Farley Mowat

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Fiction Stranger than Fact

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In common with the majority of his previous works, The Snow Walker provides Mowat with a convenient platform from which to expound his passionately held convictions about the North and its people, but it also proves, to this reviewer's satisfaction at any rate, that Farley Mowat can be counted among the top story-tellers writing in Canada today.

There are nine short stories in The Snow Walker, each of which plays some variation on the general theme of character in conflict with environment, and two non-fictional pieces which are used to introduce and conclude them. (p. 129)

[The] concluding piece in The Snow Walker, "Dark Odyssey of Soosie", is vintage Mowat…. In it he documents the true and tragic story of a group of Eskimo families whom the Canadian government and the Hudson's Bay Company shunted from one bleak and hopeless location to another over a period of 30 years, refusing to return them to their original home. Mowat's description of the Eskimos' ordeal, culminating in a murder trial; of the trial itself, and of its aftermath are as gripping as anything he has ever written.

Yet despite its power, "Dark Odyssey of Soosie" may seem out of place in a collection of short stories until we recollect that The Snow Walker is, after all, a book by Farley Mowat. Leaving well enough alone, or appreciating the Eskimo experience from a comfortable aesthetic distance, would be as foreign to Mowat's purpose as a baobab on Baffin Island. Though each of his fictional pieces is a self-contained story which can be enjoyed purely as a story, each is also in some measure a fierce and uncompromising sermon directed against white arrogance, ignorance and greed. Read as an epilogue, "Dark Odyssey of Soosie" goes a long way towards justifying Mowat's sermonizing. Truth, it demonstrates, is both stranger and more terrible than fiction.

All of which may seem to relegate the stories themselves to second place, which may well be precisely what their author had in mind. Yet looking back on the book as a whole it is Mowat's fictional characters, especially his animal characters, which spring to mind.

The life of the Eskimo in Farley Mowat's Arctic is stripped to its elements: love, death, hunger, work and tradition, and gives rise not to despair, but to moral purification. The plot of each story is generally a straightforward explanation of a mystery or an anomaly. All of the stories, sooner or later, deal with some aspect of the theme of brotherhood or self-sacrifice. Narration is divided equally between Eskimo characters and Mowat himself.

But it is Mowat's prose style, even more than the sometimes spectacularly dramatic stories he has to tell, which makes The Snow Walker exceptional. His vocabulary is large and knowledgeable; he is rich in the wiles of the born and practised storyteller; his ability to select the best of all possible words at the ideal moment is first rate. (pp. 129-30)

Pat Barclay, "Fiction Stranger than Fact" (reprinted by permission of the author), in Canadian Literature, No. 76, Spring, 1978, pp. 129-30.

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Farley Mowat: Writer for Young People

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