Written by Jordan Abel, one of the six authors who came to town for Yellowknife’s very own Northwords Writers Festival, Empty Spaces is a fleshy, vulnerable novel that provides a poetic exploration of the natural world and our place in it.
I’ve heard that this novel is a reimagining of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans. With no familiarity with that text (or the film it spawned) beyond the story being mentioned by Thomas King in his fantastic Massey Lecture, The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative, I can confidently say that Empty Spaces has its own gravity and its own’ voice, and this novel uses these things to demand attention.
Released just as Yellowknifers started trickling back after the evacuation, this tense novel decentres Western, anthropocentric perspectives on the climate crisis, the idea of ownership, and even the shape of a human body. Splitting the world into flesh and non-flesh, the almost-celestial, hovering narrator is keenly aware of the way that bodies — described in all of their fleshy glory — are rooted in the land.
Almost psychedelic in its effect, Empty Spaces gave me the feeling that this novel gave me a little bit of insight into a vast body of knowledge that would always be out of my reach. My copy of this book was gifted to me by the author over the evacuation, and it subsequently came with a very kind content warning for forest fires.
If you’re still raw from the evacuation and you want to save a novel that features fire as a metaphor as well as a very present, physically hungry thing, for later, then do so as those themes are very much present in Empty Spaces.
Of all of the beautiful lines in this novel, the concept that “There is a spark on the tip of every tongue” jumped out at me. I don’t know why this specific line was impactful, it’s not a new sentiment in the grand scheme of things. Abel’s pensive exploration of the way that fire can galvanize action, the way it can be associated with change and ruin, how multifaceted it is as a tool, weapon, or something out of our control, however, was something important to me that I held onto from this book.
As Empty Spaces ultimately suggests, fire is subject to wind, so in a world where even a whisper can cause a breeze, the potential in every person to control fire is immense.