The Back of the Turtle

Thomas King’s The Back of the Turtle is a lengthy but wonderfully crafted story containing a not-so-subtle environmental plea which aims to force even the strongest non-believers of climate change to re-evaluate their actions and their relationship with environmentalism.

King’s novel involves themes of reconciliation, healing, guilt, and forgiveness. The Back of the Turtle invites us to follow the narrations of Gabriel, Mara, Crisp, Sonny and Dorian, each of whom struggle with the concept of healing. The novel revolves around ‘The Ruin’, an ecological disaster that has shaped each of their lives. Guilt and remorse haunt both Gabriel and Mara, and they continue to struggle with their own insecurities and memories throughout the novel. Forgiveness and growth guide Sonny’s journey as he wanders through the town seeking purpose. Meanwhile Dorian, the CEO of Domidion, refuses to feel guilty for his company’s failures and mistakes, only perpetuating the unpleasant stereotype of the heartless business-man.

King weaves an intricate story that slowly burns for just over 500 pages. Each chapter gives readers a back and forth perspective from character to character, keeping the book fresh as readers slowly discover details surrounding the ecological disaster that took placed, and how each character is tied to it.

Throughout the story, King utilizes an Indigenous creation story as a thematic backdrop for environmentalism. In the middle of the novel, Mara, one of the Indigenous characters, tells the story of ‘the woman who fell from the sky’. In short, this is the story of how the earth was created on the back of a turtle as various sea creatures attempted to bring mud to the surface of the water. From this mud, the woman was able to create land for her twins. These twins, one representing chaos and the other representing order, would shape the earth in harmony with the animals and with the woman.

This creation story does not solely feature ‘the woman’, but intersects with the characters of ‘the twins’ and ‘the animals’. It is a story that encourages mindfulness, and demonstrates how environmentalism can be, should be, and must be synonymous with material feminism and intersectionality. Everyone, every global citizen cannot escape or ignore their connection with and reliance on this earth. King emphasizes this as the small town where Mara, Crisp and Sonny live, seems to be dying in the post-‘Ruin’ setting.

Multiple characters share a symbolic ‘pairing’ Dorian and Gabriel, Sonny and Crisp. Each pair symbolically shifts which one is which twin throughout the novel. Dorian, for example, comes across as the chaos twin as the CEO of the company that manufactures harsh chemicals and sells them, until the reader learns about Gabriel’s role in “The Ruin’. Crisp has a playful and impish quality, and yet his actions seem to corral a sense of order to his community.

King attempts to subvert the association of nature to resource, insisting that nature is not just a commodity. Instead, King forces readers to shift perspective and understand that nature is a being of its own, one that needs to be reconciled with.

King also wants readers to consider how to heal and reconcile together as Canadians; the ecological disasters in his novel are not fully fiction, and as he clearly addresses, it is our reservations and Indigenous peoples who are often affected by these environmental nightmares. In order to heal, we must first learn, understand, and accept our history and our past.

The novel does have a ‘hopeful’ ending, which after enduring the ecological disasters feels unsatisfying or cheap. The wrap-up feels fast and ‘too nice’, but I want to question the intentions of such a ‘happy ending’. After absorbing such strong political and environmental messages throughout the entirety of the novel, I debate whether or not the ending has satirical value. King gives us an ending that seems pleasant, but after witnessing all of the events leading up to it, he forces the reader to question the reality of such a possibility. Is reconciliation really that simple? The answer is, NO. In life, the strings do not always get tied up nicely, and it can take years of slow progress before we may actually see real change. I appreciate King’s effort to educate in regards to environmentalism throughout the novel, and I hope that his ending (which seemed to wrap up in the last five chapters - out of 99) was meant to give the readers whiplash, causing them to question how something so grandiose (ie. climate change) could ever have a ‘simple fix’. I am not implying that the novel was solved with a deus ex machina to heal the earth, but it just seems a little too convenient.

King successfully makes us question this process of reconciliation. The ending of the novel made me question how our story - our relationship with the earth, and our reconciliation as Canadians - how can it really happen? It must happen slowly, with patience and persistence.

Sonic Approved