Growing up in Willowdale, Ont. in the 1970s, Joseph Boyden was an average kid - except for the fact that he had devoured the Encyclopedia Britannica, volume by volume, by the time he was eight.
"I don't know why I was so captivated," Boyden told CTV.ca. "But those books, plus my dad's stories about World War II, definitely instilled a love of history in me."
That sense of embracing the past is a core theme in "Through Black Spruce" (Penguin), the book that landed Boyden, a teacher of Canadian literature and creative writing at the University of New Orleans, on the 2008 Giller Prize shortlist.
The follow-up to his bestselling first novel, "Three Day Road," Boyden says, "I found out about the nomination the day I was starting on a 55-day book tour. The news made the tour a lot easier for me to do."
Boyden's tale centres on Will Bird, a Cree hunter and pilot with blood on his hands, and his young niece Annie who is searching for her missing sister and New York model Suzanne.
The alcoholic hunter recounts his painful, guilt-riddled past as he recovers from a violent attack.
His conscience and his soul are a spiritual wasteland that Will cannot easily escape. Yet Boyden beautifully echoes that hopelessness in the remote, snowmobile-tracked bush that surrounds Will as he lays in his bed grappling with his memories.
"I really felt a desire to write about First Nations people," says Boyden, whose ancestry is part M�tis, Micmac and Irish-Catholic.
A new way of looking at the power of history
"We always hear about the diabetes and the suicide rates among Canada's Native peoples. But there is such a beauty in them - and in the land. I wanted to get that across to people in this book," says Boyden.
The death of traditional ways of life is, without question, a running theme in "Through Black Spruce." As Annie, the book's other narrator, points out, the Cree inhabitants of their area have "gone from living on the land ... hunting, trapping, trading in order to survive, to living in clapboard houses and pushing squeaky grocery carts up and down aisles filled with overpriced and unhealthy food." They have, as Annie ironically puts it, become "civilized."
Restoration and redemption are also key themes Boyden skillfully mixes into this complex story. Throughout all the drama that unfolds Boyden lets the natural world be that one, hopeful channel that can slap the beaten Will back to life. Moreover, it is nature alone that has the power to help Will reconnect with his past and regain his family.
"It's a classic clich� but if you don't know your personal history you're doomed to repeat it," says Boyden. "For me history is right there on my shoulder looking at the world with me. It's there in how I engage with the world and what choices I make. We may think the past as something we don't need. But that's not true - not to my mind."
Throughout the book's tangled weave of inner and outer landscapes drugs, guns, sex, violence and the Manhattan fashion scene pepper the story lines that connect Will and Annie.
"I built Will on a real person I knew who had endured trials and tribulations in his life. But he turned it all around," says Boyden. "That's why I think of this story as a hopeful one. It doesn't just pertain to a Native family. It's about family everywhere. That message is universal."
