In Rankin Inlet, a small town bordering the Arctic Ocean, the lives of the Inuit are gradually changing. The caribou and seals are no longer plentiful, and Western commerce has come to the community through a proposed diamond mine. Victoria Robertson wakes to a violent storm, her three children stirring in the dark. Her father, Emo, a legendary hunter who has come in off the land to work in a mine, checks to see if the family is all right. So does her Inuit lover, as Victoria’s British husband is away on business.
Thus the reader enters into the modern contradictions of the Arctic—walrus meat and convenience food, midnight sun and 24-hour satellite TV, dog teams and diamond mines—and into the heart of Victoria's internal exile. Born on the tundra in the 1950s, Victoria knows nothing but the nomadic life of the Inuit until, at the age of ten, she is diagnosed with tuberculosis and evacuated to a southern sanitarium. When she returns home six years later, she finds a radically different world, where the traditionally rootless tribes have uneasily congregated in small communities. And Victoria has become a stranger to her family and her culture.
At first glance the title of this exceptional first novel would seem to refer to the common name for tuberculosis, so named because the infection appears to consume people from within. However, as the novel progresses, consumption takes on a different meaning as we see the Inuit way of life and even the land they live on being consumed by "civilization" and the quest for profit. (Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).
The Vancouver Sun
It's this thematic resonance, along with an understated humanism reminiscent of Anton Chekhov (incidentally, another physician), that makes Consumption a quietly devastating novel.
The Winnipeg Free Press
[T]he people in Kevin Patterson's gripping new novel of the North, Consumption, are defiantly human. They are complicated, passionate, troubled, confused and, in some cases, doomed -- by disease, by their own failings and by those of their loves ones and by economic and cultural forces beyond their control.
Kirkus Reviews
[A]n exquisitely-written, elegiac
story, Consumption tells of Victoria, an
Inuit woman who, sick with tuberculosis, had
been exiled to a sanitarium as a youngster,
only to return to find her home gone.
Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. [A] searingly visceral message about love, loss and dislocation.
The Vancouver Sun
It's this thematic resonance, along with an understated humanism reminiscent of Anton Chekhov (incidentally, another physician), that makes Consumption a quietly devastating novel.
The Globe and Mail
Some first novels simply tower above their contemporaries by the scope of their
ambition and the power of their vision. Last year, it was Joseph Boyden’s
Three Day Road; earlier this year it was Madeleine Thien’s Certainty,
and now it’s Kevin Patterson's Consumption.
Recent Reader Reviews
Rated of 5
by Natalie Refutes current propaganda I love it that the author calls attention to the American diet as he tells the sad tale of the destruction and diseases of the Inuit tribe; you might think he is being politically correct. If you read more carefully, suddenly you realize he is... Read More
Rated of 5
by Christine Clapp Consumption The writing is excellent - I can "feel" the cold of the Arctic and sense these people's way of life - the pull of more modern society - the clutching to old ways. I'm buying a copy for friends and family for Christmas this year.
Rankin Inlet (picture)
has a population of about 2,200.
It is located on the 63rd
parallel on the west shore of
Hudson Bay (map)
approximately 1,100 miles north
of Winnipeg in the recently
formed territory of Nunavut,
which was officially separated
from the Canadian Northwest
Territories in April 1999.
A Short History of the Inuit
According to
nunavut.com, the history of
the Inuit begins in the southern
Bering Sea (North Pacific)
where, about 2 to 3,000 years
ago, an ancient culture adapted
their maritime hunting life to
the seasonally ice-covered
waters of the Bering Sea. Traces
of settlements can be found
complete with splendid carvings
and there are indications that
metal tools had largely replaced...
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(1041 words).
The Vancouver Sun
of 5
by Natalie
of 5
by Christine Clapp
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