Moon of The Turning Leaves by Waubgeshig Rice

A sequel I wasn’t expecting (and that maybe wasn’t needed?), this big Canadian hit of last year is a powerhouse of a post apocalyptic novel that really fucking delivers.

If you haven’t read Waubgeshig Rice’s 2018 novel Moon of the Crusted Snow, stop reading this right now and go order a copy.

That short novel – published, I believe, by an indie press rather than the Penguin Random House global conglomerate that brings you this sequel – is a biting, intense, brief, Wintry thriller set in an ordinarily isolated first Nations reservation over the Winter when… well… when the rest of the world ends…

That novel contains much ambiguity that remains hidden by not only the snow and ice but also by the physical distance from the cities to the South that have – according to the scattered white survivors who rock up begging sanctuary and causing plot and problems – gone to shit and ratchets up its intensity in a deeply resounding and memorable way.

I think it’s one of the books I’ve gifted the most times, and perhaps the only book I’ve gifted more than once that other people have actually read.

Moon of the Crusted Snow is (in my household at least!) considered a genre-defining piece, and should (again, it is where I live!) considered a piece of canonical and essential post-apocalyptic fiction on a par with Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Anna Kavan’s Ice (I really need to read more of her work!) and Nevil Shute’s On The Beach. (Please add your suggestions to this list in the Comments below (or disagree with my selection if you want… I haven’t read Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven but I’ve been told I’d probably also like it???))

Moon of the Turning Leaves, around 5 years in the making, is a sequel to that story, focusing on the same Anishinaabe community in Northern Ontario. It is now set a bit over a decade since the power lines, phone reception, governments, capitalism and any form of this currently recognisable society crumbled into the dust…

The community, though, has made a near-sustainable life up there – there’s fish and game and berries and – during the Summer thaw – vegetables and wild rice, but as time goes on it has become clear that there might not quite be enough resources to maintain things the way they have become…

There is a reason why this was the land the colonialists were happy to give up as reservations for the indigenous peoples they displaced, and there is a reason why those peoples historically moved with the seasons: after ten years, the lakes are getting depleted of fish, the deer know to avoid the hunters in this region and the berry trees aren’t producing as much as before… It has become time to move. But where can they go, now the world is not what it was?

After an extended set-up, a group of six people depart, aiming to head hundreds of kilometres south to the community’s ancestral homeland on the North shore of Georgian Bay – land they were forced from many generations ago.

The group of six contains two now middle/early middle aged guys (one newly a grandfather), a slightly older guy who’s the leader, a young married couple (who aren’t quite as developed as the rest of the group but that’s kinda fine as narratively they’re a smaller little unit within the group?) and the teenage daughter (and youngest child) of the new grandfather, who is basically the best person in the community with a bow and arrow and has all the right instincts for this new post-modern era. This teen was born before “society” collapsed, but only just – she is ultimately the main protagonist and, one perhaps feels by the end, the presumed protagonist of any future sequels Rice might choose to write…

On the walk south, there are the usual post-apocalyptic dangers and surprises: animals grown braver and unafraid of humans… evidence of ravaged landscapes blighted by fire… lack of medical treatments and blunt life or death choices in response to injury… Lack of food, lack of shelter … Unsettling maps and messages scrawled on the walls of abandoned buildings … Unexpected helpful strangers and – crucially, significantly and (again, in a way that feels like something that would come back in a later sequel) inevitably – a dangerous, highly organised, cruel, explicitly white supremacist and knowingly expanding militia of dickhead Americans who call themselves The Disciples who graffiti their logo – a cross transfigured to look like a gun – everywhere they have been…

nb: I will start explicitly discussing the plot below, so if you want to avoid that then don’t read on; summary thoughts are “intentionally demolishes the carefully wrought ambiguity of the previous novel (in which the end of the world could have turned out to be a con or a hoax), but this is a deeply satisfying, exciting, tense and moving post-apocalyptic novel whose flaws ultimately only get noticed because of comparisons to Rice’s earlier and (in my home at least) canonical novel…”

The group trek south, and Rice describes landscape beautifully and evocatively. The places they visit bounce between the wilderness – places where extractive capitalism barely got a footing (because it had decided it wasn’t worthwhile) – through to the abandoned and the re-wilding landscapes of highways, villages, small cities and luxury bolthole retreats…

It is trees and nature, it is cracks in the asphalt, it is wide expanses of water, but it is also threat, it is also risk and – when the group are ambushed by a group of the Disciples and have no apparent means of survival – potential redemptions when one of the villains turns an assault rifle on his own small group and massacres them in order to save the group of strangers, even beating one to death once his gun jams…

This, really, is where the novel becomes interesting, and though it doesn’t cop out and have this character – a white-passing part- Anishinaabe man who to save himself joined an explicitly white supremacist militia he stumbled upon in the world after this one and therefore took part in explicitly racialised violence and likely (at best witnessed) sexual violence as a weapon of war – get narratively redeemed by an act of heroic self-sacrifice or something, Rice doesn’t force him into the eternal punishment of having to live and try to build a new life with the guilt of his actions on his soul, as this man is killed before the narrative ends…

This man kills a bunch of white supremacists (violently!) and begs the protagonists to let him join their group (happily handing over his weapons) as they continue searching for their ancestral homeland. They are suspicious of him, but they do let him come along, never revealing to him the locations of the friendly people they have met en route and – of course – never telling them where their loved ones are in relative (if not eternal) safety to the North.

Rice maintains ambiguity (again) around this guy in a super satisfying way – is he a plant from the white supremacists who learned a little of a foreign language and a sob story and was willing to sacrifice some of his peers in order to gain the potential secrets of the land’s historic custodians???; is his story of his background true but will he still turn tail and go find more of the big white guys with big guns if and when he finds something worth finding with the Anishinaabe because he’s a disloyal slimy untrustworthy prick???; or is he a genuine new friend???

We never get to know, because when the group encounters some of The Disciples for a second time, one of them recognises their ex-brother and executes him, unceremoniously, dead.

A worse writer and a worse novel would have had this guy’s intentions and alliances made plain (whether he was a double agent or a remorseful person who did bad just to stay alive), but an exceptional novel would have forced this character to deeply confront, on a human level, his actions and their ethical and personal repercussions. This doesn’t happen either.

We are, though, left with the ambiguity around this character, and left too with the image of at least one of these Disciples escaping, alive, from the broadly victorious Anishinaabe, who do get a hopeful, optimistic and deserved happy (for now!) ending when they find their ancestral homeland and others who have resettled it.

What we’re not left with, though, is any ambiguity at all around the general state of play and significant fictional-historical events post the capitalistic world ending, as one of the friendly strangers the characters meet narrates in great detail over several pages the terms and the timelines of industrial, economic and governmental collapse following the solar flare-induced destruction of the North American power grid. This character explains where nuclear power plants melted down, where pockets of previously treatable disease spread and – crucially – where roaming gangs of heavily armed militias began to take control, all of which explains the bizarre markings on the sinister annotated map they stumbled on earlier in the book…

So, yes, the fictional world’s ambiguity is reduced. But in such a way that further sequels would (will?) become easier to construct because there are more fixed factors… Maybe it’s not as cynical as that, but (for me, at least) a definitive retelling of how this novel’s world ended wasn’t needed in order to make that fallen world feel believable… Or maybe it was needed. I dunno. Maybe it was needed. Or the writer just wanted to do it. And that’s fine. Who am I to judge??? (I am no one.)

–///–

Is Moon of the Turning Leaves as tight and as sharp as its predecessor? No. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t excellent, just that it isn’t as excellent as Moon of the Crusted Snow.

It’s moving, it’s exciting, it’s bleakly believable and Rice’s rich narrative descriptions mean that the places the characters walk through, alone, never feel empty, as of course they never are.

…Beautiful descriptive prose, a super engaging and exciting plot that grips to the last page…

It does shed ambiguity, yes, and two of the six main characters never quite coalesce into people as complex as the other four, and, yes, the pre-journey set-up at the beginning of the novel is paced in a very different (and much slower) way to the rest of the book, but these flaws aren’t major ones, and pointing them out feels like a waste of time.

It’s a great book, I definitely recommend it! …I just recommend Moon of the Crusted Snow more.