Thrice Upon a Time

Marjorie Retzleff teaches English at Champlain Regional College in
Lennoxville, Quebec.

A novel’s title is important: it must suggest the book’s essence and
also appeal to the reader. “Thrice Upon a Time” does suggest the
work’s three-faceted conflict, but it is an irritating play on the
opening line of fairy tales. It was a poor choice and implies a lack of
good editorial advice, a failing that goes beyond the title into the
novel’s structure. A mixture of themes (history, mystery, Indian
legend, feminism, and race relations) is recounted in a mixture of
literary devices (narrative, letters, diaries, poetry, and even a
tapescript)—more than a short novel should have to cope with. These
all combine to tell the story of four-week-old Gitrhawn, whose mother
has put her adrift in a canoe with a large manuscript containing her
family’s history. Unravelling the mystery of the baby’s identity
forms the substance of the novel.

The first parts are by far the strongest; a lively, detailed
“herstory” of British Columbia in the 1860s, including the
brideships, the Cariboo Trail, and the Barkerville Gold Rush. This is
the setting for the story of Laura Browler (a bride) and Henry Stewart
(an orphan who becomes a murderous adventurer); they are the
great-great-great-grandparents of Gitrhawn and the parents of Catherine,
whose two children (one by her husband and one by her Indian lover) form
the two branches of the family that are reunited in the abandoned baby.
Catherine’s experiences, like those of her mother, are gripping and
innovative views of nineteenth-century frontier women’s lives.

Unfortunately, the last parts of the book, the modern events, fall
flat. The story of Elise, the baby’s mother, is wordy, abstract, and
self-indulgently introspective. Elise believes that by abandoning her
baby she is somehow fulfiling her family destiny and bringing a legend
to life. She does not engage our sympathies, and her motives are
unconvincing. Gunn would have done better to concentrate on the
nineteenth century and leave the modern musings to other writers.