When I tell you that Canada concerns an unlikely couple who rob a bank, thereby setting into motion events that will lead to the dissolution of their family and eventually some murders, I’m not giving anything away. These events are told in the first paragraph of the book.
Canada is told by 15-year-old Dell from the standpoint (until Part 3) of his much older self. Author Richard Ford has written a slow-paced book that goes deep into the lives of an individual family, while at the same time including events such as one might find in a thriller. He looks at the reasoning which leads seemingly-ordinary people to do extraordinary things, such as armed robbery or murder. This is an unusual, engrossing piece of story-telling.
Part One opens with Dell, age 15, living in Great Falls with his parents and twin sister, Berner, physically older by 6 minutes and psychologically and emotionally older by a couple of years. There is never any doubt about where this story is headed; as Dell explains his parents to us, describes their backgrounds and his own childhood, he will include bits written by his mother in jail, a journal she entitled “Chronicle of a Crime Committed by a Weak Person.” But it’s heart-breaking, made all the more tragic by our knowledge of the inevitability of the robbery. This is a case where foreshadowing deepens anticipation. “I never saw them again,” Dell tells us several times of his parents, once they are arrested and taken away. Dell was hoping to put down roots in Great Falls, after a childhood spent moving about thanks to his father’s Air Force career. He was excited about starting high school, joining the chess club, bee-keeping.
His mother feels bad for her kids, and makes arrangements for them to be taken out of Montana so as to avoid orphanages. Berner runs away before that can happen, but Dell, always the more compliant of the two, the more likely to observe than act, ends up in the middle of nowhere in Fort Royal, Saskatchewan. His only belongings in a pillowcase, put under the charge of one Arthur Remlinger, a man with a shady past and secrets to hide, Dell finds himself not in school at all, working at Arthur’s hotel, staying on his own in a two-room shack with only a privy. There he meets a variety of people, from the “Filipino girls” (not Filipino at all, but local girls pulled into prostitution) to the American businessmen there for the geese shooting, to Charley, a rough individual who barely tolerates Dell’s presence.
Dell is in many ways an anti-hero, a somewhat passive observer who is pulled about by forces out of his control, which surely isn’t unusual for a child his age. One can’t help but contrast his father, Bev Parsons, with the character of Arthur Remlinger, who at one point introduces Dell as his son, both of them looking at Dell to see some reflection of themselves, both of them making choices to commit crimes and somehow expecting Dell to understand and forgive.
Extremely well-written, Canada is a book that looks at the chaos lurking behind each human soul, and at where pride and hubris can lead. This is a story of family and the ties that bind and loosen but don’t ever quite break, a story of innocence somehow retained in the face of evil.