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    Barkskins: A Novel
    Barkskins: A Novel
    Barkskins: A Novel
    Audiobook25 hours

    Barkskins: A Novel

    Written by Annie Proulx

    Narrated by Robert Petkoff

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    Now a television mini-series airing on National Geographic May 2020!
    A Washington Post Best Book of the Year & a New York Times Notable Book

    From the Pulitzer Prize–­­winning author of The Shipping News and “Brokeback Mountain,” comes the New York Times bestselling epic about the demise of the world’s forests: “Barkskins is grand entertainment in the tradition of Dickens and Tolstoy…the crowning achievement of Annie Proulx’s distinguished career, but also perhaps the greatest environmental novel ever written” (San Francisco Chronicle).

    In the late seventeenth century two young Frenchmen, René Sel and Charles Duquet, arrive in New France. Bound to a feudal lord for three years in exchange for land, they become wood-cutters—barkskins. René suffers extraordinary hardship, oppressed by the forest he is charged with clearing. He is forced to marry a native woman and their descendants live trapped between two cultures. But Duquet runs away, becomes a fur trader, then sets up a timber business. Annie Proulx tells the stories of the descendants of Sel and Duquet over three hundred years—their travels across North America, to Europe, China, and New Zealand—the revenge of rivals, accidents, pestilence, Indian attacks, and cultural annihilation. Over and over, they seize what they can of a presumed infinite resource, leaving the modern-day characters face to face with possible ecological collapse.

    “A stunning, bracing, full-tilt ride through three hundred years of US and Canadian history…with the type of full-immersion plot that keeps you curled in your chair, reluctant to stop reading” (Elle), Barkskins showcases Proulx’s inimitable genius of creating characters who are so vivid that we follow them with fierce attention. “This is Proulx at the height of her powers as an irreplaceable American voice” (Entertainment Weekly, Grade A), and Barkskins “is an awesome monument of a book” (The Washington Post)—“the masterpiece she was meant to write” (The Boston Globe). As Anthony Doerr says, “This magnificent novel possesses the dark humor of The Shipping News and the social awareness of ‘Brokeback Mountain.’”
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
    Release dateJun 14, 2016
    ISBN9781442370074
    Author

    Annie Proulx

    Annie Proulx is the author of nine books, including the novel The Shipping News, Barkskins and the story collection Close Range. Her many honors include a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and a PEN/Faulkner award. Her story ‘Brokeback Mountain,’ which originally appeared in The New Yorker, was made into an Academy Award-winning film. She lives in New Hampshire.

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    Reviews for Barkskins

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    • 2/5
      Overly and unnecessarily long, depressing, and disjointed book. Of the dozens of underdeveloped characters, the one that I was most interested in died on page 58, leaving me to slog through 655 more pages. By that time, I couldn't keep track of who was related to whom and I didn't really care. The end was so strange that I wondered if Proulx wrote it first and then built a story around it.

      I will save you hours of frustration by telling you that the entire book was about bad people and deforestation. Do yourself a favor and read The Lorax instead. Just as moving and meaningful. Nice pictures too.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      I'm a little late in getting to this book was determined as I loved The Shipping News. This one not as much. It's a family saga spanning about 300 years that began with 2 men emigrating from France to Canada as tree hewers. The men went their separate ways, one marrying a native Indian and the other becoming a well-to-do land baron himself. Their stories are told in alternating sections until at the end there is a connection in the present day. I kept reading because I was interested in the characters but also the history of the logging business and ruination of virgin land in Canada, the US and other countries was fascinating. Proulx's research appeared to be quite in-depth and also gave a focus to reforestation and climate change, etc.
    • 4/5
      "There is here a complete lack of knowledge of forest management. Americans do not understand shelter belts, they have never heard of thinning trees nor pruning them, they cannot believe that soil has anything to do with forests?The most elemental precepts of forestry are as Chinese?So extensive are the forests here that Americans cannot see an end to them. Therefore, they have no interest in preserving them." (480)In Annie Proulx's ambitious and colossal epic about the eradication of the North American forests, she follows two French immigrants who started their new lives in Canada as indentured servants. Rene Sel works out his contract and marries into the local Indian tribe while Charles Dequet runs away and becomes an entrepreneur in the fur trading business. The book follows the descendants of these two men from 1693 to 2013. Condensing over 300 years of genealogy and history results in muddled characters and too much summarizing. How I wish she had made this book into a trilogy so she could have made more than a few key characters come alive on the pages. I realize the book is more about the loss of the great forests in the new world and the harsh treatment of the natives which Proulx shows brilliantly. The environment and the abuse we have continued over the years is the true star of this book. The characters we do get to know showed the ambition and greed on the Duke side and the pathos and hopelessness that overcame the Sel family as their way of life was diminished along with the forests of their homeland.The book shines for me in the eloquent descriptions of the lands of both North and South America, and venturing as far away as New Zealand. Charley Duke takes a stand against his family when he proclaims: "I am sure that wild natural woodlands are the only true forest. The entire atmosphere--the surrounding air, the intertwined roots, the humble ferns and lichens, insects and diseases, the soul and water, weather. All these parts seem to play together in a kind of grand wild orchestra. A forest living for itself rather than the benefit of humankind." (643) This is a sad book Ms. Proulx has written, but even though the ending seems rushed, she leaves us with a bit of hope as a new generation of the Sel faction becomes awakened to the problem and works to fix it?one seedling at a time. This wasn't a perfect book. It was difficult to follow the families' losses of their ways of life and their actual lives?hardly any of which were peaceful deaths. The political and environmental upheavals take their toll on the reader, although the author's dark humor provides some respite. I have a hunch this is a book that will stay with me. It's an investment of time that pays off in the end.
    • 5/5
      Many names to follow over nearly three centuries, but worth it. Several strong personalities in the two families are front and center. The reader on the CD was phenomenal. He did Dutch, English, French, and German accents that added a lot to the book.
    • 5/5
      So, so good! This story is deeply researched and large in scope. I loved the sharp detail given to every event, and I truly believe this is one of the best books I’ve ever encountered. The story spans over >300 years, many generations, and I think the earliest generations and characters are my favorites. So hard it must have been to thrive on the frontier and in logging camps! Brilliant story, brilliant narration.
    • 4/5
      Multigenerational family saga set mostly in New France (now Canada), covering over 300 years. In 1692, Frenchmen Charles Duquet and René Sel arrive in New France as indentured servants. Sel stays to work off his servitude and is forced into marriage to a Mi’kmaq woman, with whom he has children. Duquet escapes, becomes a fur trader, travels widely to secure wealth, and eventually forms Duke & Sons, a timber company. The storyline follows the descendants of these two men.

      The primary focus of this book is rapid depletion of natural resources, particularly the overharvesting of fur and timber. It contrasts life of the settlers, who do not give a thought to taking whatever resources are available, with the Mi’kmaq, who live in harmony with the forest, taking only what they need. The environmental theme is articulated through the actions and dialogue among characters. The book is lengthy (700 pages), and the end seems to cover too much ground too rapidly. Do not get too attached to any one particular character – they tend to die off quickly (rather like the felling of trees).

      I listened to the audio book, which is exceptionally well-read by Robert Petkoff. His voice is pleasing, and he reads at a good tempo. He does a great job with the many accents and characters.
    • 3/5
      This is the sort of sprawling, multigenerational epic that isn’t to my taste. I liked it much better after I finished it, when I could consider its overarching message and its painstaking historical detail, than I did while I was reading it, when it struck me as dry, with characters that came and went without much fanfare and without being very engaging or sympathetic.
    • 1/5
      Apparently I really am not a fan of anything Annie Proulx writes. I found The Shipping News lacking in real understanding of, and research into, life in Newfoundland, Brokeback Mountain infuriatingly misrepresentative of gay life and understanding, and I've found the same true in Barkskins.However, at least with the former novels there was a clear end in sight. The novels did tie up all the threads quite neatly, quite succinctly. But in Barkskins, Proulx not only displayed her lack of regard for intimate research, but clearly demonstrated her inability to edit her own interminable work. She told the same story over and over again. The same theme. The same characters with different names, in different locations. But it was all endlessly the same beige and uninteresting story.Now, I realize I fly in the face of much of popular acclaim. She has been honoured with some considerable literary awards. But I don't know why. And I've tried. I've examined her prose: nothing arresting or startling there, certainly nothing that would even approach the likes of Boyden, Crummey, Atwood or Mistry. Her plots are predictable. Her characters are little wooden pieces she takes out of the box and moves around on a board which is flat and uninteresting. She purports to write sensitively about sensitive subjects, but I find her work voyeuristic and without true understanding or compassion. She writes ABOUT subjects, not WITHIN subjects.So, what is Barkskins about? Forestry. Plain and simple. And logger barons. Also plain and simple. That's it. There's no real human underpinning, no cultural revelations. It's a long and boring fictional essay.Read or not. Knock yourself out.
    • 3/5
      I feel Barkskins should have been broken up into a series. Perhaps that would have given the author more time to develop characters. The first half she spent in my opinion more time on the characters ...the last third seemed to be a hasty run to the finish.
    • 4/5
      A dazzlingly detailed and dramatic ecological historical fiction that is vibrant, complex, and raw. Proulx crafts a family saga around two Frenchman and their families whose struggle for survival reflects what happens to the land they work in attempt to gain freedom, wealth, and a piece of land; all while believing that the forest and the resources that surround them are infinite. A stunning, fierce tale of the past that is that is also a look into the future.
    • 3/5
      There must be something in the air -- writers, who are not genre writers, are drawn to the early pioneering days of America: Tea Obreht in her bewitching "Inland"; Hernan Diaz in "In the Distance"; and Annie Proulx in "Barkskins." I loved the title; it conjured up the themes and motifs of the book: from the healing powers of wild tree bark to the history of deforestation. But if I had read William T. Vollmann's review in the NYTimes first, I probably wouldn't have embarked on reading this novel... And, somewhat ashamed to admit it as I hate leaving things half-done, I abandoned it about a 100 pages in. In contrast to Obreht and Diaz who, in different ways, skillfully produce compelling narrative, irresistibly drawn digression, and moments when nothing happens in which we relish their prose and attention to natural detail, I felt that Proulx perhaps was trying too hard or was writing too quickly, but I found no pleasure in the reading. I enjoyed the occasional French interjections, although it would have been nice if they were chosen for their untranslatability: Why the double "I will return to Paris! Je vais retourner à Paris!" -- here the French sentence is just a lame reminder that the speakers are French, but since most of the dialog is based on the reader's leap of faith ("we read English but believe they are speaking French," kind of like in those old movies when Hollywood was afraid of letting characters speak their own language and made the actors put on phony accents and then pretend they couldn't understand one another), why produce the French phrase at all? Elsewhere, the foreign words do add a certain spice to the prose: seigneur, domus, underscore one character's illusions of nobility, whereas local words, like cacamos, lend a certain concreteness to the described reality. The overall effect is, however, very uneven. Some usages are anachronistic: I find it hard to believe that Monsieur Trépagny swearing in French would use today's mild "Zut!": it's like having a one-eyed pirate swear by saying "Shucks!". (Until quite recently, some of the curse words persistent in French Canadian carried the traces of the 17th century language and were properly speaking blasphemous, like sacré bleu. A quick trip to the Dictionnaire Robert Historique would have told the author that Zut, to stick with the example, is a 19th-century invention.) On the other hand, the native Mikmak Indians speak a pidgin English that again reminds me of some early Hollywood portrayals of foreigners or Native Americans somehow unable to grasp basic syntax even though their native languages might be of much greater complexity. And to top it off, these broken-English dialogs are sometimes followed by a repetitive paraphrase in modern English. I haven't read far enough, but William Vollmann points out in his review that some characters might speak pidgin English at one point only to wax poetic a few pages later.As a reader, I care more about the quality of the prose and the purposefulness of the words used than about a story that might one day make a good movie. If you compare a paragraph by Obreht or Diaz, each sentence seems to have been properly weighted and carefully placed in the narrative, like if you were building a log cabin without nails or mortar and every piece of timber had to be cut just right. Because otherwise, you might end up shy of a 1,000 page slab of deadwood. (There is an expression in French, langue de bois, a wooden tongue, that describes a style of writing that is rather dry and full of artifice and, to my great disappointment, Barkskins is written in a langue de bois, rather than in a language of the forests I had envisioned.)When the movie Barkskins comes out, I will go and see it, and probably enjoy it as much as I did Shipping News.
    • 4/5
      I've loved Annie Proulx's writing since I read The Shipping News when it came out in the 90's, so what I'm about to say comes from a heavy heart: I did not like Barkskins. It's not that I don't recognize it as more of her admirably great writing, nor can I even comprehend the magnitude of the task she undertook to create a story that spanned over 300 years, two families, and (I lost count) maybe a hundred distinct characters. Wow. I mean... just: wow.But sadly, none of that made me like the book. I get the theme. Trees=good. Tree cutting down=bad. I'm 100% on board with that. And the other theme? White men did well in the booming years of the new country while natives did not. I think that was the other theme, anyway. Yes, I completely agree. Atrocities abounded amongst the natives and white men were the culprits. Again, 100% onboard. But what was the point?Spanning all of those centuries, bouncing back and forth between the two bloodlines, every chapter (practically) focusing on different characters... I barely got interested in one set before having to move onto another. And nothing really tied the whole thing together, ever. Except for the trees.Did I miss something? I felt to me like a collection of short stories all linked by a couple threads, some stories longer than others, for sure, but that's about it. The rise and fall of one character rarely had anything to do with anybody else in the novel.Again, massive effort and what a phenomenal amount of work it must have been. For that alone (and the fact that her writing is sublime) I'll give it a positive rating. But sadly, for me at least, it wasn't worth the effort to read. If I could go back and give myself some advice, it would be to skip this one.
    • 5/5
      What an extraordinary book. It encompasses the history of the major North American forests from the 17th century to the present day, and combines this with two loosely connected family stories. This ought to be too complex and ambitious to work, but for me it got more compulsive the more I read.At the start of the book we meet two poor Frenchmen, Rene Sel and Charles Duquet, who are contracted to work for a settler from a French aristocratic family in a forest in New France. Duquet runs away while Sel remains loyal, and is persuaded to marry a Mi'kmaw Indian woman who has been contracted as a cook. Duquet is an ambitious wheeler dealer who starts a business empire which concentrates on logging, while Sel's family lead a marginal existence with the vestiges of the Mi'kmaw. Both families are followed all the way to the present day, and Proulx exposes the way in which the forestry industry destroyed most of America's primeval forests and most of the Indian tribes' homelands and sources of food. The book is full of memorable characters (Lavinia, the heiress to the Duquet empire in particular), but as in Proulx's earlier novel Accordion Crimes, most of their lives come to premature ends.For such a long book, this is surprisingly enjoyable, in fact it is among the best new American novels I have read in the last few years.
    • 2/5
      Overly and unnecessarily long, depressing, and disjointed book. Of the dozens of underdeveloped characters, the one that I was most interested in died on page 58, leaving me to slog through 655 more pages. By that time, I couldn't keep track of who was related to whom and I didn't really care. The end was so strange that I wondered if Proulx wrote it first and then built a story around it.

      I will save you hours of frustration by telling you that the entire book was about bad people and deforestation. Do yourself a favor and read The Lorax instead. Just as moving and meaningful. Nice pictures too.
    • 3/5
      I found this book full of sanctimonious drivel, where the white man and Indians wise sages. Gets tiring after 600 pages especially when the writing is tepid.
    • 4/5
      One of those great big sprawling family epics that are a delight to dig into and lose oneself in for a while. A fine read.
    • 3/5
      A Cold Skimming Over a Terrible History

      The implied narrator of Annie Proulx's Barkskins speaks like a cold god who takes a terrible joy in abruptly killing off her children. On the one hand, this might be intentional, a way for Proulx to express her cold anger for the destruction of nature and the world if trees by rapacious and greedy hunans. On the othervhand, it seems a weakness in the telling. If the forest is the real protagonist, we never come to feel we care about it or experience it in a way that we can empathize. It is very hard to care for any of the characters since the implied narrator doesn't seem to. Often in Michener, the geography of a place seemed more alive than the people. And that worked. Yet in Michener we often still cared about the human actors, too. That alchemy does not happen in Barkskins, and I am left felling as empty as a barren field of stumps.
    • 4/5
      “...the newcomers did not care to understand the strange new country beyond taking whatever turned a profit. They knew only what they knew. The forest was there for them.”Annie Proulx had not released a novel, since The Shipping News. That was 14 years ago! Well, she delivers quite a chunkster here: A 700 page, multigenerational family saga, that focuses on two Frenchman and their descendants, spanning three hundred years. It mostly deals with the timber trade and begins in the deep wilderness of Canada and radiates from there and it even touches down in New Zealand and China.This book takes some patience, but the author's passion and knowledge of the subject, keeps the reader turning pages. There is also a strong environmental theme, running throughout, as we witness the plunder of our forests and other natural resources. This epic novel may not have hit the highs it intended but it is still a good and worthy read.
    • 5/5
      Absolutely a great book. Love this author and loved this work of historical fiction. A family saga but also a history of the forest industry. Another book with a warning of how we don’t listen to our own detriment. This book covers a time period of 1693 to the present time and is global but primarily looks at the Canadian/American forests.
    • 3/5
      Overall, I enjoyed this book, but not as much as I've enjoyed others by Annie Proulx (The Shipping News; Brokeback Mountain). The book is well written and really provides a sense of life in early North America, but I think Ms. Proulx tried to do too much in one novel. The character development often suffered...and to a lesser extent, so did the plot. Like many others LTers, I think this would have worked better as a trilogy....I'm thinking of Ken Follet's Century Trilogy as a comparison. One of the things that did come through very well (in addition to the environmental message) was the difficulty many Aboriginal people have in straddling two cultures. Some of Ms. Proulx's metis characters embraced their heritage; others tried to ignore it. All encountered challenges.The ending of the book was a disappointment...the character written about in the last chapter was a minor one and seemed like a bad choice to cap off 700+ pages. I would have preferred the story to end with Jeanne and Felix...possibly the end of a dynasty, possibly a new hope.
    • 5/5
      I listened to this book and perhaps that was not the best choice. I presume the printed version would have included a family tree which would have been helpful. This is a multi-generational family saga about the descendents of two indentured French servants who come to the New World in 1693. Their many children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren etc. have stories to tell but some times I forgot who was a child of whom or which generation a certain person belonged to. A family tree would have helped a lot.Charles Duquet and Rene Sel came to New France from Paris as indentured servants. They went to work for a man who was clearing land for a farm and so learned the craft of logging. Their stories diverged almost immediately. Charles Duquet ran away and got work in the fur trade eventually amassing quite a fortune. Rene Sel stayed with the master and eventually married his Micmac country wife, starting a family of mixed Indian and European heritage. The Sels stayed true to their aboriginal roots and barely eked out an existence. Charles Duquet started up a timber business in Maine after marrying a rich Dutch heiress and Anglicizing his name to Duke. His children grow the Duke and Sons family business by clear-cutting New England forests and expanding to other states. The daughter of one of the sons marries a Sel descendent, thus bringing the two families back together. The Sels are never acknowledged as descendants of Charles Duquet although their claim to his estate is as valid (or possibly more valid) than the children with the Duke name. As years of timber cutting take their toll on the environment some of the descendants on both sides start to have second thoughts about the practice. Is it too late to undo the damage done?This book may be a little too preachy for some but Proulx obviously feels strongly about the damage to the environment. Her condemnation of the timber industry is wrapped up in a fascinating 300 year history of the New World and peopled with some very interesting characters. I would recommend this book but probably you should read it, not listen to it.
    • 4/5
      Loved this book when I started it, but less so as it went along. Beautifully written, as you would expect from Annie Proulx and brilliant in concept, but too long in my opinion. Or maybe there were too many characters. In any event, I didn't connect emotionally as much as with her previous work.
    • 5/5
      Epic.
      Harsh.
      Fascinating.
      And full of trees.
    • 3/5
      At times, I felt I was plodding through this very thorough story of a First Nations family and a French family who came to North America. Through marriage their lives intertwined Through the story Proulx’s love for nature and Canada shine through. The novel deserves the accolades it has received, if for no other reason the detail about the lumber industry and the treatment of native peoples. Beginning in the 1600’s the multigenerational story ends in 2013. I love a big thick novel, and although this book held my interest, I didn’t find it as compelling as Michener’s Hawaii, perhaps because Proux is so adept at putting so much detail into a story.
    • 3/5
      I felt this book was far too long. While I typically enjoy a multi generational story, this just dragged on for too long. It seemed like the author realized it was going on for far too long and then all of a sudden after introducing several new characters (ver briefly) she wrapped it up. And I don't exactly know what happened at the end. I re-read it a few times and just don't get it.
    • 4/5
      Barkskins is one of those sprawling sagas (the print version is 756 pages!) that perhaps sprawls a bit too much for its own good. Or at least for my taste and convenience. I borrowed the kindle version from my library, and just when I got engaged with the story of the Duquets and the Sels, it had to be returned; I couldn't renew it because another reader was waiting for it. So I put another hold on it and had to wait two weeks before plunging back in, and by that time, I had begun to forget who was who. (The book follows the descendants of these two families over 300 years and down several branches.) So if you plan to read this book, just be aware that it is one HUGE door-stopper, so unless you're a speed reader, you'd be better off getting your own copy or waiting until interest dies down before downloading it from your local library.The story begins with two young men, Charles Duquet and René Sel, indentured to a Quebec timber company as cutters. In return for three years of labor, they are promised land of their own--a promise that the crafty Charles realizes will never be made good on. He runs away and eventually strikes it rich, first as an international fur trader and then as owner of a vast timber business. René sticks it out but fares less well: he is forced to wed a much older Mi'kmaw woman and dies a violent death.The story follows Charles, his descendants, and the Sel descendants over time and continents. Charles travels to Holland, where he finds a wife, and to China, where he purveys furs and secures new varieties of wood to bring back for sale on the North American continent. His wealth relies on the unbridled flattening of the land, clearing whole forests without conscience, believing that forests of Quebec and Maine are so vast that they will never be extinguished. (So yes, one theme of the book is ecological--and it gets more heavy-handed as the story moves into the 20th century.) His descendants expand the business into New Zealand and begin to consider the South American rain forest, by this time one of the last true forests remaining on earth. The Sels, on the other hand, suffer from a lack of identity: part white and part Mi'kmaw, they find they don't fit well into either community. The young drift back to the Mi'kmaw (who are becoming fewer in number as they are starved, infected, or outright murdered by whites taking over their land) and into relative poverty. Along the way, the two families intertwine, both in events and in blood, and add a third line, the German Breitsprechers.With so many characters and over so many years, I found it difficult at times to remember who everyone was and how they were connected. One positive aspect is the strong female characters: Mary, René's Mi'kmaw wife, a noted healer; Beatrix, one of the first to unite the two families by marriage; Lavinia, who takes over the lumber business with a ruthlessness worthy of Charles Duquet himself; and Sapranisia Sel, a PhD conservationist determined to save the healing Mi'kmaw plants and to reforest the land before it is too late.As stated above, the novel's main theme, in addition to the fates of two families, is the effect of the rapacious stripping of the North American forests, first in the northwest, then westward into Michigan and beyond. While it is an issue that concerns me, it becomes overly didactic in the last sections of the book as several young Sels and one particular Breitsprecher become dedicated conservationists. There are a lot of technical/scientific details that I found dull and digressive, and it seemed rather a shame that an intriguing family saga evolved into a bully pulpit for forest conservation.
    • 5/5
      I'm not going to spend anytime trying to summarize any of the complexities of this novel. Figuring it out for yourself is a large part of why this novel is so good! If you've read any of Proulx's other works you will easily recognize her style in her marvelous passing descriptions, the twisting connections between characters, and the gruesome ends she tends to favor. If you haven't read any of her other works... this is a fantastic start to a Proulx binge.
    • 3/5
      Sprawling novel of two indentured servants of a Frenchman in "New France" in the 16th century and the generations of descendants spawned from these two men up until nearly present-day [2013], taking us all over the world. Main theme of the book is forests and logging, how the forests are denuded through greed, then finally forest management and replanting take hold. The two families lives are entwined -- one becomes owners of a lumber and logging company, the other, simple loggers--some of Indian descent.There was too much small detail through the lives of these people, but I appreciated the author's later emphasis on preserving our natural resource. I wish the author had placed the family trees--complicated as they were in the FRONT of the book.
    • 4/5
      Two men get off a ship from France in 1693, somewhere on the St. Lawrence in New France and begin their lives as indentured servants to a Monsieur Trepagny. One is Charles Duquet and the other is Rene Sel. Barkskins is the story of how these two men weathered their early lives in a cruel wilderness and then how successful their progeny became over the next three centuries.Duquet realizes early on that the life of a lumberjack is not for him but life as a timber baron and entrepreneur has a lot more appeal. Sel adapts to his environment and circumstances and settles into a life as a Barkskin, husband and father. He marries an aboriginal woman Mari and their descendants make up half of the story.Duquet uses his wits to establish a trading company Duke and Sons with headquarters in Boston, Europe and China and determines that the vast forests of North America are meant to be pillaged for his benefit. There is never any thought given to the concept that the forests might be a finite resource, that forestry management would assure its sustainability and that the wildlife and native peoples who occupy these lands have a right to be there. The Sels regard the forests as a source of employment but also as a resource to be managed for its bounty of shelter, food and traditional medicines. Duke and company becomes one of the largest forest product industries in the world.The Sel family does not fare as well. Theirs is a life of working for the lumber barons who have little regard for the safety, security or destiny of their employees. They are regarded as expendable and many are killed by falling timbers, drownings in log jams or from infected wounds. The Mik mah in Nova Scotia are driven off the land by British soldiers and then by settlers who regard them as vermin with no right to property.This is a long and interesting book. I really enjoyed most of the characters but had trouble keeping track of them. I found the genealogy at the back very helpful. The characters are well developed, the stories of individuals are compelling. However, the last chapters are not as satisfactory and some threads were left dangling. The insertion of Felix and Jeanne at the end made me wonder if they were a source of hope or the end of a dynasty. Worth reading.
    • 3/5
      Despite forewarning of heavy going,I found this an easy,entertaining read. Not so full of angst as her short stories and very like James Michener/ConradRichter. The ending is a bit sappy. She should lose the current generation . I expect most of us baby boomers feel like that. BAD AMERICANS for ravaging your natural resources and you are still at it.!