Totem - Having a story of it own

Some books have a story of their own. Totem, my latest novel, has one that stretches back 19 years.

Back in 2007, I made a trip to the mountainous wilderness of British Columbia to research a potential drama series for the BBC. I wrote a script, but as with nine out of ten promising drama projects, it didn’t go any further. Nevertheless, I had been entranced by this landscape and its people.

Hiking in country accessible only by float plane more than fifty miles from the nearest dirt road, without guns or even bear spray (more likely to antagonise than placate, apparently), our guide pointed out fresh grizzly scat and for the first time in my life I experienced the feeling of not being at the top of the food chain. It heightens the senses and places you in a different relationship with nature: it’s no longer something you observe, you are a part of it.

 Deep in the woods, we came across the skeletal remains of a teepee that had probably stood there for decades. The forest had never been managed and existed as nature intended – fallen, dead trees were nurse logs for new saplings in a life cycle that operates at many times that of a human span.

I went on to visit remote outposts, met indigenous people and began to learn something of the process of cultural renewal and restoration that is taking place in small communities dotted across the vastness of Canada. Some indigenous peoples are engaged in the sensitive process of negotiating treaties with the government that give them partial autonomy and a share in the natural resources in their ancestral lands.

It set me thinking about a novel that would explore the complex tensions between all that is good in modernity and all that is precious in our pasts, in our ancient cultures, ancestral memories and deep connections with homelands. Some of us live in landscapes in which our ancestors dwelt – in the Welsh borders, I count myself lucky to be one of them. Many of us don’t and are a fusion of many histories and influences. Some of us have a deep and profound sense of connection to place, but many of us feel indifferent to our immediate surroundings or even displaced from somewhere lost to us.

These tensions increasingly suffuse our politics and culture and raise deep questions: we all share a sense of common humanity but at the same time value our unique heritages, all God-given and part of our collective journey into an unknown future.

I sketched an outline for the novel in 2010 but my then publisher encouraged me in another direction. A blow at the time but in publishing, timing is everything. I’m glad I didn’t know that the journey would take 16 more years.

Another 12 years had passed when I chanced upon Charles Joseph, a renowned indigenous artist who chiefly works as a wood-carver. I heard his moving personal testimony on a podcast and managed to make contact. His traumatic life-experiences involved his sexual abuse, aged 5, at the hands of a nun at residential school. In adulthood, his healing began by making connection with the culture of his ancestors. His life story inspired a pivotal character, Eldon, who had been missing from my original idea and around which a new narrative began to take shape.

I wrote the book on spec in 2022 and 2023 in the aftermath of the death of our youngest son. Quite how, I don’t know. It was the darkest of times. Charles was hugely encouraging and I fancied I had a story that would find a home but it received a string of rejections and another year went by.

It was never said out loud, but I wondered if the rejections were partly out of fear that as a British writer I didn’t have the right to tell a story that involved indigenous people. Maybe I didn’t?

The gloom set in.

Fate intervened again in the strangest of circumstances. In 2024, my aunt, an artist who lived in Ontario and who was suffering the early stages of motor neurone disease, asked me to be with her when she ended her life through euthanasia. I didn’t want her to go through with it, but she was resolved.

During the few days before she left this life for the next, we made a trip to the beach at Lake Huron and my cousin, Dion, remarked that a painting had caught his eye in a fish smokery on a nearby reserve where he had gone for the cheap, tax free cigarettes - another strange link in the chain.

We went to see the picture – it was by an indigenous artist, Jeff ‘Red’ George, and I knew I had

to meet him. Two days later, I tracked him down to the lakeshore house where he was staying.

Like Charles, Jeff has his own deeply-troubled life story and had found his redemption in his art. Within minutes of meeting, Jeff had started to draw the image of a bear and her cub with which the book opens. He agreed to illustrate the text and the book instantly became something else – a collaboration and fusion of his form of artistic expression with mine.

It was the missing piece. Not long after, Totem found a home with Eye Books, a wonderful, smaller publisher not afraid to take creative risks.

Totem explores the idea that we live in a world of unknowable connections and boundaries; of both unique and common experiences. Its own long story certainly bears that out.

Totem by Matthew Hall (Eye-Books) Out Now

The day Jessie Cunningham achieves her life’s goal and is made partner in an ultra-powerful Toronto law firm, she suffers a catastrophic burnout. While attempting to recuperate, she volunteers for a charity preserving ancient trees in the wilderness of British Columbia. There she meets Todd Samson, a man with a troubled past and a wounded soul. The attraction is instant, but they’re from different worlds… that are about to collide. When Todd is falsely accused of murdering a local conservation  officer and his beleaguered community in the Three Valleys Reserve comes under pressure from the government to swap its ancestral territory for land on the outskirts of Vancouver, Jessie is drawn into their struggle against greed, corruption and injustice. Forming an unlikely alliance with Chief Ray Squinas and wood carver and shaman Eldon Marshall, Jessie joins them in the fight of their lives – against just the kind of dark forces she has spent her career serving.

Totem is available for pre-order from the publisher: Eye Books, Amazon and all the best bookshops.

Website: www.matthewhallbooks.com

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