The Bone House
by Luanne Armstrong
(New Star, CAN$21, 277 pages, trade paperback; published in December
2002.)
In the near future, multinational corporations will own everything,
from information to  land
to social services. The cost of food, fuel, and services will be prohibitive.
Cities will become chaotic and dangerous. Climate will be extreme and
unpredictable. Environmental protection will become a convenient excuse
for corporations to appropriate land and resources. Youth will feel
that the greed of older generations robbed them of their future and
their present.
Luanne Armstrong's The Bone House takes place in this all too
likely and unpleasant future. But its focus is much more intimate.
Lia flees Vancouver after being ripped away from her grandmother by
a gang of raiders. She is looking for her grandmother, who may have
returned to their farm in northern British Columbia, and for Star, a
girl with whom Lia has fallen in love. Meanwhile, in Appleby, a town
near Lia's farmhouse, Matt spends a blissful few days with Star, and
it changes his life forever.
In trying to find Star, Matt and Lia cross paths; both encounter a
commune that promotes a way of life that ignores the rule of the corporations.
But the corporations eventually want the commune's land.
The Bone House is peopled with memorable characters whose actions,
reactions, and emotions are startling and striking. It speaks -- with
empathy, knowledge, and vision -- to the anxieties that arise from the
current climate of increasing "free" trade that favours corporate profits
over any other considerations and from the ongoing damage to the environment
caused by humanity.
The book's politics are complex and nuanced, acknowledging the contradictions
that lie at the heart of the negotiation between human welfare and the
well-being of the planet. But, most of all, The Bone House is
an emotionally rich tale of people who cannot settle for preprogrammed
lifestyles and ideas.
Originally published, in slightly different form,
in The Montreal Gazette, Saturday, 1 February 2003.
Claude Lalumière's Fantastic Fiction
is a series of
capsule reviews first published in the Saturday Books
section of The Montreal Gazette.
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