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Wow, ok, that was not what I was expecting, I imagined a story that starts with a man out hunting and then in the style of , fatally shooting his nephew who happens to have deer coloured hair and be wearing a deer coloured t-shirt to develop in far darker directions, but this is like The Winter's Tale a story of family reconciliation (but without statues coming to life or the return of daughters abandoned on the coast of Bohemia), perhaps stronger, it is a book about the construction of a family principally around the eponymous hero., and perhaps by extension it is a manifesto in the form of a fable for the creation or recreation of the Ojibwe people.

I assumed given the themes of violence, trauma, addiction, that this would be a rural noir, - you know once upon a time the countryside was full of sturdy peasants with rosy cheeks, dancing as though only Brueghel was watching, the rural was the repository of virtue, purity and innocence, natural overtime this has been inverted in Art - think of the film Deliverance - now the countryside is as likely to be a wasteland of pretty crime, incest and the legacy of historical abuse. But in this book the cities offer no salvation, they are equally savage, just in their own civilised way. The opening put me in mind of Disgrace and I sensed a related dynamic that some kinds of injuries cannot be addressed through conventional punishment or financial compensation, but only through sacrifice as restorative justice, but Erdrich goes off in a different direction to have her cake and eat it.

Again I assumed that what we were seeing was the impact of the forked tongue white man, Columbus landing every day, turning the world upside down, first with alcohol and firewater, later with prescription drugs. But when a character articulates this view it is the 'loveable rogue' Romeo who gets by through leveraging jobs and relationships to steal medications, he is one of the two only Republican voters in the story a figure of fun who is caught with his zip undone before gorging himself on mislabelled medications which gives him a powerful priapic erection at the same time as giving him an unforgettable laxative effect. This is not a character that we are meant to take entirely seriously. Over time I felt he is a Coyote figure from folklore, a mischievous trickster, who causes chaos, but who can give rise to wisdom.

Huh, said LaRose. So what's the moral of this story?
Moral? Our stories don't have those!...
...It is about getting chased, said Ignatia, with a long suck on her oxygen. We are chased into this life. The Catholics think we are chased by devils, original sin. We are chased by things done to us in this life.
That's called trauma, said Malvern.
Thank you, said Ignatia. We are chased by what we do to others and then in turn what they do to us. We're always looking behind us, or worried about what comes next. We only have this teeny moment. Oops, its gone!
What's gone?
Now. Oops, gone again.... (pp.344-5)

It is not then for me a tale of historical trauma at the family or national level, but a saga about reconciliation and the (re)creation of a people. The old people gather round to throw their scraps of traditional practise into the young figure of LaRose, but this feels like more than an act of salvage, a new identities are being created just as La Rose unifies the two families traumatised at the beginning and brings them more than together. You can't replace a dead child, nor resurrect a people, but this novel says and is engaged in doing - you can make something new. If at the beginning there is a sense of the alien, of these people as not part of the USA, despite the absence of foreign embassies, it's own place, by the end it seems that accommodation and belonging are possible in a way that feels a natural outgrowth of the development of the characters.

By contrast the novel's second known Republican voter, the Catholic priest Father Travis, a former marine traumatised from being injured during the Beruit barracks bombings can only ever go backwards, to a cult of physical perfection, to his loss, to his fallen comrades, creation for him has ended, there can only be the finality of death.

To me this was more a fable arising from a particular community and addressed to it, as an unforeseen outsider, it did not feel entirely compelling as a novel to me, things work out well maybe in a way that is truly novelistic, but a little more gently than I found believable (perhaps I felt this because of the omniscient narrator, which distanced me from the characters). The authorial voice whispers all shall be well, all shall be well, all manner of things shall be well.