Life after death

>> Jim Harrison brings reincarnation,
incest and complex family ties together
beautifully in Returning to Earth

by JULIET WATERS

In Returning to Earth, a man is dying of Lou Gehrig’s disease at the age of 45. Married at 15 to the love of his life, Donald is already the deeply loved patriarch of his small family and an extended pack of lost souls who have become his clan.

Near death, Donald has agreed to tell his wife, Cynthia, his life story and family history, which she plans to transcribe and give to their two children, Clare and Herald, to Cynthia’s brother David and to David’s stepson Kenneth. It’s to K, as he prefers to be called, that Donald confesses his last wish: to be buried naked without a casket in a spot up in Canada where he once endured a three-day Chippewa vision quest.

Half native, half Finnish, Donald has kept his emotions and religious beliefs intensely private all his life. But unleashed and mildly demented, the story Donald tells is a narrative masterpiece, spanning three generations and teeming with history and soul. Donald’s one small regret is not taking advantage of the money his father saved up for him to go to college. “I just like to work hard but now I wish I had learned more about how the world works. There’s way too much I don’t understand.”

But here are the rare and amazing things Donald does understand: How to be a good father, a good husband and a good man without ever losing a devotion to justice, or give up on a plan to murder a childhood enemy who killed his puppy. How much is lost when we lose our first-hand knowledge of nature, both animal and human? And how much is gained by knowing something about why it is that ravens and bears often travel together in packs? They do this to share the food, since ravens, the most intelligent of all the birds (and, curiously, one of the few birds who mate for life) are carnivorous, but not predators. Donald hopes to be reincarnated as a raven, but after his death his daughter Clare believes that he’s come back as a bear.

The first section could stand as a brilliant novella on its own, but most of Returning to Earth is told after Donald’s death, from the point of view of three of the other characters who have fluttered around him like bright and hungry birds. There are times when they sound suspiciously like him, and like each other, a problem that can be attributed both to narrative flaws, or human ones, as we learn how deeply inter-dependent these character have become during Donald’s life.

K is the next narrative voice. In a twist of weird circumstance, K, who is technically Donald’s step-nephew, is closer to him in spirit and understanding than Donald’s own son. Herald is more like his uncle David, an intelligent but pallid misanthrope. David narrates the third section and is a man K describes aptly as “aggressively weak.” To get a sense of how much the narrative voices bleed into each other, Cynthia, who tells the final section of the book, describes her and David’s father as “aggressively useless.” But it would make sense that K sounds like Cynthia. It’s an open secret that he’s been in love with her most of his life, despite a 20-year age difference, and despite the fact that he’s also been sleeping with her daughter, his step-cousin Clare, for most of this time.

Yet it’s a casual incest we accept as a painful side effect of love deeply felt and a life deeply lived. “I never knew anyone who so thoroughly was what he was,” says Cynthia of her husband. It’s rare to read a writer who is able to capture life and death so thoroughly as it is, and so thoroughly as it should be.

RETURNING TO EARTH BY JIM HARRISON,
ANANSI, HC, 280PP, $29.95