Book Review - 'Three Day Road' by Joseph Boyden

‘Three Day Road’ by Joseph Boyden

While researching the life of Francis Pegahmagabow for my ‘Military Medal recipients’ series, I came across mention of this novel, which is Joseph Boyden’s debut novel.

‘It is 1919 and Niska, the last Canadian medicine woman to live off the land, has received word that one of the two boys she saw off to the Great War has returned.
Xavier Bird, her sole living relative, is gravely wounded and addicted to the army’s morphine. As Niska slowly paddles her canoe on the three-day journey to take Xavier back to his home, travelling through the stark but stunning landscape of Northern Canada, their respective stories emerge – stories of Niska’s life amongst her kin and Xavier’s horrifying experiences in the killing fields of Ypres and the Somme.
Niska realises that in the aftermath of war, Xavier’s soul is hovering somewhere between the worlds of the living and dead – but will the three-day journey home be enough to save him?’

In the ‘Acknowledgements’ Joseph Boyden states ‘I wish to honour the Native soldiers who fought in the Great War… I especially want to honour Francis Pegahmagabow, sniper, scout, and later chief of Wasauking First Nation…’

The story begins with Niska, an old Oji-Cree medicine woman, who has left the familiar surroundings of her home in the wilds of Northern Ontario to travel to a town she’s never been to before.

Like many of her native relatives before her, Niska long ago rejected European culture and all its trappings to live according to the traditions of her people.

She has made the journey to meet Elijah, her nephew’s friend; she’d seen the two boys off to fight in the Great War and had been told her nephew had died.

It is only when he steps off the train does she realise there’s been a mistake…
‘… he slowly makes his way down the steps on his crutches. He is an old man, I think. So skinny. This cannot be the Elijah I know… He looks up and I see his face, thin and pale, high cheekbones, and ears sticking out from beneath his hat… The ghost of my nephew Xavier looks at me.’

Her nephew, Xavier Bird, is very much alive.

Xavier is as shocked as she is, for he’d been told the previous year that she had died.

Niska wants to ask about Elijah but decides to wait until later.

She leads him away from the town to the river where he waits while she goes to fetch her canoe.

As she gets closer to him, she sees ‘that he has his jacket off and is holding his thin arm in one hand. I get closer and see that he has stuck something into his arm, something he pulls out just as he looks up and sees me. His body has gone relaxed and his eyes look guilty for a moment…’

Niska doesn’t say anything about it, and they begin their journey in the canoe, heading north away from the town.

That night, Niska comes awake in their tepee, and seeing that Xavier has remained outside in the rain, she realises he ‘has come home only to die.’

Interestingly, it is not only their journey home along the river that will take three days, but the road travelled by those ready for death is called ‘Three Day Road’.

As they begin their journey, Niska is determined to do all in her power to save Xavier.

She realises there is something more going on with Xavier than just his wounds and morphine addiction:
‘What happened over there has wrecked him. He thinks I don’t see him putting those needles in his arm. They are a part of what’s killing him. But something far worse is consuming Xavier from the inside. It’s this that I must figure out how to remove… This is a sickness I’ve not had to face before. I must figure out the right cure or I will lose him, and he’s the last of my family.’

And the way she does this is to recount stories of her life in the hopes that ‘maybe his tongue will loosen some’ for she eventually believes ‘that Xavier wants to talk to me. He goes so far as to let words come out of his mouth when he sleeps. He says very little when he’s awake. I’m not able to make out more than the odd sentence when he is sleeping, though…’

When the narration switches to Xavier’s perspective, we begin to learn of what happened to him.

Neither story unravels chronologically, and, for me, the non-linear narration was reminiscent of listening to someone verbally relate their story.

To begin with, I found Niska’s story more compelling as Boyden has enriched it with Cree culture and mythology; he’s also given her a strong but not overpowering voice.

Xavier’s story is revealed – only indirectly to Niska – through flashbacks each time he slips into the numbing embrace of the morphine.

Mainly through Xavier, we learn of his best friend, Elijah Whiskeyjack, and how, as they grew into young men, both perfected their tracking and shooting skills.

Craving adventure, they sign up for the War and are sent to Belgium where it isn’t long before their abilities are recognised, and they’re sent out as trackers and snipers.

Boyden doesn’t shy away from depicting the horrors of war, but it’s an honest depiction, not gratuitous.

‘This crater is deeper, but the bottom too is filled with water. The stench is horrible… Arms stick up from the pool of water, some with fingers curled like they are grasping something I cannot see. A few bare feet stick straight out of the water… rotted faces peek over at us. I see the eye sockets are empty and their lips have pulled back from their open mouths so that they look like they’re screaming.’

As Xavier and Elijah are sent on increasingly risky missions, the differences in their characters emerge, in the way each handles the pressure and almost unrelenting violence, and the growing admiration from their fellow soldiers.

Through Xavier’s memories, we see the choices ordinary men are forced to make to survive when thrust into awful situations.

As the story progresses, we get closer to finding out what happened to Elijah and why he hasn’t returned home with Xavier.

Near the beginning of the book, when the perspective first switches to Xavier, he doesn’t want to sleep because ‘the dead friends I don’t want to see come to visit. They accuse me of acts I did not perform. Of some that I did. We all acted over there in ways it is best not to speak of…’

And he knows what the morphine is doing to him:
‘… I can no longer live without the medicine, and in a few days there will be none left. Their morphine eats men. It has fed on me for the last months, and when it is all gone I will be the one to starve to death. I will not be able to live without it.’

It’s clear Boyden has done his research:
‘… we crouch and move along a communication trench that leads us to the front trench. The whistle of shells keeps our heads down… It is hard going. The bottom of the trench is covered in duckboards that keep our feet out of the mud and water that collects at the bottom… We were taught in training that everything happens at night. Digging and repairing, raids on enemy trenches, scouting and laying out of wire…’

‘Thompson does a lot of explaining… “You hear the thunk of a mortar land close to you, know you can run away from it if you’re quick. It’s the only bomb you can do that with. The big shells you can hear coming from a long way off… Now listen careful, boys, it’s the smaller shells, the whiz-bangs, that are the most damaging, the ones that sound like a mosquito whining in the distance. You hear that coming and you dive flat into the earth and bury your nose deep as you can into the mud.”’

Boyden’s style is easy, unfussy, which suits a war story and its atrocities, and the no-nonsense depiction of the life of Niska’s people, but I would have liked more beauty when he speaks of the wild Canadian land.

As for the characters, Boyden has done a good job with all of them.

I really liked Niska, especially her stories of a life alien to many, through which is interwoven Cree mythology.

While Niska is my favourite, I found Xavier a compelling character, with his quiet, introspective nature, and the two characters together are touching, their relationship almost like that of mother and son.

The third main character is Elijah; he featured almost as much as Xavier whose recollections revolve around his best friend.

Although larger-than-life, I didn’t really take to Elijah as there was something about him that just seemed to rub me the wrong way.

The other characters, especially the soldiers serving alongside Xavier and Elijah, are fleshed out enough that you get a sense of each of them, and they don’t all morph into one.

Seeing the war and its effects through the eyes of Xavier makes it more personal.

Having spent the night trapped behind German lines with their side not knowing they’re there, Xavier and his comrades make themselves a hiding place:
‘The brightness of late morning shines through the chicken wire and across my face… I stare up at the blue sky. Not a cloud, only the blue of morning. Small birds dart across the crater chasing one another. One swoops in and lands close to my head…For a while nothing moves. Pure silence. It’s not something I’m accustomed to any more.’

In the canoe with Niska, Xavier tells her:
‘So many dead men lay buried over there that if the bush grows back the trees will hold skulls in their branches… I saw it already. We once left a place covered in our dead. When we came back a few months later flowers redder than blood grew everywhere… They even grew out of rotting corpses.’

As ‘Storm of Steel’ showed us the war through the eyes of a German soldier, this book, although a work of fiction, gives us an idea of what the war might have been like for a Canadian Native American.

‘Three Day Road’ isn’t an easy read; what war story is? But it’s one I’m glad I’ve read.