Olivier was a nameless, penniless boy sleeping on the docks when faced with the chance to go to America. He arrives to find himself in Acadia, one small portion of a vast country in which French and English colonial governments vie for power while their settlers struggle to coexist with the indigenous (primarily Mi’kmaw) inhabitants.
On the heels of recent explorations like Annie Proulx’s Barkskins, Phillip Daigle’s THE ACADIAN focuses not on English colonial ventures but French, in the modern Maritimes and Maine—settlements dominated less by pure agriculture and more by the fishing and fur trades. The way THE ACADIANinhabits this space isn’t necessarily surprising, but it is satisfying. The text is off like a shot with a Mi’kmaw raid on an English settlement (one of several set-piece battles) and tramps rapidly into the woods, buoyed up on solid evocation of historical detail—animal products, clothes and hairstyles, indigenous dice games, and even the particulars of a band of fur-trapping voyageurs all sleeping under one huge moose-skin blanket. The text also revels in its slower moments, with careful attention paid to the natural world, whether watching “the cold rolling on the chocolate-colored water in misty waves,” or how a lumber camp “[squats] in a fresh clearing like a wound in the forest.” These components of the story, closely observed and taken straight from history, are the cream of THE ACADIAN.
The text could use another round of line-editing, however. There are a few noticeable typos, including issues with missing or misplaced quotation marks. In one instance, there appears to be a copy-paste error in which the exact same paragraphs are repeated. In another, an unusual accent suggests a find-and-replace error: “whisPèred” and “prosPèred” appear a few times. Resolving these straightforward issues would smooth the reading experience and better conform to the overall sense of care in the text.
THE ACADIAN stumbles on larger storytelling concerns as well. The core narrative of the immigrant experience is solid, but the story makes some unusual stops along the way. An attack on a British fort is emblematic. Olivier is given charge of a sacred Mi’kmaw necklace, which seems to have spiritual power, and is tasked with recovering another stolen indigenous relic from a British soldier. But this “magical artifact” subplot feels heavily at odds with the rest of the book—if for no other reason than the fact that these magical artifacts show up for one episode in the story and have no bearing on the rest of it, but especially because they’re so much less interesting and less compelling than the core narrative’s emotional arc. Other subplots could also be easily axed, like an early non-starter of a doomed romance. This narrative trimming would strengthen the overall text and allow it to focus more on the characters and themes that work best.
Nonetheless, THE ACADIAN is still a fun, action-packed dive into a rich moment in the colonial history of the Americas.
Phillip Daigle’s THE ACADIANis a rich, exciting view on the complex colonial period of Acadian history.
~Dan Accardi for IndieReader