LEGENDS: A Book Review

Legends of the North Cascades 

By Jonathan Evison

     This is one of those books I wanted to like more than I did. Evison is at his best in his evocation of the wild mountain landscapes of the North Cascades in Washington State. The winter winds will chill your bones, you sink into the muddy surface of the meadows in the spring thaw, you hear the rush of streams, the call of birds… Such scenes transport you. All good.

    In the promising first pages of the story, the sudden accidental death of the protagonist’s deeply loved but end-of-her tether wife leaves Dave Cartwright the distraught father of Bella, his little five-year old daughter. A veteran of the Iraq war who suffers from PTSD (never named, but readily diagnosable for anyone paying attention to our recent history) he does everything he can to alienate those around him—and that includes this reader as I suspect many others.

    Angry at the world, rejecting anything that looks like sympathy or a desire to help, dismissive of social norms and the political circumstance alike, he heads off deep into the mountains to lead the life of an isolationist and survivalist. He takes his little girl with him. Bereft of her mother and deprived of the critical understanding of an adult, she adores him, obedient to his slightest whim. Smart, sassy, tough, adaptable, Bella appears at first to thrive amid the rigors of living in the cave he makes their home, while her father fails to address the deprivations he inflicts on her—school, friends, warmth, proper nutrition, home comforts and so on. She develops, instead, a rich fantasy life, and enjoys the benefits of learning from the natural environment.

    So, an interesting situation. Unfortunately, it breeds problems, the chief of which is the main character himself. Quite naturally the reader wants to sympathize with a severely traumatized vet. Dave just keeps making it harder to feel anything but dismay, and soon anger at his childish selfishness and refusal to act on what is clearly in the best interests of the daughter whom he claims to love. In the very last pages of the book, disaster strikes and he needs the intervention of a rescue team, and is forced finally to acknowledge a measure of dependency on his fellow human beings. By this time, though, it feels more like self-service than enlightenment.

    There are other problems. There is a sub-plot, pursued in a series of separate chapters, which takes us back to the earliest days of human existence, a parallel story of survival in dire circumstances in these same mountains. Exiled from her clan, a woman loses the man who is her sole protector and is forced to face every danger in raising her boy-child to manhood. In modern times, Bella’s special senses pick up their proximity despite the centuries that separate them—at one point she turns up a skull which we readers know to be that of the boy’s father—but this other theme of potential interest never culminates in any satisfying connection between the two stories. They just run parallel, and we are supposed to do the working of making that connection.I wanted, too, more compelling action in both stories, more continuing forward movement, more reason to keep the pages turning to find out what happens next.

    Another problem: these ancient people are gifted with thought processes and language that seems inappropriate to their level of development. The mother’s skills of introspection and psychological perception about her son seem wildly out of keeping with her time. The result is many jarring moments when the reader’s “willing suspension of disbelief” is suspended. 

    Last of my nit-picks is Dave’s family. Hard to believe his supposedly sympathetic brother and his wife would be so unfeeling, even cruel, during Bella’s brief respite off the mountain, when she has the chance to return to normal life, school, friendship… pizza! They provide her shelter, but so excessively give preference to their own daughter that Bella feels excluded, rejected, and is only too happy to return with her father to the dangers of the mountain. 

    So… I wanted more from this interesting premise. I wanted, above all, to lend the story my credulity, and I could do so only intermittently. Which is not enough.