Two books on broken pasts and forgetting hurt

Shame can be crippling. 

Shame keeps Eldon Starlight clinging to the dark depths of the bottle. It is the black void into which he repeatedly throws any chance of a relationship with his son.

And then, as he is dying of liver failure, he asks his estranged 16-year old son Franklin to take him on a journey of redemption.

Richard Wagamese’s Medicine Walk is about dealing with a broken past and moving forward to a healed future.

Eldon wants his son to take him on horseback through the mountain wilderness to a ridge facing east. He wants his son to bury him in the warrior way. Franklin can’t conceal his disgust:

“You ain’t no warrior.”

But he is a good young man, and he can’t deny his father.

The journey gives Eldon a chance to tell his story. It is a story on one level of the pain, hardship and heartbreak Eldon has endured.  It is also a collective story about loss of identity and the severing of cultural ties.

Medicine Walk is about the power of story.  When Eldon meets the woman who will be Franklin’s mother, she asks him to share his story, his past, with her.  He simply can’t:

“Mosta the big talk in my life got unsaid … I never told no stories.”

She replies: “You should. When you share stories you change things.”

But Eldon keeps everything buried until he is dying on a mountain ridge with his son.  It is too late for him, but his final stories are a chance for Franklin to start filling in the ghosts of his past, laying them to rest, and moving on.

Wagamese has written an exceptionally powerful book about the importance of connection between generations. And about what is lost when stories, both personal and collective, are forgotten, repressed or buried.

While Wagamese’s book is rooted in the beautiful realism of the Canadian wilderness, Kazuo Ishiguro tackles similar themes in the fantastical mists of 5th century England.

Axl and Beatrice, an elderly couple, decide to journey to a distant village to visit their son.  But their memories of him are elusive.  The memories come and go and seemed locked behind a fog. 

This fog covers all the land.  No one in their village remembers the past, and events slip away even as they happen.

On their journey, the couple encounters a Saxon warrior, ogres and an elderly knight who served under King Arthur.  Their journeys intertwine and they end up on a mission to slay a dragon.

Axl and Beatrice are faced with a decision: do they risk reversing the spell that has stolen their memory? They live in ignorant bliss as a loving, devoted couple. Do they want to dig up the memories that shimmer below the surface, memories of hurt, fights and infidelity?

Ishiguro is not just writing a fable about love and aging, he’s also writing about the collective decision to “forget” painful and ugly chapters in our cultural history as well.

In The Buried Giant, it is bloody-wrought peace between the Saxons and Britons that depends on people forgetting. 

The book is poetic and the metaphors are clear. When Sir Gawain talks about the victims of war buried across the country, he clearly has a deeper meaning:

“Here are the skulls of men, I won’t deny it. There an arm, there a leg, but just bones now. An old burial ground. And so it may be. I dare say, sir, our whole country is this way.  A fine green valley. A pleasant copse in the springtime. Dig its soil, and not far beneath the daisies and buttercups come the dead … Beneath our soil lie the remains of old slaughter.”

But both books remind us, ultimately, nothing stays buried.