Summary
"In Search of the Elusive Sasquatch"
In the present, Lisamarie has arrived in her speedboat to Monkey Beach. She recalls being here the previous year with Jimmy, a time when she takes drugs and drinks excessively. She gives up on eleventh grade and instead moves to Vancouver for two years, where she finally feels popular because she can buy her friends booze using her trust fund allowance. After one night of partying, Lisa wakes up in a motel room to find Tab looking at her angrily. They go for coffee and Tab confronts her about her “wallowing in misery” and her irresponsible choices. When Tab walks away, Lisa sees that this is actually the ghost of Tab, and that Tab has died. Lisa, in terrible physical and mental condition, wonders if she is hallucinating.
Lisa goes to see Aunt Trudy so that she can find out if Tab is really dead or not. Trudy is in the process of moving and is very drunk. She talks about Tab, so Lisa realizes that her cousin is alive. Trudy tells her that she will be going to rehab for alcohol soon. She, Lisa, and Josh go to a local seedy bar in Surrey. Lisa bumps into Frank at the bar and he gives her a ride home. Frank informs her that Pooch has killed himself. They drive up to Kitamaat the next morning to go to the funeral and both of them are in a haze and have a hard time conversing.
After the funeral, Lisa goes with Karaoke to a party where Cheese is, and he drunkenly taunts Lisa. Jimmy is also at the party and demands to know where Lisa has been. He tells her that he has quit swimming. He now smokes cigarettes. Jimmy takes Lisa back to their parents’ house, and they are shocked to see her. They both look very unwell. They insist she spends the night.
While Lisa had been driving up from Vancouver she saw a sasquatch cross the road, which comforted her. In the present, Lisa is still at Monkey Beach and hears voices in the trees offering to help her. She thinks about how the sasquatch appears across geographies and cultures and yet most people see it as an imaginary creature. She says that the sasquatches have their own clans and stories.
Lisamarie has decided to stay at her parents’ house and go back to the eleventh grade so she can get her life back together. She sees her cousin Erica, who now has a baby. Everyone is incredulous that Lisa is returning to school. She celebrates her birthday with her parents. Lisa is now motivated in school as she does not want her brother to graduate before her. Lisa and Jimmy go to Karaoke’s birthday party and Jimmy finally gets together with Karaoke after years of liking her. Jimmy does not come home that night and Lisa has to go get him.
A while later, Karaoke leaves Kitamaat and Jimmy is devastated. She is the first girl he really loved. Lisa tries to comfort him. His way of coping is to go out partying all the time. Lisa, who has sobered up since returning from Vancouver, tries to get Jimmy to go on a trip to Monkey Beach with her so he can get away from his party friends. On the boat, Jimmy is barely able to stay awake. They reach the shore and Jimmy tries to start the engine of the boat to escape, but the motor has broken. They are forced to stay on the beach for another night with almost no food. In the evening, they hear what they think is a bear.
Jimmy asks Lisa about Vancouver and he says he does not understand why she was mourning so deeply for Mick and Ma-ma-oo. He admits that he used to think she was weak for “giving up” but that now he understands better after having experienced his own trauma of breaking his shoulder and having to quit swimming. They fix the boat the next day and leave Monkey Beach. On their ride back, they see orca whales. Jimmy dives in the water to see the orcas up-close and tells Lisa how magical it is. Back home, Jimmy throws away his swimming trophies and declares that he feels freer than ever.
Lisa has a dream about her grandmother where she is covered with bruises and telling Lisa that “nothing’s wrong.” Lisa wakes up and goes to the beach and submerges herself into the cold ocean until Jimmy, disturbed by what she is doing, comes and pulls her out. Lisa is in a daze and is not sure why she went in the water. For awhile after this incident, Jimmy is scared to leave Lisa alone.
Jimmy tells Lisa he plans to ask Karaoke to marry him and asks his parents how much a wedding will cost. One day, Jimmy gets a fishing job which upsets Karaoke, thinking he is leaving her. Lisa finds a vague note in Jimmy’s room addressed to Joshua that speaks of being pregnant with his baby but deciding to kill it because “it was yours.”
In the present moment, Lisa can’t make herself move from Monkey Beach. She hears voices in the trees offering to help her with Jimmy, and she is torn over what to do. Finally, she goes into the woods and tells the spirits that she does not have any meat, but that she has blood. Nothing answers her. She cuts her left hand and holds it up to the trees to offer her blood. She hears a “stealthy slither.”
"The Land of the Dead"
The final chapter consists of many poetic descriptions that do not follow a logical sequence. First, Lisa is with Uncle Mick and Ba-ba-oo looking for pine trees, and she asks Mick why he never visited her. Next we are taken to the scene of Jimmy on the boat killing Josh for what he did to Karaoke. Then, Lisa is demanding the spirits at Monkey Beach to know where Jimmy is, but they want more blood from her first, and she refuses. She tries to get back in her speedboat, but slips and falls underwater. She is taken to the realm of the dead where she meets Ma-ma-oo, who tells her she must go back to the world of the living, as it is not her time yet. She shows her the oxasuli berries, cautioning her that her gifts must be used wisely or else she will be killed. She then has different visions, including seeing Jimmy and her dead relatives singing a Haisla farewell song.
Analysis
The section “In Search of the Elusive Sasquatch” begins with Lisamarie’s memory of her tough times as an addict in Vancouver. As a means to escape from her sadness, she has moved away for two years, wasting away her grandmother’s trust fund on drugs and alcohol to impress what she believes to be her friends. This low point shows Lisa dishonoring herself and her entire family. Her parents look worn and emaciated when she sees them again, wearing their grief on there bodies. Yet Lisa’s sojourn in Vancouver marks a time of hitting rock bottom that is necessary for her to finally start the upswing of recovery, which we see as she returns to her hometown and goes back to school with a new determination. She comes to understand how having a sense of purpose helps from dipping back into patterns of negativity and desperation.
Lisamarie’s return also helps her revive her relationship with her brother Jimmy. Jimmy has encountered his own challenges after dislocating his shoulder and being unable to compete in swimming, which had been his main focus in life for years. We are shown how Jimmy, once the all-star child and student, has now been humbled and made to better understand life’s challenges. For a moment, it seems like their roles are reversed: when Jimmy is an emotional wreck, the now-sober Lisa forces him to stop partying and takes him to Monkey Beach. Although he resents this at first, their trip ends up opening a conversation between them where Jimmy expresses that his own setbacks have made him empathize with his sister’s mourning, which in the past he never understood. It is in these sections that we finally get a closer look at who Jimmy is. In the previous chapters, he is more of an archetype of the perfect child, but it is not until something breaks him that we get to see his true character come out.
Throughout all of her troubles, Lisamarie is still captivated by the simple magic of life that is specifically symbolized in this part through the B’gwus, or sasquatch, and the T’sonoqua, a mythical woman in Haisla lore. Lisa’s interest in these creatures speaks to her own sense of feeling otherworldly, as it stated multiple times that the sasquatch is not quite man and not quite a wolf but something in between; an apt metaphor for Lisamarie’s feeling of alienation that derives from her powerful psychic gifts.
Descriptions of the mythology and the Haisla landscape are peppered throughout the book and give us a more fleshed-out perspective of life on the British Columbia coast, contrasting with what is often the squalor and hardship of modern culture that co-exists with natural beauty. It is a type of experimental writing that Robinson engages in, oftentimes straying from the narrative arc of the story to describe specific things in exact details for reasons that are not really made clear in the moment. But it all adds up to create a story that is quite lifelike in its stitching together of Lisa’s many colorful memories, present actions, history lessons, poetic observations, and imaginative asides.
In these sections, we see several examples of Eden Robinson using descriptive language and dialogue in a way that reflects the mental or emotional state of a character, such as when Frank and Lisamarie discuss the suicide of their friend Pooch. Neither of them are able to entirely articulate a sentence; in this way we are shown their grief and trauma rather than being told about it. We also see this in the paragraph at the very end of the novel, where Lisa is grappling to get back to her speedboat after drawing blood for the spirits. We know she is in a daze without being directly told so because of the way the sentences are not formed fully, such as: “Manage to stand. Wobble towards the speedboat” (370). Lisamarie seems to be in a hazy mental state throughout much of the second half of the book, which we can intuit is a result of her existing between the worlds of the living and the dead.
The book ends in an ambiguous way. Many of the unclear parts of the story come into focus in the last chapter, such as why Jimmy has gone missing. We now know that it is in part due to his murder of Josh, who violated Jimmy’s girlfriend Karaoke. We cannot be sure, however, if Jimmy is dead, or if not, if he will ever be found. Perhaps the most striking message at the close of the book is from Lisa’s grandmother who reiterates one of the main themes: that Lisa must be mindful of her spiritual gifts lest they destroy her. Throughout the book we witness many characters mess around with powerful forces that end up killing them: Mick with the ocean and alcoholism, Ma-ma-oo with her poor health choices. To avoid the same fate, Lisa must choose to live her life and not stay stuck in between worlds. Whether she chooses life or death at the end is left for the reader as a mystery.
