A Blanket of Butterflies (2015), by Richard Van Camp and Scott B. Henderson

25 March 2016

It is embarrassing that I have not yet read Richard Van Camp’s The Lesser Blessed (1996), which is purportedly a true classic of modern Canadian young adult fiction. My guess is that reading his short graphic novel A Blanket of Butterflies does not absolve me of the obligation, which I promise to fulfill asap… A Blanket of Butterflies really does make me want to run out and read everything by Van Camp. Not usually a fan of graphic novels, I nonetheless found the pace of the novel, as well as the balance between text and image, to be particularly satisfying.

A Blanket of Butterflies is mostly wordless. Unlike many graphic novels, the pictures tell most of the story; only dialogue is otherwise provided, which brings natural visual focus onto the space. In life, we do not have a narrator telling us what we are seeing around us: we need to look. Van Camp and Henderson create this same interaction: we hear the (written) words, but we must look to see what the characters are responding to in their (illustrated) world.

The story is simple and poignant, the somewhat predicatable ending notwithstanding. It tells of an affinity between the Tlicho First Nation of Fort Smith, NWT, where Van Camp himself is from, and the Japanese. The affinity stretches across history; the peoples are the same, the text asserts, in that they have suffered similarly at the hands of European economic and military imperialism. The story is certainly not as heavy-handed as this suggests, but it does cause the reader to reflect on the history of European Canadian treatment of the northern First Nations as a parallel to the American bombing of Japan at the end of the Second World War. (It doesn’t get into Japanese atrocities committed during the war, but like many other narratives— Eleanor Coerr’s Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes (1977); Joy Kogawa’s Obasan (1981) and the children’s version, Naomi’s Road (1986); Hayo Miyazaki and Isao Takahata’s movie Grave of the Fireflies (1988)—tells the story of the lives of the Japanese people devastated by a war that their government waged. Like all wars, for all peoples: the suffering is not discriminate.)

The museum in Fort Smith had worked hard to locate a Japanese man, Shinobu, who is invited to reclaim a suit of armour belonging to his family, pilfered at some previous time. It is agreed by both that the armour belongs with its rightful owners, but the sword, beautifully crafted by Shinobu’s great-great-grandfather, has been bartered off by a previous museum custodian. The immediate story tells how young Sonny, with the help of his Ehtsi (grandmother) and her knowledge of the ways of the Tlicho, help Shinobu retrieve the sword from the unsavoury “Benny the Bank.” You can see here the scope for action-packed panels as well as images of great peace and healing. The balance in content, like that between narrative and image, satisfies graphic novel aficionados in its ability to engage.

A Swiftly Tilting Planet (1978), by Madeline L’Engle

A Wrinkle in Time (1962) is one of the classics of YA science fiction; in A Wind in the Door (1973), science fiction sits uncomfortably beside fantasy, injected with a hint of mysticism; A Swiftly Tilting Planet (1978) has abandoned the science fiction genre entirely. It has “preciously little science in it” but blends fantasy and mysticism with the political fears of the moment: nuclear war. Like the source of the preceding quotation,¹ A Swiftly Tilting Planet is better for not subscribing even loosely to the parameters of the science fiction genre.

In this fantastic tale, 15-year-old Charles Wallace travels not through space but through time, on a wind-riding unicorn–pegasus named Gaudior (“more joyful” [46]). A pregnant Meg (now O’Keefe) lies in her attic bed (yes, again it is “a dark and stormy night”) and accompanies him through “kything,” communicating mind-to-mind.  She is strengthened in her abilities by a recently arrived replacement for the ever-vigilant Fortinbras: a stray dog, whom Charles Wallace tells us is named Ananda (“that joy in existence without which the universe will fall apart and collapse” [38]). As in A Wind in the Door, when we learn that Louise the Larger (the pet garden snake) is actually a “Teacher” in the greater universal community, animals have a strong mystical connection, used to support the Murry children in their attempts to save the world; also like A Wind in the Door, the narrative clues are not particularly subtle. But at least A Swiftly Tilting Planet has an interesting story to tell, and a mystery to solve, that keep the reader guessing well into the plot.

The pervasive theme in this novel is the archetype most often represented by Cain and Abel. L’Engle takes for the basis of her version the Welsh legend of Madoc, published in epic poetic form by Robert Southey in 1805. The original had only the youngest Welsh prince, Madoc, fleeing internecine strife to found a new, more peaceful life in America (although in Southey’s poem he ends up waging religious war on the Aztecs, and converting them, and ultimately founding a colony). In L’Engle’s version, he and an older brother, Gwydyr, cross the waters: like Cain and Abel, one is peace-loving, one is full of a greed for power. Charles Wallace, sent to alter history and thus prevent nuclear annihilation at the hands of a South American despot, enters “Within” the peaceful Madoc, as he does a number of subsequent characters, and begins to learn the long and complicated history of Madoc’s and Gwydyr’s decedents, intertwined as it is with the history of Calvin O’Keefe’s forebears as well as the Southey poem. And yes, the plot is presented in as complicated a manner as this sounds, even moreso.  Young readers will actually enjoy the historical puzzle L’Engle builds for us, even if to the adult reader it seems somewhat contrived.  Charles Wallace visits some interesting moments in history: prehistoric Native America, first contact with the indigenous peoples, the Salem witch trials, the Civil War. These are combined with more recent fictional moments that will similarly interest readers: namely, the early life of Calvin’s seemingly unimportant and ineffectual mother. There is “more to her than meets the eye” (24, 278), certainly, and A Swiftly Tilting Planet shows characters and readers alike how wrong it is to judge a person without knowing the full story.

Where A Wind in the Door felt uncertain of its genre, and did not really beg continuation, A Swiftly Tilting Planet brings the reader back into the Murry–O’Keefe families’ lives and leaves us wondering where their stories will go from here.

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¹   James DeMille, A Strange Manuscript Found in Copper Cylinder, 1888 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2000) 226.