Tristan Hughes novel, and what you’re getting is Good.

In his latest, Boundary Waters, we’re back in 1804, in the Debatable Lands between Canada and the US, amongst fur-trappers (‘the Fur Age’).

Hardship

Our narrator is one Arthur Stanton, addressing one Esther, recounting a tale of hardship and struggle and ice and want and the unavoidable complexities of human entanglement.

The characters are marked by mutilation (missing ears and noses, misaligned limbs, ‘hernias and ruptures of myriad sorts’) and disgrace; attempts and urges to escape places of harm (both received and perpetrated) abound and bind.

This is a land that chips and whittles away at humankind. Melville looms and informs; a canoe is ‘a tiny floating world’, a miniaturised Pequod, one of the passengers of which is one Crebassa, who keeps his own severed ear on a cord around his neck and into which he whispers secrets and prayers.

There is a disgraced trader, McLeod, often drunk on ‘shrub’ (a concoction which a Google search tells me needs to be sampled), who has some connection with Esther: ‘rumours of an engagement between you, broken when McLeod had gone north to his disgrace’. (That choice of name: perhaps this is Hughes setting himself up in conversation with the late Scottish/Canadian author Alastair Macleod, whose No Great Mischief is thematically and occasionally echoed in Boundary Waters. Or perhaps not).

The research is meticulous and judiciously applied, as is the evocation of milieu and environment; the ‘Great Hatching, the horror of a northern spring’, when mosquitoes appear, had me reaching for the Zeet.

Evocative

Types of clothing, shelter, weaponry, food … Hughes has an instinct for the evocative and encapsulatory detail; the description of Esther skinning a hare is mighty. You’ll smell the blood, even as Esther herself remains somewhat phantasmal, spectral, a shape in memory. A Platonic Ideal, indeed.

The Theory of Forms, in fact, underpins much of this fine novel: this notion that abstract perfections exist beyond sensory experience and serve as the ultimate standards for all things, including such concepts as justice and truth, and that they do not only reflect the physical world but distil its pure essence, can be traced not only in Arthur’s focus on Esther but in the colonial project itself; monetisation of land and creatures, the Crusoe-like imposition on and control of wilderness, have as centralities the need to build (or perhaps rebuild) an Eden, a place free from want and ignorance and ever rewarding of human endeavour.

Of course, utopia for one grouping is hell for another, and so, here, the fur trade itself becomes a uniquely apposite metaphor; a veneer, a covering, a hide.

Animals become barterable or sellable goods; enforced transmutation, in advancement of the distant powerful, is all. This is the core truth of the colonialist project (the oneiric Esther, part indigenous Saltaux and part incomer, embodies this).

With care and empathy and perfect pacing, Hughes expands and opens this theme. The world becomes palimpsest.

Things are not what they are, because humanity needs them not to be: ‘it was the season when the deer, stupefied by desire … were being plucked from the groaning agonies and brief delights of their wooing to be transmuted into blankets and moccasins and smoked meat’. Life becomes currency.

And take the title, in which the plural is articulate. ‘Waters’ have no boundaries; they shift, they move, they deny mappability. ‘Water’ could be used to mark a physical edge, but ‘waters’ never could.

A man stitched into a bear skin becomes that bear, ‘a ghastly composite’. Spey is a man who is a woman.

Deception, disguise, doubling; Arthur converses with the ‘Other Arthur’ in one world amongst many, shifting and intermeshing and overlapping.

Grounded

In this, I’m reminded of Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke; like him, Hughes takes pains to keep the reader grounded even as impalpables are explored, and lyricism is one method by which this is achieved: ‘the snow started to melt. The ice on the lake began to groan and creak and candle. And at last, one night a wind came up and it tinkled a symphony of tiny bells’. You can hear this. You can feel this.

Given more space, I’d examine this aspect of the novel in relation to Caledonian Antisyzygy; that’d be fertile ground to explore, I think.

But you’re going to have to do that yourself, after engaging with this book.

Have fun.

Boundary Waters is published by Parthian and can be purchased here and at all good book shops.