by Thomas King
Thomas King's Green Grass Running Water is a devilishly funny read. In fact, I was sucked in from the epigraph: "Just for Helen - who will not think less of me for having written it."
I thought I was getting just a little tired of self-conscious guilt-ridden colonizer works of angst, but King enters the genre gracefully with this lighthearted romp. In Green Grass, King playfully inverts the traditional oppressor-oppressed duality standing it on its head in a fashion so resplendently droll that the reader "gets" the message while marveling at King's comic genius.
There is a ton going on in this novel ["Perhaps Hawkeye should tell the story." "Perhaps Ishmael. . .Perhaps Robinson Crusoe..."], from unreliable narrators to shifting perspectives. No where is this technique more effective than in King's upending of the Christian belief system and its stock biblical characters. King privileges native American beliefs over the Euro-centric and gently denigrates that which is sacred to the oppressor, all to unerring comic effect. From the gentle parody of the opening "in the beginning, there was nothing" to the closing "we could start in the garden," his touch is deft and light. The Christian God ("that god"—the dog who "gets everything backward") is but a dream of Coyote, a dream that is unwilling to accept his lesser place: "I don't want to be a little god, says that god. I want to be a big god!" That god is exposed as inept, whiny and petulant: to the aptly named Ahdamn, "You can't leave because I'm kicking out out."
Noah is a bumbling chauvinist idiot—"Lemme see your breasts, says Noah. I like women with big breasts. I hope God remembers that." And, in King's clever nod to Timothy Findley (and these kind of nods to other authors are littered throughout), Noah shouts "if you can't follow our Christian rules, than you're not wanted on the voyage." King even mocks Christ, or as he is known in Green Grass, Young Man Walking on Water. This Christ is childish and full of himself. He angrily dictates absurd rules: "And the first rule is that no one can help me. The second rule is that no one can tell me anything. Third, no one is allowed to be in two places at once. Except me."
This is a book that can be read in a sitting or two as it moves at a lightening quick pace from past to present and back while characters tumble in and out of the framework. And, so much more is going on in Green Grass than a short review can illuminate. Readers will find themselves laughing aloud and marveling at King's wit and compassion.
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