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Book Reviewed by:Born on the tundra in the 1950s, Victoria knows nothing but the nomadic life of the Inuit until, at the age of ten, she is diagnosed with tuberculosis and evacuated to a southern sanitarium. When she returns home six years later, she finds a radically different world, where the traditionally rootless tribes have uneasily congregated in small communities. And Victoria has become a stranger to her family and her culture.
In Rankin Inlet, a small town bordering the Arctic Ocean, the lives of the Inuit are gradually changing. The caribou and seals are no longer plentiful, and Western commerce has come to the community through a proposed diamond mine. Victoria Robertson wakes to a violent storm, her three children stirring in the dark. Her father, Emo, a legendary hunter who has come in off the land to work in a mine, checks to see if the family is all right. So does her Inuit lover, as Victoria’s British husband is away on business.
Thus the reader enters into the modern contradictions of the Arctic—walrus meat and convenience food, midnight sun and 24-hour satellite TV, dog teams and diamond mines—and into the heart of Victoria's internal exile. Born on the tundra in the 1950s, Victoria knows nothing but the nomadic life of the Inuit until, at the age of ten, she is diagnosed with tuberculosis and evacuated to a southern sanitarium. When she returns home six years later, she finds a radically different world, where the traditionally rootless tribes have uneasily congregated in small communities. And Victoria has become a stranger to her family and her culture.
At first glance the title of this exceptional first novel would seem to refer to the common name for tuberculosis, so named because the infection appears to consume people from within. However, as the novel progresses, consumption takes on a different meaning as we see the Inuit way of life and even the land they live on being consumed by "civilization" and the quest for profit...continued
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(Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).
Rankin Inlet (picture)
has a population of about 2,200.
It is located on the 63rd
parallel on the west shore of
Hudson Bay (map)
approximately 1,100 miles north
of Winnipeg in the recently
formed territory of Nunavut,
which was officially separated
from the Canadian Northwest
Territories in April 1999.
A Short History of the Inuit
According to
nunavut.com, the history of
the Inuit begins in the southern
Bering Sea (North Pacific)
where, about 2 to 3,000 years
ago, an ancient ...
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