Book Review - The Night Watchman - Louise Erdrich

‘The night watchman’ by Louise Erdrich This is based on the life of her grandfather, who worked as a night watchman at a jewel bearing plant near the turtle mountain reservation in North Dakota. In this book, Thomas Washashk is the driving force behind the campaign to resist the dispossession of the Chippewa people from North Dakota, taking the fight to congress.

Characters

There’s quite the cast of characters in ‘the night watchman’ but a lot of it focuses on Patrice, or Pixie as she is also known. She heads to the city to look for her sister Vera, who has vanished. There are some gritty scenes in this part, showing the life of destitution and poverty that some Indians fell into.

The aforementioned Thomas is the other main character, and it’s through him that we learn about aspects of the ‘emancipation bill’ as well as the cultural traditions of the Chippewa and their spiritual beliefs. There are a number of supernatural scenes involving Thomas that give the book an ‘otherworldly’ feel.

Community

It’s a vibrant book, and Louise Erdrich really gives you a sense of the strong community bonds amongst the people. It’s not an easy life, and there’s alcoholism, domestic abuse and misogny, and they have to fight for all that they have. There’s a lot of resilience and compassion in this story, and parts of it reminded me of another book about Indians I read and wrote book review about - Michelle Good’s Five little Indians about a group of First Nation children in the residential system in 1960’s Canada.

There’s no doubting that Louise Erdrich is a great storyteller but I felt that one of the things that didn’t work so well for me was the shifting narrative and characters drifting in and out. Too many characters seemed to drop out and others, such as the two mormons, or Millie, were introduced quite late and not really developed. And I think I would have liked to have read more about Vera, however disturbing her storyline might have been. But sure what do I know - the book won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Summary

Perhaps my hopes were too high for ‘The night watchman’, especially as I had previously read and enjoyed ‘the round house’, but it just didn’t quite come together for me. Maybe there’s too much going on - waterjacks, ghosts and political assassins all feature. But I did mostly enjoy it and I learned and sympathised a lot about how life was for the Chippewa Indians in the 1950’s and their struggle.

Definately one of those good bookclub books with plenty to talk about.

The night watchman by Louise Erdrich.

Published March 3 2020 Harper Collins

464 Pages

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