Secluded in a former boarding school for Aboriginals, Jeremiah Camp spends his days tearing down the anonymous wooden crosses that mark the graves of dead children. He replaces them with stones that he chisels in their names because “the children buried here deserve better than a grave marked with a symbol of the cult that murdered them”.
Posted at 12:00 p.m.
His past as an analyst in the business world, however, is catching up with him. Billionaires, whose names appear on a list he once compiled for a wealthy employer, are dying one after another. The new manager of the firm that employed him wants to pull him out of retirement to shed light on the situation.
Jeremiah Camp thus finds himself torn between two worlds, between a wealthy elite and a small dispossessed indigenous community.
The talk sounds serious. He is. But Thomas King breathes a good dose of humor into the story. The Canadian author of Cherokee origin creates a gallery of picturesque and endearing characters, starting with ancestor Nutty Moosonee, the Three Bears (an inseparable trio formed by Cradle River First Nation Chief Louis Bear, his daughter Enola and his nephew Wapi) and, of course, Lala, Nutty’s granddaughter, who takes a liking to the austere Jeremiah Camp and calls him Pop-Up.
Add the bad guys, of course, including the mayor of nearby Gleaming, Bob Loomis, who wants to relocate the community of Cradle River to install a big real estate project instead.
In the past, Thomas King wrote detective novels as well as landmark essays on First Nations conditions. In Tolerance’s thresholdunder the guise of an intriguing thriller, it manages to portray the terrible living conditions, but also the resilience of a community.
Tolerance’s threshold
Thomas King
inkwell memory
410 pages