A Dream Like Mine

Ronald Conrad is a professor of English at Ryerson University in
Toronto.

M.T. Kelly’s third novel, winner of the 1987 Governor General’s Award, is a complex blend of elements. Cast in the form of adventure fiction, it quickly becomes a study in ambiguity. The narrator, a Toronto reporter, has always hated corporate pollution of nature and of native peoples. He has read obsessively of injustices by conquistadors to the south, and by later colonizers in the north. He views the mercury poisoning of Grassy Narrows as particularly obscene. But when a reporting assignment to an Ojibway reserve near Kenora turns into the kidnapping of an actual polluter, his allegiance is tested. Our unnamed narrator is torn between Indian avenger and white victim, between eco-terrorist and paper mill executive.

As an eye is gouged out, a tendon cut, brains splattered and a finger severed, our uneasy liberal becomes an unwilling accomplice to both men. And as we react to the seemingly gratuitous violence, we are constantly reminded that it is no more gratuitous than the centuries of deliberate genocide against native peoples that form the background and the reason for this narrative.

Like Brian Moore in his Jesuit novel Black Robe (1985), Kelly poetically evokes the North as a landscape of dread, as a dream-like void that echoes the void of the human heart. But in other ways, A Dream Like Mine is rough around the edges. Many small infelicities man the style. Both Arthur (the alcoholic Indian) and his opposite, Bud (the hefty and authoritative manager), are exaggerated into stereotype. Sub-plots begin, then end without issue. And in places the novel turns to essay; characters shrink into mouthpieces that preach opposing views of life.

Yet the whole exceeds the sum of its parts: despite the flaws, A Dream Like Mine is disturbingly powerful. In the vein of Rudy Wiebe, who elevated the events surrounding Riel, Dumont, and Big Bear into myth, M.T. Kelly has transcended mere information to magnify into its proper scale Ontario’s conflict of industry vs. nature and those who live in nature.