by Cherie Dimaline
ISBN 978-0-73552-7718-2
Note: This title is currently available in Canada and will be released in the US on July 28, 2020.
“Joan was anxious. She hated this cheap version of Victor, filled with so many lies. She couldn’t sit still any longer.”
It has been nearly a year since Joan’s husband Victor went missing from their land on the shores of Georgian Bay, but she refuses to give up hope, even as her family grows increasingly doubtful. Despite the fight they had the night Victor disappeared, Joan cannot really bring herself to believe that he has abandoned her. After a night of hard drinking with her cousin, Joan stumbles into a church revival tent in a Wal-Mart parking lot. At first she is unsure what drew her in, but when the preacher takes the stage, everything becomes clear in a moment. The man at the pulpit looks exactly like her missing husband, yet does not seem to recognize her at all. As far as he is concerned, he is the Reverend Eugene Wolff. But Joan knows her husband when she sees him, and despite the doubts of those around her, she will stop at nothing to extract him from the clutches of the travelling missionaries, and whatever powers they are using to keep Victor in their grasp.
Empire of Wild is told in alternating chapters, with Joan and Victor as the primary narrators. While Joan is bent on her quest to save her husband, Victor isn’t sure where he really is, or what has become of him. He just knows that something isn’t quite right. Dimaline also incorporates Joan’s nephew Zeus and community elder Ajean, as well as antagonists in the form of the mission’s leader, Thomas Heiser, and his right hand assistant, Cecile, a reformed hippie who has found God, and aspires to marrying the Revered Wolff.
In Empire of Wild, Cherie Dimaline takes the legend of the rogarou and blends it with the daily life of the Georgian Bay Métis community of rural Ontario. In all other respects, Joan’s life and family seem unremarkable, at least on the surface. But as the rogarou haunts her community, aspects of myth and magic slip between the cracks of daily life, revealing that Joan’s people are anything but ordinary. Among them, “girls are taught to fear the rogarou. Boys are taught to fear becoming him.” Violence against innocents and betrayal can bring on the transformation, and in this way the rogarou becomes a haunting metaphor for intergenerational trauma.
There is a certain disturbing aspect to the idea that Joan has to be the one to save Victor from his own darker impulses, and from the well-earned consequences of the betrayal he tried to press upon her in their final fight. Nor is this power she seems to possess entirely without consequence. Even the act of rescue can be fraught; sometimes when you try to save something, you risk destroying it by that very same effort. Increasingly, Joan’s family pays the price of her obsession. The death of Joan’s grandmother sends the family into mourning, and puts the community on high alert.
Although set in the present day, Empire of Wild has all the atmosphere of Dimaline’s post-apocalyptic hit The Marrow Thieves. There are dystopic elements, but they deal with the real, everyday infringement on Indigenous lands and dignity. What is cottage country for the summer people is home to Joan and her family, and they’ve had to fight for every inch of lakefront they control, with everything from tourism to pipelines threatening their home and their way of life. This real dystopia is only made more eerie by Heiser’s attempts to use Christianity to lure Indigenous people off their land, making for a charged, unforgettable atmosphere that truly makes this novel stand out.
Required Reading 