A book review
The book review on Thomas King’s 2021 novel Sufferance originally published in Literally Literary.
“It’s only after Florence has gone back into the restaurant that I remember what I like best about fog. It comes out of nowhere, doesn’t make a sound, and as it forms, the rest of the world disappears.”
The ‘voice’ in Thomas King’s 2021 novel Sufferance is the narrator Jeremiah Camp. What he describes of a fog here a reader could also say about this extraordinary character who decided earlier in life to stop talking, and so throughout all 306 pages of this book he does not say a word. What we know about him is what he tells us in his thoughts. When characters ask him questions, his response is silence.
He just fills in the space around them — and us — with his presence and the rest of the world seems to disappear. And as it disappears, the reader wanders through King’s fictional landscape of Cradle Rock Reserve and this curious tale about identity, race, greed, and truth and reconciliation.
Jeremiah is an extraordinary, perceptive character with a gift for “forecasting.” King somehow manages to combine a story about his work in an enigmatic multinational corporation called ‘the Locken Group’ and a final mysterious mission they seek him out to accomplish with the Indigenous community and its people where he lives, the mystery of crows and the dead in the graveyard of the former residential school where he lived.
Oh, and there is humour. A lot of wry, ironic and sarcastic commentary that we hear on almost every page of Jeremiah’s narration.
First, the crows.
Jeremiah introduces them early in the novel telling readers the story of a Saskatchewan farmer who once shot a crow. When other crows came to the injured bird’s defense — “So it would not die alone,” he says — the farmer would start picking them off. Eventually, he got “bored” and retired for the night, having killed more than 200 crows.
Over the next few weeks, the birds exact their revenge. First, they cover his truck and farm equipment in crow shit. Then, one day when he is away, they pick up rocks and drop them from a great height onto his greenhouse, smashing the glass panels. A few days later when the farmer was away in town, the crows flew through an open window into his house, tore at his furniture and smashed the Hummel figurines he had bought his wife. The crows “wreaked havoc” on the farmer’s life for the next two years.
“Crows see everything, and they remember everything,” Jeremiah says. “They can be the best of friends, but they do not forget. And they do not forgive.”
King expertly tells a tale of Jeremiah and his tight-knit small community of people like Florence Holder who runs the Piggy, a cafe housed inside a former bank. The reader gets to know and admire these characters as we observe their daily lives, and to is repelled by the likes of ‘Mayor Bob’ of the town of Gleaming. I was especially moved by the close connection between Jeremiah and the young girl Lala who calls him “Pop-Up” and who sometimes accompanies him, as he works to commemorate the dead in the graveyard at the former residential school where he lives.
Jeremiah sets out early in the novel to remove the white crosses that mark the graves of the former students and replace them with stone markers. He plans to pile the crosses and set them on fire.
They are powerful scenes and one in particular is described with a certain dark, poetic precision of writing.
“The cross that marks Jacob Potts’s grave is rotted, and it breaks off when I try to pull it out. When this happens, I take the time to dig up the rest of the stake. I could ignore it, but I would know that the end of the stick is still in the ground, like a knife in a wound.
“I should have brought my shovel with me. I try to dig the rest of the stake out with my hands, but it’s buried too deep, and the ground is still hard. I drop the stone next to the hole as a reminder of what I need to do.
“Then I move on to the next cross.”
The title Sufferance comes from the mission that Jeremiah is given. Locken Group heir Ash Locken and her creepy henchman Oliver Flood, seek him out once again to solve a mystery about the possible murders of 12 billionaires. A list that Jeremiah is given ends with the cryptic line: “We Exist at the Sufferance of Others.”
We learn about this shady ultra-rich cabal, including Ash’s father who was on a quest for immortality. But she tells Jeremiah at one point that the “issue” with the dozen billionaires — is King playing on Jesus’s disciples? — wasn’t immortality.
“The issue was a small group of men and women, individuals and families with such vast resources and privilege that they imagined themselves to be separate from society, invulnerable and invincible. The issue was individuals who were determined to reshape the world with no regard for the well-being of the rest of humanity or for the health of the planet, with no regard for the concept of balance.”
In another writer’s hands, this conspiracy theory plot may seem far fetched. Just like another writer would not be able to present a narrator who doesn’t speak.
Thankfully, Thomas King is more than capable of pulling off all that and more and presenting us with a very fine novel indeed.
Claudio D’Andrea 2024
Claudio D’Andrea has been writing and editing for newspapers, magazines and online publications for more than 30 years and has published a book of short fiction, Stories in the Key of Song. Visit him at claudiodandrea.ca or read his stuff on LinkedIn and Medium.com and follow him on Twitter (now X).
Claudio D'Andrea 
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