The Main Character Is the Cold and the Snow
Depending on one's immediate mood, a lot can be found wrong in the writing of Farley Mowat: all sorts of laughable excesses, from sloppy style, overweening sentimentality, a kind of con brio enthusiasm for windmill tilting, to the sort of verbal keening one associates with a traditional Boston Irish wake, with the whisky flowing so freely one forgets just who is dead and why.
This is not so much a disclaimer as an announcement of fact, and in Mowat's very particular case the fact doesn't matter. Of Farley Mowat's 19 or so books I've read 12, and after a few weeks' mulling over his latest it seems to me that "The Snow Walker" is the best. The precious sniping of the littérateur is simply not relevant here. "The Snow Walker" is a book of tales about the Eskimo, stories ranging from the ancient to the overwhelmingly modern. It is passionate, harsh, with a mythic density that puts a great strain on the reader. In fact, the reader will assuredly come up feeling more than vaguely unclean.
History is forgetful but ultimately unforgiving, and in "The Snow Walker" Mowat draws us into the beauty and anguish of an extirpated culture; perhaps more than a culture, a microcosmic civilization. The beauty of the tales purge, exhaust, draw us out of our skin, but the pain involved is so deep that we feel the free-floating remorse that characterizes modern man on those rare occasions he has the wit and humility to turn around and look at his spoor.
In the reading of this book we should first of all forget all the Brotherhood of Man nonsense. We have nothing in common with the Eskimo and he has nothing in common with us other than our accidental simultaneity on earth. It is not profitable to look for similarities, to make a unity of us all in the usual ritual of breast-beating. The simple fact is the Canadian Government has no better track record with the Eskimo than we with the American Indian in our mutual courses of empire. (p. 4)
The main character of "The Snow Walker" is the cold and the snow. The "snow walker" itself is death. We have an old man telling Mowat a tale going back so far that it recedes into the bottom layer of a glacier—how men with metal helmets with horns on them and wearing breastplates came in a long boat one year. They had blond beards, sang songs and taught the Eskimo how to build the crossbow. There are tales of starvation, cannibalism out of love, the giving of one body to another with the poignancy of the Eucharist. There are tales so simple and strong you read them again to make sure you haven't been tricked into feeling a story in your stomach for a change. There is a tale of a man and an arctic fox in a suicide pact, and a tale about a woman named Soosie that exceeds any story I've ever read, save in Kafka, for convincing bureaucratic horror. There is a tale that is a Romeo and Juliet for grownups—romanticism loses its perversity and becomes convincing. In "The Snow Walker" Mowat is presenting the essence of his 30-year obsession with the Arctic and its people. (p. 5)
Jim Harrison, "The Main Character Is the Cold and the Snow," in The New York Times Book Review (© 1976 by The New York Times Company; reprinted by permission), February 22, 1976, pp. 4-5.
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