Paper Trees

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

Not very often does one read a book in which grammatical and stylistic
faults turn out to be virtues. Paper Trees has errors on every one of
its nearly 400 pages: subject and verb mix-ups, verb tense confusion,
stilted dialogue. Sinclair, himself a logger for more than four decades,
writes with all the subtlety of the runaway logging truck that plays an
important role early in the book. The manuscript has clearly never seen
the red ink of an editor’s pen. But in spite of—or, more accurately,
because of—this roughness, the story that tumbles out—a saga of
logging operations at the fictional Rainy Mountain camp near Prince
George, British Columbia—is as alive, vibrant, and richly discordant
as its owners and operators, the Morrow family.

Sinclair’s narrator and fictional counterpart is Byron Smith, a young
drifter who returns to Rainy Mountain after a nearly fatal accident to
become the operation’s de facto foreman. His efforts to avoid work and
responsibility have the perverse effect of sinking him more and more
deeply into the affairs of the idiosyncratic Morrow family. Even the
murder mystery spilling without warning from the book’s final
chapters, replete with sexual innuendo, avarice, and treachery, is no
real surprise given Byron’s predilection for intrigue and
problem-solving.

Serving as backdrop to the action is the very real situation in British
Columbia’s logging communities, in which forest operations are subject
to the government’s revised system whereby a company’s allowable
quota is dependent on the timber it manages to harvest.

If Paper Trees turns out to be Sinclair’s only book, it will be a
pity; his energetic and enthusiastic style makes one wish for a sequel.
Recommended for public libraries.