Conor Kerr's ​Prairie Edge

Reviewed by Catey Fifield

(Strange Light, 2024)

Last summer, I joined a book club in Huntsville, Ontario, a town in the Muskokas with a fast-growing population of wealthy retirees and a median age almost ten years above the provincial average. Given these demographics, I was skeptical about the books that would be up for discussion at Cedar Canoe Books’s monthly book club meeting. I worried I’d be asked to read the latest from Colleen Hoover or to F last year’s only DNF, Bonnie Garmus’s Lessons in Chemistry, which is somehow the most popular book club book of all time. I was pleasantly surprised when I received the email informing me that Conor Kerr’s Prairie Edge, which was later shortlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize, had been voted Cedar Canoe’s book of the month for September.

Prairie Edge follows two distant Métis cousins, Isidore “Ezzy” Desjarlais and Grey Ginther, on their quest to disrupt the status quo—of their own lives, of the lives of settlers, and of the movement for Indigenous rights—by unleashing a herd of national park bison in downtown Edmonton. Ezzy finds himself at the uncertain end of a conveyor belt that has forced him through foster homes, group homes, and prison cells. He’s never been sure of himself or his future, and so when he meets Grey, a prominent activist and organizer of the no-bullshit variety, he is immediately captivated by her cool confidence. Ezzy is eager to strike up a friendship with Grey, and though he would much prefer to hole up in her uncle’s trailer playing cribbage and drinking cheap beer, he can’t help but agree to be her accomplice when Grey decides to take Land Back to new heights. But relocating bison is not as easy as it sounds, and what begins as a purely political act of protest quickly consumes the personal lives of Ezzy and Grey, forcing each to hurl themselves in harm’s way in defence of each other, their loved ones, and the land and animals that are as kin to them as any human relation.

Prairie Edge might be marketed as a “propulsive, frenetic crime thriller,” but it is driven far more by character than it is by action. The bison-heisting wraps up, more or less, by the end of the first chapter, while the rest of the book examines the backgrounds of both characters and the unintended—not to mention deadly—consequences of the “Bison Strong” movement they initiate. In a prologue with an unidentified narrator, Kerr provides a moving introduction to the relationship between the Plains Cree and the bison and examines the demise of the bison at the end of the nineteenth century. In other parts of the book, however, his writing about the bison feels mechanical, as if he were trying to put together a how-to-capture-and-unleash-a-herd-of-bison instruction manual. Despite the beautiful illustrations that adorn the front and back covers of this book, it is Ezzy and Grey, not the bison, who take centre stage.

And Kerr manages the interplay between Ezzy and Grey very well. This is a story about activism, and its author displays a thorough understanding of both the Land Back movement and the people the movement is intended to benefit. It would be too simplistic to suggest that Grey wholly embodies the former category and Ezzy wholly embodies the latter. Although Kerr is right to point to a rift between the experiences of the liberal-minded, university-educated activists who attend Indigenous rights protests and those of the First Nations and Métis peoples who are the very reason for those protests, his characters take up space both under the yoke of colonialism and behind the machines of its destruction. In Prairie Edge, Kerr gives us two very different characters united by an understanding that the failure of Land Back is not an option—even if it seems to them sometimes an inevitable outcome.

Much as I appreciated Kerr’s cynicism, and much as I enjoyed his satire, particularly around the subject of performative activism, I often felt that the prose in this novel was lacking. Fans of Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead won’t be unfamiliar with the informal, Gen Z voice in which Ezzy, especially, speaks, but I couldn’t help cringing at words like “Instababes” and phrases like “Natural settings hit different.” More than these stylistic differences of opinion, however, I took issue with Kerr’s treatment of Grey’s sexual encounters. In particular, when Grey is sexually assaulted and has only “the rapey shit was just clichéd” to say about it, I felt not only that Kerr had missed an opportunity to discuss the impact of sexual violence on First Nations and Métis women but had distastefully brushed over it. While it is certainly in keeping with Grey’s character to neglect her own suffering in favour of the bison her aggressor shoots and kills, this book is political and even prescriptive: there was no shortage of room for Kerr to denounce violence against Indigenous women.

As I’ve worked to organize my thoughts on this book, I’ve found myself hesitating to criticize the actions of these characters—and the decisions of Kerr, their puppeteer. When, while reading, I disagreed with a choice a character (mainly Grey) made or the way a character (mainly Ezzy) described themselves, I had to pause to ask myself, How could it be any other way? Grey lets Ezzy take a major fall for her, but if she didn’t, how much good might she have been prevented from doing? Ezzy’s descriptions of himself as unintelligent and unsalvageable are deprecating and depressing, but given his background—a background Kerr so skillfully sketches out—how can readers expect him to view himself any differently? This book might have stirred some mixed feelings in me, but it never shook my confidence that Kerr is a writer who knows what he is doing. Prairie Edge is angry and has good reason to be angry. I don’t see how it could be any other way.

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​Catey Fifield is a freelance editor based in Montreal.