I can count on one hand the names of authors whom I would willingly commit the hours and attention required to read a book of more than 700 pages. Annie Proulx is one of those rare few. I all but begged on bended knee to review BARKSKINS, clearly remembering THE SHIPPING NEWS from over 20 years ago. Once I finished the first page, I found myself totally immersed in a novel unlike any I’ve ever read.

Proulx has that magical capacity to create characters who step, living and breathing, right off the printed page. BARKSKINS is much more than the saga spanning over 300 years of two families and their progeny in the New World. It follows 20 generations in the lives of two Frenchmen who landed on the shores of New France (now Canada) in 1693, bound to seigneur Monsieur Trepagny, a feudal lord, for payment of debt. At the end of three years, each will receive five acres of the feudal estate. To the two impoverished and desperate men, this is the only way to avoid debtor’s prison. Each will turn his opportunity to his own purposes in different ways.

"...a spellbinding novel of compelling power and importance as the world faces the reality of Western civilization’s hunger for natural resources."

When René Sel and Charles Duquet, both experienced woodcutters, first gaped at the giant trees that were of a size not seen in the old country for hundreds of years, they asked Monsieur Trepagny about the size of this forest. Trepagny said, “It is the forest of the world.  It is infinite. It twists around as a snake swallows its own tail and has no end and no beginning. No one has ever seen its farthest dimensions.”

These men will not live to see the fallacy of this idea that forests are forever. Duquet’s heirs will pay the price of this belief as their fortunes swell, then collapse as their ambition and greed lead them to buy, cut, slash and burn their way through the giant forests of southeastern Canada and northeastern America.

Proulx follows Duquet and Sel and their descendants on their very separate journeys into the 21st century. The duplicitous Duquet escapes from Monsieur Trepagny to pursue the fur trade. He travels to the Netherlands and finally China to amass a fortune large enough to purchase vast forest lands and build his own shipping line. He develops a lumber dynasty that will bring riches and disaster upon his descendants for three centuries. Sel stays with Monsieur Trepagny and is soon trapped into marrying a Mi’kmaw woman. This decision to stay to claim his five acres will cause his progeny to remain trapped in poverty in the face of eventual cultural annihilation.

The American Revolution and the War of 1812 create a demand for ship spars, then the Civil War clamors for railroad ties as the westward movement slashes through the middle of America in the 1800s. The opening of the west, as settlers clear-cut the nuisance woodlands to grow crops, is only one devastating effect of the thirst for the rapidly diminishing forests.

For her research, Proulx spent 10 years traveling the world, meeting with botanists, plant geneticists and timber industry experts to observe the remnants of ancient forests in New Zealand, Europe and South America, and then on to the ice fields of Greenland. At age 80, she has created a spellbinding novel of compelling power and importance as the world faces the reality of Western civilization’s hunger for natural resources. Once considered everlasting, the forests are now dwindling at a rate perhaps too fast to repropagate. BARKSKINS is certain to elevate Proulx among America’s most exciting and prodigious authors.