The Orenda by Joseph Boyden

Not for the faint hearted

The Orenda is intense from its opening pages to the very end making it a page turner.  However, it is not for the faint of heart. It is the type of story to give you bad dreams if not nightmares.

It is a story told in alternating chapters from the viewpoint of three main characters, a Huron warrior, an Iroquois girl captured and adopted by the warrior and a Jesuit priest.  It is historical fiction set in the early 17^th century just before the destruction of the Huron nation and at the beginning of Jesuits coming to Canada to convert the First Nations to Catholicism. 

Boyden is a good writer, perhaps one of Canada's best.  He is definitely very descriptive and creates excellent characters while maintaining historical accuracy.  This book has intensity from its first page to its last. 

You feel the tension, the fear, the unrelenting struggle to survive.   This intensity had me fearing an arrow piercing into my back as I read accompanied characters on canoe treks through Iroquois land and fearing starvation through long, cold winters and summers of drought.  

I have read a great deal of historical fiction--medieval, Vikings, Romans--I love stories about Genghis Khan, so I have read a lot of battles, and violence, but Boyden's descriptions of torture in this story are very graphic and relentless.  You can't just breeze over a paragraph or two and then perhaps get onto something else, he goes on for pages. The Iroquois are recognized as fearsome warriors and history has recorded them as brutal and Boyden does not shy away from that.  The only balance to his graphic descriptions is to remind readers at one point that such torture has been used throughout the world throughout history.   Father Christopher reminds two other priests of how the people they refer to as “sauvages” are not alone in torturing their captives and draws their attention to the atrocities of the Spanish Inquisition

It reads like a movie, you can imagine the panning camera shots and recognize some standard movie devices. There is one part where a secondary character stands up in the midst of a battle, stating something self-congratulatory in and then just like in any war movie when something like this happens you find yourself thinking "sit down stupid, before you get shot"...whoops too late, the arrow passes right through his neck and he dies while being comforted by the older, wiser primary character.  Other than that one part that is so cliché, the remainder of the book is worth reading and the movie would be worth watching—even though I would be watching the battle scenes from under a blanket. 

I enjoy a book that intrigues me enough to do check its historical accuracy and do some additional research.  I also checked out various reviews of The Orenda to see how it was received by First Nations readers. 

I recommend the book and hope someone makes a movie that does it justice.

Reading Challenge:  I used The Orenda to complete the challenge of a book recommended by someone I had just met.  Although I met the person a while ago, it was only one meeting.
Moe, out younger son and I were on a tour on the French River offered by the Lodge at Pine Cove, near Noelville.  Our tour guide, Alex, is the owner of the Lodge and is well read on the region and Canadian history.  On a beautiful, sunny day in June, we were on a pontoon boat in the middle of the French River listening to Alex talk about Canadian politics, geography, history and First Nation topics when he recommended the reading of The Orenda and two other books as good reading for understanding the early history of the area.  

I highly recommend visiting The Lodge at Pine Cove. Check it out on Facebook or at their website.