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SUGARMILK FALLS
by Ilona Van Mil
McClelland and Stewart, April 2005
328 pages
$34.99CDN
ISBN: 0771087322


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Sugarmilk Falls is a tiny northern Ontario town that appears to subsist on a small maple syrup industry and considerable gossip. It is a little town that time forgot, almost literally, in the sense that it is extremely difficult to work out a time line for the events described or to get a real sense of the town as having a genuine existence somewhere in Canada.

It opens with a mysterious visitor who appears in 1993 and about whom we know nothing except that she is female. She is to spend the evening with a group of townsfolk who will tell her their recollections of the terrible events that occurred sometime in the past but the reader is cautioned at the outset not to believe everything they say.

The visitor reflects: "Can the facts be sifted from the disorder of their memories? Or will there be just versions of the truth moulded to take account of my particular probing at this particular time? And what will I do with the information? Does anyone even know the whole truth?" The short answer is no.

It is extremely difficult to review this novel without revealing too much about what occurs in it. Briefly, SUGARMILK FALLS is an ambitious first novel that attempts to deal with the resonance of certain great moral outrages of the 20th century in a town about as far removed from some of them as it is possible to be. Thus Ravensbruck concentration camp plays a part, as does the German occupation of Paris, the rout at Dieppe, Native land claims, and generalized racism directed against Native peoples.

Unfortunately, the characters who were victims of these outrages behave in ways wholly incomprehensible in view of their past history and those who are the object of racial stereotyping live up to the stereotypes -- the white people complain about "drunken Indians," but the Indians are pretty much all drunks in this book and anti-Semites into the bargain. In addition, most of the crimes (and, by the time the book concludes, there are many) are prompted by motives that are at best foggy and at worst wholly obscure.

There is something about the great Canadian North that invites this kind of mythic romancing. Van Mil, who was born in the Netherlands, grew up in Niagara Falls, Ontario (quite a civilized place, really), and who now lives and teaches law in the UK, fails to root her impressionistic take on the wilderness in a sufficiently solid ground of fact and probability to convince us that she does indeed have a plausible re-vision of our national myth.

Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, May 2005

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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