James Grainger Reviews John Vigna’s No Man’s Land
John Vigna. No Man’s Land. Arsenal Pulp Press. $22.95, 310 pp., ISBN: 978-1551528-66-3
Novels announce their intentions in their opening paragraphs, some with allusive subtlety, others with the equivalent of a fist pounding on a table to startle the reader’s attention.
No Man’s Land, John Vigna’s debut novel, falls into the latter category: “In the beginning, a land, void, without form.” The Biblical echoes are intentional, as we soon find out, but Vigna wants us first to imagine a land void of all but the most elemental lifeforms. That land is what we now call Canada, the time somewhere near the end of the last Ice Age, when the Cordilleran Ice Sheet “clutched the land with a tight fist and briny water seeped out” (a great image).
Continuing in King James Bible cadences, Vigna chronicles the arrival of the “cloven-footed beasts” — bison and elk — and other mammals, along with the birds and fish and then the First Peoples who hunt them, until all have settled harmoniously in the greening lands vacated by the retreating glaciers. Thousands of years pass, then, “here come the Europeans, sallow-skinned men from far-flung countries who kill, torture, rape, and enslave the First Peoples.”
The arrival of the Europeans ends the mythopoetic cycles of history and the novel proper begins. It is 1887, in a remote region of eastern British Columbia on the edge of the Rockies, where an English explorer and his son are besieged by a blizzard blowing down from the mountains. The father is near death but won’t hand over the map that has brought them to the desolate land, a map that purports to reveal the location of an unclaimed coal seam. The son, Will, murders his father and, after nearly dying in the wilderness, is taken in by the misfit followers of Reverend Brown, a shifty, charismatic preacher.
Reverend Brown’s thundering, Old Testament-style calls to repentance and renewal (through both physical endurance and sexual pleasure) set the tone for the sprawling, violent saga that follows. Rape, degradation, murder, natural and manmade disasters, all unfurl in graphic, poetic detail as the Reverend brings his travelling salvation show to the region’s barely settled frontier towns.
Will recovers and finds the coal seam, then importing hundreds of desperate labourers to ravage the land and make him rich. The curse of patricide is not so easy to slip, though. Will, like almost everyone who falls under Reverend Brown’s care, is soon brought low by violence and greed.
In the novel’s complex symbology, Will’s act of patricide curses the land itself, while the Reverend’s unheeded calls for repentance (especially his own) bears only the fruits of treachery, death, and exploitation. Ideologically, Vigna is also linking Will and Reverend Brown to the twin evils that despoiled the land and wiped out many of the First Peoples: rapacious capitalism and misguided evangelizing.
This is heavy stuff, so Vigna introduces a kind of stand-in for the modern reader, a teenage girl named Davey who was taken in by the Reverend years earlier. Her dependence on, and disappointment with, her benefactor overwhelm her loyalty as Reverend Brown’s sins ratchet up and the brutality of frontier life takes its toll on him and his followers.
The bleakness is also counterpointed by the region’s austere but beautiful landscapes (which Vigna also captured so eloquently in Bull Head, his short story collection). Sensual detail and densely allusive prose that rarely shades into the “poetic” combine to ground the allegorical plot in a believable and evocative setting.
Reverend Brown himself is not quite as “alive” as the landscape and most of the other characters. Perhaps he is required to carry more of the novel’s symbolic heft than can be expected of any one character, but he often reads as a more of a symbol than a living man. Luckily there is a large enough cast surrounding him to pick up the slack.
Anyone who thinks that life in the Canadian Wild West was any less nasty, brutish, and short will have their eyes opened by No Man’s Land. Strangely enough, they might also find themselves planning a sight-seeing tour of the region in the near future and picking up a local history book or two.
James Grainger is the author of Harmless (McClelland & Stewart), a Globe and Mail and National Post Best Book of 2015, and The Long Slide (ECW Press), which won the ReLit Award for Short Fiction. He currently writes a column on horror fiction for the Toronto Star and is the curator of The Veil on Substack.