Book Review on Kiss of the Fur Queen

Introduction

The novel opens in 1951 with Abraham Okimasis's victory in "The World Championship Dog Derby," a major dog-sled race. Part of his prize is a kiss from the winner of a local beauty pageant, a young white woman with the title of Fur Queen. This touch of white culture indelibly marks the lives of Abraham's sons, Jeremiah and Gabriel, who grow into acclaimed artists attempting to work within white, European traditions while retaining the influence of Native culture. The novel follows the boys from the idyllic innocence of their Cree childhood through a forced relocation to an abusive residential school to their lives as young artists attempting to discover how far their natural talents can take them (www.quillandquire.com). Highway frankly depicts the abuse of Native students at the hands of the Catholic priests who run the residential schools, but falls short of overt condemnation. This startling material is tempered, in a remarkably skilful manipulation of prose, by an almost complete lack of editorial intrusion by the sympathetic narrator.

Discussion

Kiss of the Fur Queen ultimately deserves to be a few hundred pages longer. Highway's discussions of racism, homosexuality, and cultural awkwardness toward the end of the novel would seem less like sociological set-pieces if he took more room to fully explore the complexities of these issues, which, in turn, would add even more life to two already compelling characters. Kiss may fall short of the near perfection of Highway's acclaimed plays, but it is a remarkably good first novel.

When does a novel of fiction become 'too' autobiographical? Is there a line in the sand that cannot be crossed, a line that separates the purely imagined from stark reality? If there is such a line, celebrated Canadian author Tomson Highway dances on its edge many times over, in his alternately humorous and harrowing novel KISS OF THE FUR QUEEN.

Kiss of the Fur Queen, Cree playwright/pianist Tomson Highway's debut novel, is the story of champion dog-sled racer Abraham Okimasis and his sons Jeremiah, a pianist, and Gabriel, a dancer. As the brothers journey from northern Manitoba to residential school and then to Winnipeg, a mysterious trickster figure - the Fur Queen - plays witness to their lives. The resulting story is about sibling rivalry and sibling love, and the effects of re-education and religious conversion on one family's existence.

In Cree cosmology, children choose their parents. Highway's depiction of the brothers' trap line births are among the most haunting and evocative pieces of writing to ever appear in Canadian literature. The playful yet hallowed tone of these early passages is pure magic. It is impossible to dislike a book that brings a reader to tears (twice) by page 33 (Highway 27-305). Inexplicably, the brothers' characters stop developing about halfway through the novel. And the women are one-dimensional, assigned to roles as mother or clown or tough girl or victim, but never a realistic combination thereof. The considerable strengths of this novel do prevail, however. Highway's descriptions of life on ...