Review
VILLAGE OF THE SMALL HOUSES: A MEMOIR OF SORTS
by Ian Ferguson
Douglas & McIntyre, 202 pp.
Ian Ferguson’s recollection of an impoverished childhood in the muskeg and woods of northern Alberta’s Peace River country is a path blazed by the ordinary and extraordinary. The trail weaves through an end-of—the-Earth sort of place, one full of humour, spirit and tragedy – and cleverly strewn with social comment.
Also a playwright and the co-author (with his brother Will Ferguson) of the best-selling How to Be a Canadian, Ferguson sketches a colourful portrait of frontier Fort Vermilion, once a fur-trapping town and, at the time of his youth, the third-poorest community in Canada. Predominantly aboriginal, it is a primitive place, buried in the bush and denied such amenities as indoor plumbing and central heating. Progress may come, but it may not necessarily be for the better.
Here, Ian and his six brothers and sisters carve a youth from the land’s ruggedness and the town’s burliness. The Ferguson family arrives in 1959, after Ian’s father packs them up and moves them from Edmonton in an attempt to escape the law because of an office rental sales scam. He eventually abandons his family, looking for a paycheque that requires as little work as possible. Although he returns for several cameo appearances, his tracks leave slight impressions, like those of a red squirrel scampering across a hardened crust of snow.
While Ferguson’s childhood was troubled and traumatic, it also teemed with a cast of characters plucked from a cultural stage, from his aboriginal best friend Lloyd Loonskin to the two duelling doctors, one an ancient medicine man and the other a retired microsurgeon from Bombay, India.
Ferguson’s skills as a playwright polish his narrative, as he develops each character with magnificent detail, including the personality of Canada’s North. He describes one trapper, Sixtoes Mitchell, as having a face that looked as if it "had caught on fire, and they’d put it out with an axe."
Because of this rich childhood, the reader rarely feels sorry for Ferguson and his siblings. Rather, one is a little envious of their unique upbringing. Indeed, at times their adventures are so grand that one is left wondering whether they have grown bigger and taller with time, or if they are the product of a child’s world, where so much looms large and extraordinary.
As Ferguson writes in the opening page, "I haven’t let the facts get in the way of the story I was trying to tell." Like the mighty Peace River that flows by his town and across the book’s pages, Village of the Small Houses is also a mighty read, whether it’s true or not.
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