The Gates of the Sun

William Blackburn is a professor of English at the University of
Calgary.

If Canada were an imaginative truth instead of a political fiction, then the Oglala warrior Tashunka Witko (Crazy Horse) would be a great Canadian hero. When pressured to assent to the sale of the Black Hills to the United States, Crazy Horse replied that “one does not sell the earth upon which the people walk.” What he meant, at least in part, is that nobody owns the earth — a sentiment which lies at the heart of Sharon Butala’s novel The Gates of the Sun.

It is the story of Andrew Samson, a fatherless lad, who grows up early and becomes a cowboy in Saskatchewan. Andrew’s life is an unending struggle with the harshness of his fellow men and the land he loves, as he fights to build and hold a ranch of his own.

In spirit, The Gates of the Sun is often reminiscent of the work of Frederick Philip Grove. This story of a man cursed by his own courage and strength is episodic in nature; what holds it together is the love that Andrew — and the author — have for their land. It is a love free of sentimentality — Butala rigorously eschews all temptations to “fine” writing — as all true emotion withstands the temptation to parody itself.

At the end of his life, a puzzled Andrew reflects on the futility of his struggles, and concludes only that, “He was a human, that was all. He had grown old, he would die soon.” But that apparent futility is finally irrelevant; as the old Indian death song has it: “Only the earth and the sky endure forever.” Andrew Samson’s triumph is to share a brief measure of that endurance; and Sharon Butala’s triumph is that, unlike her protagonist, she finds a way of sharing her love for the land and the people of Saskatchewan in The Gates of the Sun.