| Interview with Ben Gadd
Here is a book that is destined to become a classic. In the tradition of Watership Down, Raven's End is a stunning fictional debut that will thrill every age of reader. And all I can say to back this statement up is that I was awestruck at every turn. What a rush to wheel through the sky with ravens!
Only Ben Gadd could have managed this magic. Only he could have distilled the mountains and given us an airborne circus.
Most people who have taken regular strolls in the Rockies know about Ben Gadd. He's a passionate naturalist, environmentalist and mountaineer from Jasper whose self-published Handbook of the Canadian Rockies is wildly regarded as the only book you need to discover this part of the world, mainly because he's spent a lifetime knocking about the woods, navigating the mountain flowers and plotting the stars. He's described the origin of cirques, and lectured on the seasonal ecology from the forest floor up. He's guided hundreds of tourists on their mountainside wanderings and he's had the pleasure of saying, at least once, "Ma’am, you're holding coyote poop." In short: he knows how a mountain works.
So what better guy to write a novel completely told from a raven's point-of-view? How could he follow up one lifetime achievement with another? And how, exactly, did this new book happen?
I put these questions to him over lunch at a granola café in Calgary. The sun is streaming through the windows. Gadd, dressed in a moss-green shirt, is covered with Collie hair. He's got an easy smile. His wife, Cia, joins us and they both seem bemused with all the fuss about Ben's new book. The translations and the great reviews are rolling in, but none of these things are making his apple-ginger juice appear. He laughs, ambles back to the cashier and returns with the missing drink.
The idea, he says, came to him in the summer of ’88, on the eastern side of Yamnuska. A climber had died there while attempting a difficult ascent, two grades higher, straight up the rock face. Gadd followed a guidebook's suggestion and took the smart path, off to the right.
"On the last belay before you reached the top I found the climb register. Someone had just written about losing his friend a few days earlier. I climbed that pitch with my heart in my mouth."
And the raven's story, I ask? It came from that?
"Right then it hit me," he says. "Wouldn't it be nice if you could live forever?"
I smile at that notion, because the book has a mystical edge to it.
"We went up there and camped on the east side of Yamnuska. Spent the solstice watching the ravens."
Four drafts and 11 years later, the book was done. During that time he watched black bears in Banff play with hanging garbage cans as if they were piñatas. He sorted out the ground squirrels, watched them dash across the traffic, and came up with their hilarious raison d’être: "Oh! The grass is so much greener on this side!" He watched elk having sex, but eventually cut that part out of the finished manuscript.
"Every time I read that bit," says Cia, "I got the hoodles."
Gadd honed the story, "bringing in the disparate voices" from the mountains, shaping "a different view about how this place works." He wanted to create his own raven mythology, not a human (Haida-like) mythology about ravens from a culture he didn't belong to. Humans, in fact, are often referred to as "it" in the book, because the birds are trying to figure people out. Like Gadd, they are curious about everything.
Years later, when the book was finally ready, Gadd decided to test the story out on a class of 10-year-olds in Jasper. The plan for a "brief" test backfired – he was forced to return to the school and read from the novel for two months, until it was finished, because the kids demanded it.
"It was the most fun I've had with a story in my whole life," he says. "At the end of each session they stood up in a circle, flapped their arms and screamed ‘RAW KA TAW!’"
Cia and I both smile. Even months later, it is easy to imagine all those kids emulating Gadd's ravens at the close of meeting. I am sure they loved hearing about a raven's breakfast inside a dead elk's ribcage.
"Ten-year-olds are bloodthirsty," he says. "They love this stuff. They seemed to think of those meals as nothing more than a bowl of cereal to a raven."
Gadd leans back in his chair, and sips his juice.
"When you're writing natural history you are looking at a lot of sex and gore. It's exciting!"
Ben Gadd reads at Pages on Kensington on Friday, March 23 at 7:30 p.m. |
