Billy Tinker

Geoff Hamilton, a former columnist for the Queen’s Journal, is a
Toronto-based freelance editor and writer.

Harold Johnson works for the Canadian Union of Public Employees and the
Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations. Set in a northern mining
camp, his first work of fiction is a novella that charts the title
character’s transformation from disaffected laborer to spiritually
aware opponent of environmental exploitation. It is a transformation
motivated by a traditional sweat lodge ceremony and hallucinatory
encounters with “little people.”

Johnson vividly evokes the details of life in an isolated mining camp:
the long and lonely workdays, the lurking violence in industrial
machinery, the antagonisms and politicking among the camp hierarchy, and
the dignity of labor (at least for some). While the magic realism of the
“little people” who preach of the contaminating influence of
civilization can be fun—they pop up in surprising ways and become
something like a socially engaged version of the Smurfs—the book’s
rather strong didactic strain makes for some dull reading by the end.
Billy’s perception of the “bleeding of Mother Earth,” wounded at
the hands of greedy potentates, sets up, rather too neatly, a good
versus evil worldview. There is also some misty-eyed revisionism from
Great Uncle Zach, who gives Native-Canadian history an Arcadian spin:
“Oh we had wars, or something like that. If another group of people
moved into your territory you tried to chase them away. Sort of saying
‘this is our space, we need this territory to survive.’”

What most impressed this reader is the book’s often very colorful
dialogue, as in the following response Billy makes to a fellow miner’s
inquiry about his hunger: “I could eat the asshole out of a dead
skunk.” That idiomatic excellence is not sustained throughout, but at
its best it is wonderfully memorable.