Starlight and Loss 
 Jimmy said Starlight was the name given to them that got teachin's from Star People. Long ago. Way back. Legend goes that they came outta the stars on a night like this. Clear night. Sat with the people and told 'em stuff. Stories mostly, about the way of things. The wisest ones got taught more. Our people. Starlights. We're meant to be teachers and storytellers. They say nights like this bring them teachin's and stories back and that's when they oughta be passed on again.Ignore my star rating for the moment. Ignore whatever I may say in the second half of this review. If you can allow this beautiful novel to draw you into its spell, if you can remain in its world and believe in its characters, you will find something utterly moving. You will find a book that, out of the most basic realities of life in the woods and mountains, weaves an almost ritual story that contains deep truths about fathers and sons, and what it takes to learn to be a man. The friend who persuaded me to buy the book called it the most powerful reading experience she had had all year, taking her totally out of her surroundings while immersed in its pages. I can easily see why. 
 Franklin Starlight, most often referred to as "the kid," is sixteen, living on a ranch somewhere in the mountains of Western Canada with the man who has clearly brought him up, similarly referred to as "the old man." They are like father and son, in every way except literally. When the book opens, the kid is setting off on a two-day ride across the mountains to visit his biological father, Eldon Starlight, living in a beat-up flophouse in the nearest mill town. His liver shot from years of drinking, Eldon feels close to death, and has sent for his son to take him three days' walk into the wilderness, according to Indian custom, so that he can die and be buried on a mountain facing the East. 
 Both men, like the author himself, are part Ojibway. But Eldon has never been brought up in Indian ways and is now as far from a warrior as you could imagine. Franklin has learned everything about the woods that the old man could teach him, but his teacher is not Indian at all. So in a sense, this journey for both father and son is a quest to assume the mantle of a forgotten heritage--a theme brought to radiant transcendence in the lovely closing page of the book. But over and above that, there is the story of a father trying to introduce himself to a son whom he hardly knows. Bit by bit, as Eldon croaks out those stories that should have been told years ago, we hear about his fearless youth when he really was a warrior of a kind, the mistakes he made and the burdens that have dragged him down, and finally the story of Franklin's birth and the identity of the old man. Hardly the lore of the Star People, but at least the confession of this one Starlight who has almost, but not quite, lost touch with his heritage. It turns out to be an altogether fuller and richer story than the simple journey into the mountains might suggest, and immensely rewarding for readers who can make the journey with them. 
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 Unfortunately, I couldn't, not entirely. Unlike my friend, I could not immerse myself totally in the story; I kept popping out of it every few pages, and reading, as it were, over my own shoulder. But the problem is most likely with me rather than the author. For one thing, it is not my world. You do not have to be Indian, but this does very much play into the North American myth of the wild. The idea that the boy becomes a man when he shoots his first game, that he learns wisdom through woodcraft, is a commonplace in American literature from Fenimore Cooper through Faulkner to Hemingway and beyond, but it does not resonate with me, a European. I was always conscious of the artifice, the juggling act required to keep the reader's disbelief suspended. The story was beautifully constructed to lead to the revelations of those three days, but constructed nonetheless, and it was hard to forget that. I was also aware of an imbalance between the characters. Eldon grows from being a stock drunk to a fully realized character, and becomes the true protagonist of the novel. But Franklin is simply too good to be true, without a single moment of weakness. He is the perfect woodsman, catching and cooking all their food, staring down a rampant bear; he always finds absolutely the right answer, the mature, no-nonsense answer, for his father. One changes; the other doesn't much, although he learns a great deal. 
 I enjoyed the laconic dialogue, written throughout in what I take as authentic dialect. The tone is set right on the first page, when the kid goes into the barn to see the old man milking a cow: 
 "Get ya some breakfast," he said. 
 "Ate already," the kid said. 
 "Better straight from the tit." 
 "There's better tits."Or take a line like "Poetry's nothin' but a man feelin' what's there anyhow." I marked this down as a nugget of real wisdom, but then it began to seem a little corny. Once I realized how easy it would be to parody this style, it lost some of its potency. It is significant, I think, that the stories that really matter--when Eldon is telling about his life--are no longer in direct speech, but narrated in the third person, in the author's own voice. And they are more effective because of it. 
 I do not generally think of an author's real life while reading his fiction; art before facts is my watchword. Yet with Richard Wagamese, that distinction is not so easy. I was greatly impressed by his previous novel, Indian Horse, which I gather was partially autobiographical. There, he was writing of things he knew personally: the government-run Indian Schools, finding an escape through ice hockey, and learning which would-be mentors could be trusted and which not. Relatively ordinary things that he made sound extraordinary. But here, I feel, he is trying too hard to manufacture something elemental, something primal. And too often it seems just a little self-consciously mythic, lacking the authenticity that shone through the earlier book. 
 And yet, and yet. Wagamese's short but moving afterword suggests that writing this book may have served as a medicine walk for him too. Like so many Native Americans of his generation, he was robbed of his heritage and parenthood, brought up in residential schools and assigned to foster families. The theme of trying to connect with the land and spirit of his people, and thinking about a father whom he never knew, must have been extremely painful. I have later learned that he has written about the difficulty of being a father to his own sons, as a legacy of his own trauma. Seen in this way, with the author identifying with both Franklin and Eldon, the novel has quite a different kind of authenticity: the authenticity of loss and regret. And that I find very moving indeed.