Il pleuvait des oiseaux

Jocelyne Saucier

4 ideas

1. Three hermits keep poison in the woods

   Three old men, Ted Boychuck, Charlie and Tom, have withdrawn to cabins beside a remote lake in northern Ontario, cut off from family and the state. Each keeps a supply of strychnine so he can end his life when he judges it time. Two younger men who run a nearby hotel and grow marijuana on the property keep them supplied and keep the settlement secret. Boychuck dies just before a photographer arrives looking for survivors of the 1916 Matheson fire, and she finds only the paintings he left behind.

2. Owning your death makes life livable

   The novel argues that keeping the means to die at hand does not push the old men toward death. It frees them to keep living, because what they fear most is being handed over to hospitals and care homes, not dying. The poison works less as an exit than as a guarantee of sovereignty, and that guarantee makes each ordinary day chosen rather than endured.

3. Catastrophe survives in images, not testimony

   Boychuck lived through the Matheson fire as a boy and never spoke about it. He left behind a large number of dark paintings, including an image of birds falling burned from the sky, and the photographer has to piece his experience together from them. The novel treats unspeakable trauma as something that goes around language and settles into obsessive, repeated images. On this view, the historical record of a disaster lies partly in what survivors made rather than what they said.

4. Wrongly confined woman finds late love

   An old woman was committed to a psychiatric institution as a teenager and held there for some sixty years without real cause. After her release she joins the hermits, takes a new name, Marie-Desneige, and begins a tender romance with Charlie, who is in his eighties. The episode shows that a life taken by an institution can still open up to desire, choice and intimacy at its very end, so late life need not be only decline.

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