I picked up We Speak Through the Mountain by Premee Mohamed as soon as it came out, fully intending to write a review after calling its predecessor The Annual Migration of Clouds the best piece of specifically Canadian science fiction I’d ever read. We have a book club episode about it, go listen if you care to.
The first novella is a vision of postapocalyptic Canada generations after a wholescale societal collapse, told with sharpness and anger in beautifully written and realized first person prose from the point of view of its teenage protagonist, Reid. It was intended as a standalone. The publisher asked for more.
We Speak Through the Mountain had too much to live up to. The two greatest strengths of The Annual Migration of Clouds were in its depiction of close-knit relationships in the community that formed on the remains of the University of Alberta campus, and in Reid’s struggle and eventual understanding of the fungal disease she’s infected with, cad. We Speak Through the Mountain sheds these elements; Reid has left her community and comes as an outsider to the (different) university run by those who kept technological progress going, and one of the first things they do is give her a treatment that suppresses cad. The resulting story follows the shape of a typical science fiction adventure narrative, where The Annual Migration of Clouds was so refreshing in its refusal to do so. I found my expectations constantly challenged, the author pulling on a different route, a different thread, in the original novella, and that sense of unbalance became part of what made it so special as a work of fiction. Its sequel never surprised me, was much more familiar. The writing still beautiful, but the whole didn’t stick with me, didn’t draw my thoughts in the same way for days afterwards. And so the review never came, not wanting to speak from a place of disappointment.
The First Thousand Trees finishes off the series and came out this year. We leave Reid to follow her best friend, Henryk, burning with shame after his failure to prove himself in the first novella. He leaves the University of Alberta campus to join a community in the woods that’s attempting to reforest and rebuild. It’s a society organized in fundamentally different ways from Henryk’s home. The sense of departure isn’t as great, though, as Reid’s previous exile; Henryk has lost his ties to the society he was born into and so his struggles to integrate in the new one do not carry the same sense of resistance as Reid’s. He is trying, in his own way, to belong.
The chief frustration is, as another first-person piece, that Henryk’s voice and character make him deeply frustrating, his thought processes very much of himself but less compelling than Reid’s. Henryk never makes peace with himself the way Reid does, he is complex but lacks the insights Reid brings. The story once again falls into the shape of a traditional postapocalyptic science fiction narrative, this time because the society Henryk visits is much more like what we’d expect from other fiction in the genre.
It’s still an interesting juxtaposition. The writing is still top-notch, and writing a fundamentally different character fundamentally differently is not a flaw. I enjoyed this more than We Speak Through the Mountain and it comes to a satisfying ending. But having that ending is somehow not as satisfying as the possibilities that opened when I reached the last page of The Annual Migration of Clouds.
Do I still stand by my statement about that first novella? Yes. And if you’ve read the second, absolutely read the third. But know the degrees of impact between the three pieces of this trilogy carry different weights.
One Last Sketch 