Barkskins

Only separated by two years, I think Proulx’s Barkskins and Powers’s Overstory can be thought of as companions to one another. I like how the pun of Powers’s title refers to both the tree canopy that towers over the landscape and the overarching story that all of his sub-stories form as they come together, while I think of Proulx’s Barkskins as the meaty understory.

It opens in Canada’s colonial past when the continent was a vast carpet of old-growth forest. Explorers arrived, shortly followed by French settlers and indentured servants contracted into a kind of slavery to clear-cut the forests.… show more.

Barkskins is a Big Book—long, yes, but also epic in its coverage: it has a cast of characters that stretch over centuries and move across the world.

An environmental novel, it explores the assault on forests, beginning with men bound to labor in the Canadian wilderness cutting down trees, through the lumbering industry there and elsewhere, up to the modern-day environmental movement.

Proulx deals with how the landscape changed and what that meant for the indigenous people, the animals, the waterways, and finally, the climate. Wide-ranging and full of quirky characters, the novel is by turns intriguing, funny, and horrifying.… show more.

The size of Barkskins made me pause, but I had read other books by Annie Proulx that I liked, and the description appealed to me.

Admittedly, I learn a lot of my history through historical fiction, and I learned a lot from this story of two families through three hundred years. Over the course of the novel, the arc of many generations—and therefore characters—arises and subsides, but the consistent theme throughout is the European utilitarian perspective on the forest and how this perspective undermined and marginalized the Indigenous way of life.

The scope of the book and its style create… show more.

This book is a sweeping, multi-generational epic that is, at its core, about the destruction of the great American forests.

Annie Proulx writes so breathtakingly about the natural world, and is also able to conjure such vivid characters through the generations.

But what I love most about this book is how it connects unexpected places – like 16th Century Canada and Japan, or 18th Century California and New Zealand – reminding us that history is not confined to any one place. 

This 600-year saga about human-environment interaction through the forest industry in Canada evoked emotional connections with my environment, the Canadian forests, and the plight of indigenous Canadians. From the arrival of the Europeans in pristine forest to its destruction under the veil of global warming, Proulx weaves generational stories of two settler families into a crucible of terrible greed and tragic irony. The bleak impressions by the immigrants of a harsh environment crawling with pests underlie their combative mindset of a presumed infinite resource. I was particularly moved by the linked fate between the Mi’kmaq and the majestic pine forests,… show more.