Medicine River

Bert Almon is a professor of English at the University of Alberta and
author of Calling Texas.

King’s first novel deals skillfully and sympathetically with a Native
community on the prairies of Alberta. The town of the title is a mixed
community near a Blackfoot reserve. The narrator, Will, is half-white
and lives at the periphery of the Native community, though he is drawn
progressively deeper into it by his friend, Harlen Bigbear, a man of
enormous goodwill and nosiness. Bigbear is, in fact, more interesting
than the narrator, whose deliberately low-key approach to life (his
marginal role in both the white and Native communities has made him
detached) is plausible but a little dull. Will is another of the
standoffish photographer figures who are so common in Canadian fiction.
He photographs other people’s lives but is a little afraid to live his
own.

The novel juxtaposes a number of comic situations in the present with
events from Will’s childhood in Calgary and early manhood in Toronto.
The flashbacks are handled carefully and their relevance to the present
is clear but not overdone. The flashbacks aren’t as interesting as the
scenes in the present, situations that reveal the attitudes and problems
of contemporary Native societies without didacticism. The victories and
defeats of Harlen’s basketball team and the politics of the local
Friendship Centre provide plot situations and reveal the texture of a
social world that is influenced by outside forces, including the Indian
Affairs Department and racist attitudes, but not determined by them. The
style of the work is rather flat, in keeping with the narrator’s
passive and cautious attitude toward life. It would be good if King took
some chances in his next novel.