Off the Page

Up here in northern Ontario the hunting season has arrived. The evidence is unmistakable: a sudden proliferation of bright orange clothing, and, in the streets and roads, people talking excitedly about ‘sign’. Stripped of its ‘s’ and turned into a collective noun, sign stands for any evidence of an animal’s presence--scat, footprints, rubbed bark, a snapped twig--and in scrutinizing it, the hunter attempts to apprehend a narrative in the landscape: a story that will tell him what an animal has been doing and so, of course, where it might be. Like any decent novelist, the hunter is trying his best to engineer encounters, to reveal something otherwise hidden, to bring disparate lives into a brief--and sometimes fatal--moment of convergence.

It all reminds me of that literary hunter and tracker par excellence: James Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo. In one of the novels in which he features--The Pioneers, I think--Natty comes upon a clearing in the forest, and surveying a nearby valley finds mingled there “scenes of nature, signs of men”. It’s a resonant and memorable phrase (one of my professors at university used it as the title for an excellent book) in which the ‘sign’ on show provides proof of human settlement and occupation, and hence the ba …

Here at 49th Shelf, we're pretty big fans of Amy Jones's debut novel, We're All In This Together. It makes an appearance on our CAN'T FAIL Summer Reading list (in which we declared it "THE book to spend a whole day in a hammock reading while one is mildly hungover"), and don't miss Trevor Corkum's interview with Amy from last month for The Chat. 

With this list, Amy is determined to set Google straight when it comes to the query of "Books Set in Northern Ontario." And if the list is a sundae, her own book is surely the cherry on top.  

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The number one related Google search to “Books Set in Northern Ontario” is “Is Toronto in Northern Ontario?” The answer, of course, is no, but given Northern Ontario’s sheer size, it’s pretty much the only part of Ontario—along with a few other cities we like to refer to up here as “down south”—that isn’t. Equally massive is the number of books set in the region. Here are eight to start with.

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If I Fall, If I Die, by Michael Christie

Michael Christie’s debut novel about a boy raised by an agor …

When my first book, Crow Lake, came out, one reviewer commented that the landscape was so central to the story that it was to all intents and purposes another character. That’s how it felt while I was writing it too. All of my novels—including my latest, A Town Called Solace—are set in Northern Ontario, and the landscape is absolutely fundamental to them.

I don’t know if it’s a Canadian thing, or if people the world over are similarly drawn to the landscape they know well, but it seems to me that the wilder and more inhospitable the terrain, the more it gets its hooks into you. Similarly, when it comes to towns and cities, the more remote and restricting the place, the greater the effect it seems to have—at least, if you’re a writer.  

The books I have chosen below all have a powerful sense of place, either in terms of the landscape or of the community where they are set. In addition to that, they are all terrific reads!

I don’t know if it’s a Canadian thing, or if people the world over are similarly drawn to the landscape they know well, but it seems to me that the wilder and more inhospitable the terrain, the more it gets its hooks into you.

Mary Lawson

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