Chapter 5 Eva-Maria Müller Sporting Mountain Voice Alpinism and (Neo)colonial Discourse in Thomas Wharton’s Icefields and Angie Abdou’s The Canterbury Trail

Icefields and Colonial Discourse

Thomas Wharton’s Icefields opens in 1898 with Doctor Edward Byrne falling into a crevasse on Arcturus glacier. The accident occurs during the fictionalized Royal Geographical Society expedition led by British mountaineers Norman Collie and Hugh Stutfield. In the novel, as in Stutfield and Collie’s own records (1903, 13), this expedition set out to the Canadian Rockies in search of Mount Brown, a peak of which little was known except that it was situated on the trading route of the Hudson Bay Company and estimated to be 16,000 feet:

The goal is Mount Brown, Collie had said. Find it, or prove it a hoax. It’s been on every map in the empire for sixty years as the highest on this continent. And no one even knows if it really exists. So far no one has thought to go and verify the one lone sighting that got it on the maps in the first place. He was determined to rediscover the lost giant and, if possible, to be the first to reach its summit. (Icefields, 18)

This linking of mountaineering—to reach a summit, to aim for a goal—and imperial practice—to see and discover, to arrive first, and to map—carries on throughout Icefields. The novel repeatedly builds a connection between climbing and the project of power and control: it portrays the Royal Geographical Society’s climbers as “discoverers” and, in the second narrative strand, follows the colonialist Lord Sexsmith, modelled on James Carnegie, Earl of Southesk, on his hunting trips and climbing attempts. Over the course of almost a century, Sexsmith, like Collie and his fellow mountaineers, climbs in service of Empire.

Icefields, as Pamela Banting notes, is a narrative of obsessions (2000, 67). It engages with a fixation on imperial expansion, entrepreneurial opportunities, and alpinist heroism, and it highlights the imaginative power of mountains and their natural energy. The novel, which uses tall tales, myths, fairy tales, and dream visions to reflect the enlarged spatial repertoire of mountains (Hepburn 2001, 73), uncovers the multi-layered fascination with alpine space through the English Doctor Byrne. Waiting to be rescued from his fall, Byrne sees an angelic figure in the ice. For the next twenty-five years—from 1898 to the novel’s close in the summer of 1923, when the ice that trapped him reaches the end point of the glacier—Byrne seeks to make sense of his apparition. He follows the glacier’s movement with the scientific, spiritual, and Romantic obsession that characterizes many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century mountaineers. The narrative is structured according to glacial anatomy, with each of the novel’s five main sections named after a specific phase of glaciation, laying bare the development of the many histories embedded in the region. Over the course of the novel, numerous peaks are scaled (some allegedly for the first time), trails and railroads are constructed, hotel facilities are built, glacier water is sold off, mountains and people are touched by the fate of World War I, and Jasper Park is established. Wharton’s novel taps deeply into the history of mountaineering, exploration, and tourism in the Jasper region; reflects on the cultural history of mountains; and offers an alternative to the traditional mountaineering story that challenges the inventory of knowledge production available to the imperial alpinist.

As the novel connects mountain sport with imperialism, it has us see that the knowledge of alpine space acquired by nineteenth-century mountaineers is shaped by the already established system of knowledge about other colonial destinations: they see in mountains an “island in the ice” (153), a “tropical jungle” (196), an “Asiatic temple” (28), and a range of “Olympian palaces” (206). Such lines of comparison—instances of Orientalist appropriation—exhibit the proclivity of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century mountaineers to apply what they already knew about sites of British colonial desire to new locations encountered on their climbs in the Rockies (Tiffin and Lawson 1994, 2).

Climbing in nineteenth-century Canada was very much a mode of knowledge production, and for the Canadian Rockies to successfully enter the European knowledge apparatus, as Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson argue, they had to first be rendered unfamiliar (1994, 2). By referring to the alpine space in terms of “a new world” (Icefields, 49), “the edge of the earth” (228), and a “true terra incognita” (99), Wharton’s novel exposes the common practice of casting mountains as unfamiliar so that mountaineers appear victorious in their quest. This discourse of negation that repeatedly asserts absence serves to clear mountain space for alpinists. It allows athletes, like Collie and Stutfield in Icefields, to turn the Canadian Rockies into an “imaginatively malleable space” full of unbounded possibility (Macfarlane 2003, 175): only when mountaineers portray the mountains they ascend through a “consciousness of absence”—a commonly deployed rhetoric of empire according to David Spurr (1993, 2)—can they be first. Wharton’s Collie and Stutfield return from their expedition to the icefield “smiling, pleased with the morning air” not merely because they have had a good day on the icefield but precisely because they are the “first human beings ever to see it” and “definitely to have traversed it” (Icefields, 50).

The degree to which the assertion of coming first and the construction of absence are related to an imperial violence that involves the negation and forcible removal of First Nations in the Jasper region becomes apparent in the section titled “Moraine,” which brings together various fractions of place-based mountain history. The transformation of Jasper from an outpost of Empire to a pleasure ground for travellers required an imperial elision of First Nations claims that culminated in the first decade of the twentieth century with the federal government removing First Nations and Métis people living in the park and withdrawing Stoney and Cree rights to their local hunting grounds in the mountains (Müller 2019, 14). This displacement of First Nations and the subsequent reassertion of pristine wilderness allowed for the Jasper region to be populated afresh by paying guests—“travellers, mountain climbers, and seekers after solitude” (Icefields, 62). It is worth pointing out here that James B. Harkin (1914), first commissioner of the Parks Branch, turned to the writings of alpinists like Collie and Stutfield (but also, for example, James Outram, Walter Wilcox, A. P. Coleman, and Tom Longstaff) to conserve the notion of being alone amidst “the virginal beauty” (Icefields, 62) of the Canadian Rockies. This kind of deterritorialization is motivated by a conflation of colonial and commercial interest (Pratt 2008, 132). “Only those who had sanctioned business within the boundaries, guides and trailblazers . . . were allowed”; all others were obstacles in the mission to exploit “to the full the resources at hand” (Icefields, 74, 101), exhibiting the reliance of the ongoing business of mountains and mountaineering on a cultivation of absence. In another key act of decolonialization, Icefields gestures towards the imperial violence bolted deeply into the founding pillars of the park by referencing the non-place previously inhabited by First Nations and Métis communities: white settlers “got compensation or deeds to land” outside the park’s boundaries, while First Nations were “driven off with guns” (74).

Icefields further dramatizes the colonial literary playbook in the Canadian Rockies when its mountaineers engage in the systematic discipline of knowing alpine space through inscription. Mary Louise Pratt demonstrates that the mid-Victorian paradigm of “being first” does not exist, even within the ideology of discovery and a politics of dispossession, unless the explorer returns home and “brings it into being through texts”: journals, letters, reports, or something as simple as a name on a map (2008, 200). In Wharton’s novel, the majority of British climbers perceive the mountains as a “blank, wordless space in the atlas” (29) that only become “place” through Western inscription. Lord Sexsmith, when not reading from a tapered volume of Shakespeare’s plays, names the places he encounters with England in mind: “I’ll call it little Albion” (38). Collie and Stutfield hurl names at the giants that circle the icefield: “Arcturus, Diadem, the Brothers, Parnassus” (59). Byrne keeps a daily journal and is rarely seen without his calfskin notebook. Hal Rawson, a poet turned packer, is eager to “make up stories” about what he finds on the glacier (193). Freya Stark, a climber, “wants to write a book about her climbs in Jasper” (187), and a new “patriotic fever of naming” quite literally changes Jasper after World War I (217). In the novel’s final section, “Terminus,” the local entrepreneur Trask checks “the names of glaciers in illustrated guidebooks” and gazes in awe at a world that is “no longer a blank space” (247).

What distinguishes Icefields from historical mountaineering reports of imperial appropriation is that it portrays the inherent violence of these colonial inscriptions. As colonial discourse is exposed, it is defined as a “record of damage” (184) and unmasked as arbitrary, inaccurate, and futile, with the novel indicating, for example, that the “region has had a lot of names” (68), and that the maps, hand drawn in the early, unnumbered pages of the book, are “not to scale.” At one point, an act of immersion refuses the discursive violence of naming that claims power and knowledge. When Byrne falls into the crevasse on Arcturus glacier, he gains insight rather than control, and sees “no reason to give this body of water a name,” referring to an ephemeral pool that appears on the glacier on warm days and disappears in the cold of night: “As the glacier flows forward, its topography will inevitably change, and the lake will vanish” (150). Thus, the novel ignites a reconsideration of the relationship between mountain and mountaineer that moves beyond imperialist inscription. The fallen alpinist ends up abandoning any colonialist desire to fixate the glacier in practices of naming or mapping and gradually gives in to the mountain’s intangibility. Delving deeper into postcolonial revision and Byrne’s own psychological landscape, one could argue that the glacier occupies him more than he can ever occupy the ice. Thus, the inscription that occurs is one embedded in Byrne’s name, a man who is, as Françoise Besson explains, burnt and reborn as a result of his contact with the ice (2011, 219). In this sense, Besson concludes, Byrne’s treatment of Arcturus moves away from colonial mastery and toward “a new awareness of life as revealed by Nature” (220).

Another instance exposing the instability of colonial power over mountain nature is revealed in one of the many journal entries that appear through the novel. Elspeth Fletcher, a young Scottish woman who works in Trask’s chalet, observes nature’s transformation of Byrne as he sits in the pool and lets the snow pile up on his head, “an absurd crown” (220). By inviting comparison between king and climber, Icefields calls forward the colonialist mode of mountaineering while disempowering its (fleeting) symbols of sovereignty. Through this deconstruction of power, the novel locates what Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin call “a crack in the certainty of colonial dominance” (2013, 155), whereby the irony of a crowned alpinist does more than mock the climber who assumes victorious postures in mountain nature: it challenges the entire practice of imperial mountaineering. Thus, when contemporary mountain novels that, like Icefields, are critical of tourism use colonial discourse in their stories—whether highlighting textual control, conceptual emptying, or Orientalist rhetoric—they write back to the colonial legacies of mountaineering and its literature.

(Neo)colonial Echoes in The Canterbury Trail

Set in the twenty-first century and published sixteen years after Wharton’s Icefields, Angie Abdou’s The Canterbury Trail (2011) operates in a similar manner to Wharton’s Icefields in its treatment of colonial discourse. The novel follows fourteen mountain pilgrims (and their dogs) who set out in separate groups along the Canterbury Trail to Camelot, a backcountry hut, for a final day of spring powder. The pilgrims are devotees of different mountain sports: skiers, snowboarders, snowmobilers, snowshoers, mountain bikers, and hikers. They also come from a range of social groups and classes. Abdou’s cross section of ski-town society includes a ski bum, a redneck, a trustafarian, an urbanite, a French Canadian inamorata turned second wife, a mother-to-be, a hippy, an environmentalist, a rad chick, a retired teacher, a miller, a foreigner, a developer, and a self-proclaimed local. All end up in the same place and are trapped not just on an avalanche slope but in their own competitiveness. In addition to their athletic feats, they compete over their status in town, the fanciness of their gear, their visions for the region, their hard drinking, their sex appeal, and their ability to tell the perfect mountain story. Their obsession with outdoing the heroic tales of their compatriots nips in the bud any possibility of establishing a connection to the mountain or to their fellow human beings. Abdou’s novel subverts colonial traditions of the classic mountaineering narrative and reworks mountains and movement into new forms of expression while spoofing a number of mountain-athlete stereotypes for good measure.

Each of the fourteen characters in The Canterbury Trail carries a different set of desires up to Camelot and is affected differently by mountains. Alison Batz, a modern-day Wife-of-Bath on skis, is a ribald forty-something Toronto journalist who perpetuates colonial rhetoric with her interest in selling a story. In Camelot, she longs for the time when a trip to the mountains meant the luxury of a Canadian Pacific Railway hotel and getting up close and personal with a rustic mountain man. In true Alpine Orientalist manner, she reads sexual promise and unlimited sensuality into the mountains (Said 1979, 188) and wants to capture a slice of mountain life “to package up and take home with her to sell” (Canterbury, 94). Alison’s perception of mountains as a sexual playground is shared by Shanny, a young snowboarder who works at the front desk of the local gym and uses every opportunity to show off her perfect backside. For Shanny, the mountain is a site of sexual fantasy that allows her to explore homoerotic curiosities while trying to imitate male behaviour. Over the course of the novel, it becomes difficult to distinguish which she enjoys more, “the pure exhilaration of the downhill ride” (70) or her own masking in mountain masculinity. Meanwhile, Cosmos and Ella, a Bear-Aware gay couple, worship mountain nature like a divine mother. They snowshoe to Camelot to escape from their problems only to encounter a drunk ex-husband with his French Canadian second wife and their Swedish friend in tow. Then there are Michael and Lanny, a realtor and a miller who long for one last guys’ weekend before Michael’s wife gives birth; and Antonio (alias Loco) and SOR, another couple of mates who compete over their local status as much as over their athletic abilities.

Three of the fourteen characters stand out and on the margins of the already heterogenous cast of Abdou’s tale: F-Bomb, who sets out with Loco and SOR, is a quiet and frequently misunderstood ski bum and the only Indigenous (specifically, Cree) character in the narrative. He is, in a sense, silenced like the Sherpa figures omitted from traditional mountaineering accounts. Heinz, the sign-maker who named the Canterbury Trail, is not a pilgrim in the strict sense. Referred to as “the hermit,” he retreats to the mountains following the loss of his wife. Year after year, Heinz immerses himself in nature and increasingly behaves like a conqueror charting a mountain wilderness. The character who is most conspicuous is Janet. Six months pregnant, she insists on joining Michael and his friend. She is the only pilgrim who does not perpetuate colonialist practices or rhetoric and has a realistic understanding of what it means to stay in a backcountry cabin with thirteen other people during the end of the ski season (Müller 2019, 44). Janet and her unborn baby are also the only ones to survive the avalanche that ends the lives of all the other characters who encroach upon the mountain, just as it ends their continuous quarrelling over the ownership and meaning of those mountains.

The diverse characters create conflict and tension and add humour to Abdou’s novel. But their diversity also reminds readers of the multi-layered approaches to alpine space. Like Wharton’s Icefields, The Canterbury Trail demonstrates how Romantic, economic, gender, wilderness, and colonial discourses overlap when sports and mountains meet. Most of the characters on the pilgrimage embody a dominant approach to mountains, and all of them (except for Janet) are additionally implicated in the colonial mentality of mountaineering, despite their societal difference, through their imitation of imperial rhetoric and activities. They refer to themselves as “blood-thirsty warriors” (7) and “captain[s]” (122) in a simulation of alpine conquest that, in the long run, establishes a relationship in which the characters are rulers and the mountain is the ruled. Setting off a series of coronations, the novel foregrounds the imperial implications of mountain sport by turning to a literary tradition that reaches back to Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (written c. 1349–1353), in which each of the ten characters, who are fleeing plague-ridden Florence, take turns being king or queen for a day.

This royal storytelling status is reflected in the structure of The Canterbury Trail. In the first part of the novel, chapters are named after individual characters. In addition, at the level of content, the novel engages with the imperial implications of twenty-first-century mountain sport. The first king introduced to the reader is Heinz. He becomes sovereign by obsessively charting, mapping, and naming “his kingdom of forest trails” (5):

At first, he just wandered—finding the quickest way to mountaintop, then the most scenic, then the most likely to spot wildlife, then the path with a well-placed swimming spot or a nicely shaded nook for an afternoon nap. Eventually, he began marking his routes—more to leave evidence of his existence than to save himself from getting lost. By then he knew the way—all the ways—but naming a certain incline or a particular creek-crossing gave him an inexplicable satisfaction. He didn’t want to name the squirrels and birds. He didn’t need a “Chip” and a “Chirp,” and he had no interest in being the crazy old hermit who deluded himself that the animals were his friends. Instead he named the land. (4)

Heinz retreats to the mountains using the open formalism “all” as an empty placeholder “for the unknown and imaginable” (Greenblatt 1991, 60), and names the places he encounters. A few chapters later, his rule is challenged by the snowboarder Shanny who imagines herself “the Queen of the Jujubes,” not in Heinz’s kingdom but in “her Candied Kingdom” (Canterbury, 68). Their regal (self)-ascriptions together with the use of possessive pronouns reveal a proprietary rhetoric in contemporary mountain discourse that parallels its imperialist ideas and appetites. The futile arbitrariness with which humans have sought to control landscapes is revealed through competing claims, from various perspectives and repeated even into the twenty-first century, while engaging in mountain sport (Müller 2019, 69). Just as imperial pretensions are challenged via the symbolism of a melting crown in Icefields, the regal status of the characters in The Canterbury Trail is short-lived: Heinz’s signs are overwritten by weekenders, and “the hum of snowmobiles” quickly shatters Shanny’s illusion “that this mountain is hers to consume in its frosting-covered entirety” (69).

Although the characters are mostly after-work athletes on a leisurely quest up the mountain, they seek Camelot as if it were a trophy in the Great Game. Instead of holding “the last bastion of the British Empire” (Icefields, 215) or drawing up imperial maps like their literary predecessors in Icefields, they use a pocketknife to carve traces of themselves into the hut’s furniture, let their dogs “mark territory” (Canterbury, 191), and possessively strew wet clothing and sweaty socks across beds in twenty-first-century versions of leisurely appropriation (118). In one of the novel’s final chapters, Janet observes that the group’s conflicts are generated in a somewhat colonial manner, with “each claiming the land as their own, insisting upon the right to name it, the power to decide how to use it” (240).

To leave us no doubt about the discursive similarities between contemporary alpinist aspirations and colonial endeavours, the novel evokes the spectre of Columbus. In a moment that highlights the relationship between colonial history and the imperialism of new commerce, those who participate in mountain sport, as well as those who invest in its destination, are cast as Columbus-like figures who treat the place as if it “sat empty before they arrived” (9). Opportunities for mountain sport—“the new golf course, the ski hill upgrades” (9)—drive real estate and change the socioeconomic set-up of a mountain town. For the ski bums in The Canterbury Trail, this means that they can only afford to live in a rundown miner’s shack “with a sinking foundation” (9). Thus, the novel interrogates the reciprocity between mountain sport and (neo)imperialism and hints at questions of belonging and uprootedness. It does so most notably through the character of F-Bomb who, otherwise rendered silent, points out the business with “million-dollar views” (9).

F-Bomb, embodying the conversational taboo inherent in his name, is undoubtedly the character most defeated by (neo)colonial forces. The notion of silence is an important one throughout Abdou’s novel and reaches its peak in this character. F-Bomb’s self-censorship in not talking about his Cree heritage is a consequence of the colonial environment. These absences in his narration highlight the omission of First Nations among the pilgrims: “F-Bomb talked about his grandmother, about his family’s past in the valley . . . never once saying that he was an Indian—everyone toeing around the word like it was a curse” (103). First Nations people and history are only articulated in F-Bomb’s thoughts, leaving them absent from dialogue yet still visible on the page (Müller 2019, 74). Readers are additionally reminded of the absence of Indigenous peoples in mountaineering projects when Alison, unaware of First Nations history in the Canadian Rockies, “wondered if he [F-Bomb] was Hispanic or something” (Canterbury, 33).

In the novel, the silencing of First Nations in Canadian mountaineering is most palpable in the often one-sided interactions between F-Bomb and Loco. Feeling that his local status is threatened by F-Bomb, Loco silences his friend, arguing that F-Bomb’s “connections were to the Coalton of yesterday, not of today” (103). This consignment of First Nations knowledge to the past is, according to Johannes Fabian (1983), a common practice of colonial discourse.1 In a key act of decolonization, the novel points out (directly and indirectly) the muting of alpine Others in mountaineering (hi)stories as well as the cultural violence of dispossession and the commodification of First Nations bodies in the colonial discourse of mountaineering.

In addition to exposing conflict deriving from the muting of alpine Others in colonial history, The Canterbury Trail engages with conflicts deriving from continued colonial practices through narrative competition between all pilgrims. Each of the characters is implicated in colonialism and so preoccupied with seeing a rival in the people with whom they share the mountain that a well-intentioned sharing circle, suggested by Ella and Cosmos, soon turns into a “story contest” in which the language of sport lends itself to expressing claims of power (198). The characters discuss the rules of the story contest and name its judge. It isn’t long before the cabin turns into a fighting pit and the weekend athletes charge at each other like “Olympic boxers” (171). What the novel also demonstrates—in the final failure of the contest itself—is that new forms of articulation and interaction can emerge once the game is no longer about winning. Ultimately, none of the characters abide by the rules of the contest and none of them emerge as the winner. In fact, The Canterbury Trail radically disables the idea of winning by casting all characters as losers: Janet loses her husband and all the others lose their lives in a deadly avalanche. In this way, Abdou writes a mountain sport novel that, like her swimming-wrestling story Bone Cage (2007), is about something other—or Other—than the athletic quest. It is about the possibilities that emerge once literature moves sport out of bounds, and, more specifically, considers mountains not simply as a playground but as bodies capable of telling a story.

Alpine Articulations

Icefields and The Canterbury Trail tread a bifurcated path in their decolonization of the imperial mountaineering story, in a textbook version of “writing back” (Ashcroft, Griffiths, Tiffin 1989). The novels expose the inherent colonial discourse in the language and practice of mountain sport and, in their attempt to let mountains speak, they carve out spaces in which to remould our notions of moving in mountain space. Icefields achieves this in a careful retooling of imaginative, narrative, and scientific perspectives, by casting the glacier as a body in motion. From the moment Byrne sees the figure of the angel in the crevasse, the ice changes, and all efforts fail to scientifically explain the apparition with the glacier’s unsteady forward motion. Arcturus glacier “groans, cracks, thunders, and rears up a cathedral” (Icefields 161); it “crumbles” (252), “collapses” (208) and emerges (261); it descends (170) and flows (133), and makes Byrne’s winged story difficult to capture. Icefields casts the glacier and the stories it provokes as entities in motion. It renders the mountain alive and echoes a scientific principle that interprets mobility as one of the central characteristics of life. “The ice is alive” (193), the novel asserts more than once, and it is this liveliness that positions Arcturus as the main protagonist in Icefields. In an interview with Aritha van Herk, Wharton explains that “the landscape is kind of the main character, the centre; the [human] characters are almost what one could call fields of force, or objects within a field, interacting” (in Banting 2000, 68). Accordingly, it is Arcturus, more than the ambitious alpinists, who moves the narrative forward (72).

The novel’s insistence on the mountain as a living being is supported by the narrative structure of Icefields, in which glacial movement overlaps with narrative development. As mentioned earlier, Wharton structures his novel according to glacial anatomy and characterizes each of the novel’s five main sections as a specific phase of glaciation. As Icefields takes readers from the névé to the moraine, the nunatak, the ablation zone, and the terminus, it traverses Gustav Freytag’s (1900) structural pyramid of exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and denouement (see also Martineau 1998; Banting 2000; Omhovère 2005; Willard 2018). In this way, Arcturus is simultaneously a natural and narrative force, and the story that unfolds between the accumulation and ablation zone is very much “the glacier’s writing” (Icefields, 143).

Echoing in certain ways Jay Schulkin’s assertion that sport “lies in the continuous fluidity between biology and culture” (2016, 2), Icefields mediates between the mountains we climb and those we read about. Although the narrative is structurally and textually pushed forward by glacial anatomy, the description of each section is not a systematic observation that orders mountains into scientific epistemes but rather a testimony to the power of imaginative narrative expression. In this sense, the novel engages in more than the “playful fictionality” described by Joel Martineau (1998, 44), who compares dictionary definitions of glacial zones with those provided in Icefields. When the novel opens with a description of névé as a “plain of snow and ice from which the glaciers descend” that “must be imagined” (1) instead of seeing it as “partially compacted granular snow that is the intermediate stage between snow and glacial ice” (Editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1998), it subverts standardized definitions perpetuated by scientific and colonial claims of power/knowledge over mountains. Icefields renders the glacier something that continuously escapes control and evokes a notion of (alpine) wilderness that, in Don McKay’s words, is “the capacity of all things to elude the mind’s appropriation” (2002, 21).

The mountain in The Canterbury Trail likewise escapes traditional patterns of representation by deploying the natural catastrophe of an avalanche to disrupt established orders. In the final part of the novel and on the second morning of their skiing weekend, most of the pilgrims are out with their skis, snowboards, snowmobiles, or snowshoes. Many of them find themselves on one side of an avalanche slope. As they begin the traverse, the mountainside suddenly gives way. Heinz, watching the scene from his hut,

hears a booming explosion, as if the mountain has stomped its foot in approval. Then right before his eyes, a giant crack opens across the mountain’s face, a grinning fracture from one side of the bowl to another. While he sits and contemplates that toothless gaping mouth—and it is, ever so faintly, pointing upwards—he swears he hears the mountain sigh, a swooshing breath of utter contentment. (274)

The mountain is depicted as a body capable of motion (dare I say, also emotion) and the avalanche as an auditory event. The avalanche is heard before it is seen or felt: Heinz hears it as a sigh; Lanny “hears the hollow whumpf” (267); Alison “hears the toasssss” (268); and to SOR, the avalanche “sounds like goodbye. It sounds like dirt shoveled onto his coffin” (270). To the pilgrims, the fatal end of the avalanche is as clear as its auditory force. By being so attentive to the acoustic dimension of the catastrophe, which thunderously breaks into the silence of athletic ambition, social rivalry, and neocolonial order, the novel provokes a sensitization to the voice of mountains. F-Bomb, accustomed to the role of the listener, “knows right away that it’s a big fucking avalanche”—a “life-ender”—and interprets its sound as a form of alpine articulation: “[H]e knows the mountain has spoken” (271).

As Abdou (2011b) confirms in an interview, the avalanche heralds the mountain as the main character of the novel. By weaving a number of interpretive models into its representations, she fires her ultimate salvo against the (neo)colonialist discourse of possession in the mountaineering narrative.2 The avalanche is cast as an event for the ears, matching the pilgrims’ deafness towards mountain voices with its own deafening roar. The avalanche is also a continuous speech act, not a single utterance, that traverses literary genres as it counters colonial erasure with a wealth of local mythology (Fernie’s Ghostrider and Grizz legends, for example). The avalanche turns the alpine landscape into the personified nature of mountain myth that—all ear, all eye, all body—paves its way through snow to knock loose the mountains of colonial discourse embedded in twenty-first-century mountain sport. And, finally, there is an experience of delimitation that is far from being destructive because it lends the strong-voiced element something of the dynamic of a creative motor (Utz 2013, 138).

“Death is creative, not destructive,” wrote Helen Tiffin (1978, 148), setting the foundation for postcolonial scholarship’s hopeful treatment of endings. In a similar vein, Abdou’s avalanche, albeit a catastrophe and, as such, a “calamitous, destructive, horrible and tragic event” (Nünning 2012, 67), is also a turning point where “an old order is lost and a new one has yet to arrive” (Brown 1997, 8). Such a catastrophic turning point, says Marshall Brown, is “both a moment of balance and a moment of unbalance, of decision and of indecision, of determination . . . and of indetermination” (1997, 10). This fragile yet highly productive moment is what Dipesh Chakrabarty calls the “‘not yet’ of the actual,” (2000, 250), and it is embodied in The Canterbury Trail by Janet’s unborn child. In the closing scene, Janet, unaware of the fatalities and sitting in front of the cabin stove, “rub[s] her hands across her belly” (275). Until officials knock at Camelot’s door to confirm the news of the avalanche, Janet “knows nothing” (276), and her waiting invites us to imagine “an ending—a future—Otherwise” (Müller 2019, 84). With this image, The Canterbury Trail gifts mountains not just with a voice of their own but with the ideal figure of a promising postcolonial future that, according to Bill Ashcroft, is the unborn child (2012, 9). Abdou’s attempt to let mountains speak is thus as much a celebration of CanLit’s theme of survival as it is a powerful symbol of postcolonial hope. The impending birth transcends the death that looms over classic mountaineering narratives just as it looms over those who participate in colonialist athletic ventures.

* * *

Against the “narrative need of death” in the classic mountaineering story (Slemon 2000, 57), Icefields and The Canterbury Trail set a wealth of literary manoeuvres. Abdou’s and Wharton’s novels demonstrate that literature that writes back to the colonial implications of the traditional mountaineering narrative is rich in opportunities to renegotiate the relationship between “mountains” and “movement.” Such literature exposes the workings of imperial discourse in the mountaineering project; upsets colonialist claims brought against mountains and mountain communities; expresses an awareness for mountains as living, speaking entities; and articulates meaningful encounters between mountains and mountaineers. It also shows that this openness involves a seismic shift of narrative attention from uphill to downhill, from the traditional mountaineering novel that charts a summit-oriented assault line (Slemon 2000, 58) to a downward perspective that upsets the (neo)colonial implications of mountain sport literature. Abdou’s and Wharton’s novels write back to (neo)colonial implications of mountain sport most effectively when they write down their articulations of alpine voice: Icefields lets the mountain speak in the descending flow of glacial ice and The Canterbury Trail activates mountain voice with the sound of an avalanche barrelling downward. Thus, these books remind us that the most moving mountain story may lie far beneath the celebrated heights of alpinist quests and unfold its greatest reward when we lose or fall.

Works Cited

1. Abdou, Angie. 2007. The Bone Cage. Edmonton: NeWest Press.
2. Abdou, Angie. 2011a. The Canterbury Trail. Victoria, BC: Brindle & Glass Publishing.
3. Abdou, Angie. 2011b. “The Canterbury Trail—Interview with Angie Abdou.” Interview by Kim McCullough, May 24, 2011. http://kimmccullough.ca/the-canterbury-trail-interview-with-angie-abdou/.
4. Abdou, Angie. 2017. In Case I Go. Vancouver: Aresenal Pulp Press.
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