hwaprofile.blogg.se

The crisis, whatever it is, isn’t due to a Canadian province cutting off the reserve’s connections to the grid, but something more significant and ominous. Two young men attending school in the closest developed town return to the community a few weeks after the first outage, and they offer a sketch of the crisis as the outside world experienced it: food and water running out, insulin-dependent students dy­ing, eventual rioting and desperation. Rice never reveals what has happened to make the power and communication grids go down. The band’s interdependency is a major aspect of the novel, because, in extreme circumstances, interdepen­dency becomes a means of survival. The winters are extraordinarily long and harsh. A few hundred of Evan’s people live on the reserve, which is a nearly self-sufficient community, particularly thanks to traditional hunting and fishing. In America, it would be the reservation of a Na­tive American tribe.) The actual location is not specific, but the reserve is many miles from the nearest developed town. (Since Rice is Cana­dian, some of his terms might be unfamiliar. That location is the reserve for a First Nations band in northern Canada. But the story, one of survival, is terrifically powerful, a familiar nar­rative told in an unfamiliar location. It’s a simply written book, almost leaning to YA in its slow, deliberate sentences and plain vocabulary. The main character, Evan, is developed only to the extent he must be, and the language forgoes decoration and lyricism almost entirely. The remote community must fend for itself, and build a new way of life from the remains of the old. No one knows why, and no one arrives to explain. The trucks delivering groceries don’t come. First phones go down, and then TV and radio, and then power. Rice isolates and stretches this moment, setting his novel in a remote community and giving the story several months to unfold. It’s not a preface to apoca­lypse, and it’s not the postscript it takes place during the moment in which a society realizes that one kind of life is over, and another kind of life is going to be the norm. Moon of the Crusted Snow is a book on the cusp.