Book Review: Motorcycles & Sweetgrass

This is the third and final novel I received from Random House’s New Face of Fiction series for review purposes.  Written by Drew Hayden Taylor, Motorcycles & Sweetgrass is this author’s first published novel, though he is a noted play-write, screenwriter, journalist, and even a stand-up comedian.

Now that I know the author is a stand-up comedian, a lot of things about this novel make a sense to me, particularly the humour. There were some pretty laugh-out-loud moments in here.

Motorcyles & Sweetgrass takes place on the fictional Otter Lake First Nation, and the story revolves around Maggie Second, the chief; her thirteen-year-old son, Virgil; and a mysterious white man who shows up riding a 1953 Indian Chief motorcycle.  This motorcyclist arrives in full leather gear as Maggie’s mother, Lillian, is on her deathbed, and his appearance causes a huge stir on the reserve, not just with the human residents, but with the local raccoons as well.  Turns out that this mystery guy is an old friend of Lillian’s, and she invited him to the reserve to ask him a dying favour, and the thrust of the novel is about his going about fulfilling Lillian’s dying wish and the fall-out of it.  And it also turns out the raccoons have a bone to pick with this guy.

The mysterious motorcycle guy, who calls himself John but gives out various last names to various people, sees the story’s melding of native myth with contemporary rez life.  But there is a darker undercurrent involved, too, with the subjects of residential schools, substance abuse, Christianization, and White patronization rounding out the themes.  Taylor handles it all with a playfulness that I really enjoyed, and some of his peripheral characters were totally priceless.  I particularly enjoyed Maggie’s younger brother, Wayne, who is a self-proclaimed hermit, residing alone on a small island creating a First Nations martial art just because he can.

The wildlife in this story also bring the narrative a lightness.  The raccoons were great and the scenes in which Jon argues with the raccoon leader were hilarious, and every so often, the author would switch the point of view over to an animal and the reader would get a unique little view of the world from a crow’s eye or a sunfish’s eye.  I liked that about Taylor’s writing; he kept some deep stuff very accessible and entertaining.

Now, without giving out any spoilers, I think I could have benefited from knowing a lot more about First Nations mythology because I think I was missing out on not only the main mythological reference, but a whole bunch of smaller ones as well.

All in all, though, I really enjoyed this book and would definitely recommend it! Once again, I was really happy to see a CanLit novel without the usual crap in it that I hate about CanLit, so Motorcycles & Sweetgrass was very refreshing.

And a big thank you to Random House for sending me these three novels!  My review of Matthew Hooton’s Deloume Road is here, and my review of Carole Enahoro’s Doing Dangerously Well is here, in case anyone is interested.