“Meridian”
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By Kris Farmen; Blazo House, 2023; 204 pages; $16.99.
“The water around her is icy as winter and it grips her chest like she owes it money,” Kris Farmen writes on the first page of “Meridian,” the third and final novel of his series “Seasons of Want and Plenty.” The sentence, which in some ways encapsulates the foreboding mood of the interconnected stories that comprise this mini epic, leads into the opening sequence wherein readers finally learn the full origin of Zia, a soul eater who has pursued Ivan Lukin, the trilogy’s central character, across the landscapes of Western Alaska, determined to destroy him and all that he loves.
As I’ve written in reviews of the prior volumes, Farmen, who lives in Fairbanks, is a formidable novelist prone to diving deep into Alaska’s history and environments, recreating its past and its landscapes in scrupulous detail. And in these books, as in one of his prior works, “Turn Again,” Farmen then infuses the world and era he explores with magical realism, exploring the hidden realms that occupied the minds of those who lived before the age of scientific rationality. A time when mythical creatures inhabited the wildernesses at the edge of human habitation.
“Seasons of Want and Plenty” is set in the 1860s, the decade during which Alaska slipped away from the Russian Empire, and into the hands of the United States. That transfer of power is increasingly rumored as imminent among the residents of Western Alaska in the first two novels, “Fireweed” and “Signals.” In “Meridian,” set in 1868 and ‘69, it has finally occurred, leaving residents both Native and white wondering what fate awaits them and how their lives will be forever changed. Uncertainty, nervousness and the need to decide which nation they will belong to has overtaken the employees of the Russian American Company that for nearly seven decades owned the fur trade in what, for Europeans, was the remotest corner of North America. Many of these employees, including Lukin, who is based on a historical person, were of blended Russian and Alaska Native ancestry, leaving them caught between two cultures, neither connected to the United States or the encroaching British, and thus untethered from the great world powers vying for Alaska. They were tied only to the land itself.
[Book review: ‘Signals’ affirms Kris Farmen’s status as one of Alaska’s finest historical novelists]
It’s through this shifting political and physical landscape that Lukin travels, neither willing nor particularly able to leave it for Russia, a part of his heritage but a place he has never known. As the book opens, he chooses to remain in Alaska, traveling inland to areas previously unvisited by Europeans, seeking to continue his career as a fur trader while hoping to outrun the demon Zia and the pieces of his broken life that stalk him. Knowing that his very survival lies in the balance.
Farmen is blazing through an all but completely overlooked part of Alaska’s past. The western coast during the time of the Russians is little explored either in historical or fictional accounts. Yet the Russians were there, operating trading posts, interacting and intermixing with the Indigenous peoples in the most isolated extension of an empire that had overreached itself. This time and place, about which even Alaskans with strong knowledge of our history know little, provides the perfect setting for these novels. Distant in both time and location, it allows Farmen to unleash his imagination and challenge his characters with the difficulties of the land and climate and the otherworldly forces alternately aiding and attacking them.
“Meridian” follows Lukin on a journey up the Tanana River (here spelled Tananah, in keeping with Farmen’s use of 19th century Russian spellings), seeking to establish his own corner in the fur trade so as to do business with the incoming Americans. He is accompanied by his daughter Anastasia, her American husband to which she is newly wed, and several others, including Anfisa, the former wife of his one time friend and now rival and enemy Yosif Denisov. For his part, Denisov is engaged in a similar pursuit of wealth. Now married to Zia, the child demon who has haunted and followed Lukin since he was a schoolboy, Denisov, like his bride, seeks not simply to defeat Lukin in commerce, but to kill him.
In the previous volumes, Zia appeared to Lukin at key junctures, haunting and tormenting him and increasingly attempting to take his life and those of others. She possesses the ability to watch Lukin’s every move from the face of the moon. Zia is Tlingit, here called Kolosh, again using a Russian term from the era. Lukin first encountered her in New Archangel (Sitka). She inhabits the body of a girl who drowned at age 14, and she remains this age throughout the three stories.
Zia pushes Denisov, already estranged from Lukin for taking his first wife, to increasing acts of violence as the two men travel further upriver. Lukin, seeking both survival and revenge, turns to a resident shaman and ultimately, a giant for assistance and protection, guiding the novel into the realm of fantasy that runs parallel with Farmen’s consistently eloquent and evocative descriptions of the lands in which the story takes place.
“The sun warmed the world and you could see in the flight of the camprobbers and chickadees that winter was not long for the world,” he writes in a passage about the changing seasons. Yet still in need of warding off the evening cold, the wayfarers “built large fires and watched the sparks from the poplar spruce rise into the stars like inverted meteors.”
As “Meridian,” and with it the “Seasons” trilogy, catapults toward its cataclysmic and otherworldly conclusion, Farmen never lets the fantastic get in the way of the real. He keeps the story grounded in an Alaska long gone in some ways, yet still ever-present in others. These are books of the land and the mysteries it holds, and there is nothing quite like them in Alaska’s literature. Like his characters, Farmen has entered unknown territory, and returned from it with something remarkable.
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[Book review: Thomas McGuire’s second novel is as lyrical, intelligent and suspenseful as his first]