Wild Geese by Martha Ostenso

As she jogged along in the cart, her eyes idled across the flat, unsurprising earth that went on and on into the north with scarcely a perceptible undulation. Here was the bush land, without magnificence, without primitive redundance of growth, here was the prairie, spare as an empty platter -- no, there was the solitary figure of a man upon it, like a meagre offering of earth to heaven. Here were the little wood trails and prairie trails that a few men had made on lonely journeyings, and here the crossings where they had met to exchange a word or two. The sky above it all was blue and tremendous, a vast country for proud birds that were ever on the wing, seeking, seeking. And a little delicate wind that was like a woman, Jude thought to herself, but could in a moment become a male giant violating the earth.

The prairies of Manitoba: Lind Archer, having recently taken a job as a village schoolteacher, arrives to live with the Gare family. She finds them all--sons Martin and Charlie, daughters Ellen and Judith, wife Amelia--cowering under the thumb of the malicious Caleb Gare, a man who cares about nothing beyond his farm. Caleb has no intention of allowing any of his family to leave the farm; he wages a kind of psychological warfare against each one to keep them tied to the land, to enrich himself by holding onto their labor. For his wife Amelia, it means threatening to reveal that she is really the mother of the dashing young caretaker Mark Jordan, who believes he is the son of deceased gentlefolk. For daughter Ellen, it means keeping her away from her beau, Malcolm. Ellen submits meekly, but Judith has no intention of being like her sister: she, at least, fights her father at every turn.

Wild Geese, as I understand it, is a classic of "Can-Con." It won some kind of prize for its portrayal of the small farming villages of northern Manitoba, filled with Anglo farmers like the Gares, but also Hungarians, and Icelanders. At its best, it its reminiscent of Willa Cather's version of the American prairie, another remote outpost that turns out to be, in its own strange way, a crossroads of the world. In fact, Wild Geese seems to ask the question of what kind of place the Manitoba prairie will become: is it a land where Catholic Hungarians, Nordics, English settlers, and Cree Indians come together to create villages, governed by shared law and custom? Or is it a place where the law of the small stakeholder rules, where Caleb Gares go to exert their will on their dependents as much as the land, remote from the eye of the church and the law? (Wild Geese is actually a muddled book in this regard, as evidenced by Caleb's rather unbelievable assertion that he will have Judith tried in Winnipeg for tossing an axe at his head--though it rings true that the devilish Caleb would use law for his own ends, when possible.)

Wild Geese is reminiscent of Cather, but it hardly comes near Cather's Nebraska novels in quality. It resembles a lot of early 20th century fiction--including some novels of Cather's, to be fair--in its love of sheer melodrama. (Edna Ferber might be an even better American analogue.) Wicked Caleb is the book's most interesting and enduring creation, and the headstrong Judith is second, but the whole novel balances on an implausible secret of questionable import. Even allowing for the customs of a different time, it's hard to imagine the secret that Caleb hangs over the head of Amelia--that Mark Jordan, having recently attached himself to the beautiful schoolteacher Lind, was born out of wedlock--mattering all that much in the end. In fact, this "secret" seemed so weak that I kept waiting for some other secret to emerge, thinking that it couldn't be the entire story. The best part of the whole thing is probably when Judith throws that axe at Caleb's head, but such moments are few and far between. The ending, in which--spoiler alert--Caleb dies in a fire, sucked into his own precious mud, trying to save his flax, works more on a symbolic level than a practical one.