Elle

Trevor S. Raymond is a teacher and librarian with the Peel Board of Education and editor of Canadian Holmes.

In the 16th century, almost seven decades before Quebec became the first
permanent French settlement in Canada, an ill-fated attempt was made to
create a colony with three shiploads of settlers under the command of
New France’s first viceroy, the Sieur de Roberval. Off the coast of
Newfoundland, there occurred an incident that became blurred to history,
suffused with legend, and is now the inspiration for this book by Ottawa
novelist Douglas Glover. Tradition says that Roberval, in a fit of
anger, abandoned on an island—which was shunned by all ships because
it was believed to be the realm of malevolent spirits—a young woman,
Marguerite de La Rocque, who may have been his niece. Also marooned were
her lover and her nurse, both of whom subsequently died, as did a baby
born to Marguerite. After nearly three years of unimaginable privation,
during which she is said to have fended off wing-flapping demons and
shot three polar bears, she was rescued and returned to France. Glover
cites a number of historical and anthropological sources in his preface,
and then assures his readers, “I have tried to mangle and distort the
facts as best I can.”

The resulting novel is not a traditional narrative, but enriches the
plausible with imagination and myth—the woman lives for a period with
Natives and may or may not turn for a time into a bear. This highly
literate teenaged woman tells her own story, with allusions to classical
writers, and she has much to say, some of it quite witty, about the
problems posed by the spread of books, and even about the future of
literature in Canada. After her ordeal, she apparently lives with one of
the most celebrated authors of her day, the elderly Franзois Rabelais
(identified only as F.), whose bawdy style has clearly influenced her.
And there is a curious and somewhat haunting coda, set in the present,
involving a young woman who fantasizes about living with Indians and who
dreams of being a bear, and her much older lover, who is reading
Rabelais.