Nina Berkhout's ​This Bright Dust

Reviewed by Marcie McCauley

(Goose Lane Editions, 2024)

Abel Dodds’ view, from the window of his Depression-era home on the Canadian prairie, immediately invites readers to inhabit his perspective in Nina Berkhout’s This Bright Dust, her meticulously curated and tenderly crafted fourth novel.

He sees the Wisharts’ farm and the schoolhouse on one side, the town and its grain elevators and railway—connecting to the wider world—on the other. The Peloquin family’s settlement is out of sight but part of Abel’s world, the English royal family is out of sight and not part of his world. But King George and Queen Elizabeth are the focus of Una Wishart’s view—even living in the home she grew up in, still with her father and now with her young son—as her household prepares to greet the royals travelling across Canada in 1939.

Against the backdrop of that decade’s disastrous climate and political strife, Berkhout’s characters confront change and challenges—as have others in her fiction. Her first novel, The Gallery of Lost Species, raises questions about what’s lost and what remains—how memories both root and shift—in families and art and cryptozoology. In The Mosaic, a character burrows underground, seeking the protection of an abandoned missile silo. And, in her third novel Why Birds Sing, even the parrot demonstrates her problem-solving skills, as she steadfastly unties knots in a ribbon. Berkhout’s pacing is measured, even while stakes are ever-escalating and lives are fundamentally altered.

Berkhout’s work as a poet—evidenced in seven published collections—is also evident here, as she gently but relentlessly immerses readers in this dustbowl-era setting characterized by decay and desolation. A towel has “thinned to gauze”, the shingles are rotted, and the soil is wind-eroded. The hay has moulded, but little else still lives in prairie barns anyway. Scarcity means that a flour-sack serves as material for clothing, and that having two unmatched shoes equates with good fortune. Mortality is ever-present: “Clothing hung stiff on the line like frozen corpses.”

A poet’s exactitude and precision also crystallize one of the novel’s central motifs. Just a few pages into the story, the sun breaks open on the prairie and, a few pages later, an axe breaks the ice in the trough: this extended shattering gains power throughout the narrative, each blow raising the risk of annihilation. This Bright Dust reveals all the sharp edges, whether a planter’s broken axel or a cut of the moon shining in the sky; the violence builds quietly until war breaks out and men’s lives are cut short.

This delicate threading requires a particular attention to detail in Abel’s present-day experiences, and it also provokes readers’ wider understanding of human history. Early in the novel, characters battle starvation and poverty, and they muse as to whether Hitler and Mussolini will determine their interests align; after a few months, crops fail again and resources dwindle further, and newspapers report on European leaders’ Pact of Steel. The shifts from thriving to surviving, from democracy to dictatorship, are swifter than expected.

Perspectives, too, shift dramatically. One man’s efforts to protect two families’ farms intersect with broader threats against humanity, and heightened awareness of the ephemeral nature of life for residents of farms and lands far away. “Abel knew only what Miss Kitty had taught them about the Boer War—that although the conflict was supposed to be resolved in weeks, it lasted years, with forty or fifty thousand regular folk—mostly Africans and Boer children—dying in British camps.” Abel’s view from his window widens, and as his understanding broadens too, his investment and responsibilities increase.

Not only does Abel look to history to understand his present, but Berkhout also urges readers to recognize ripples of vulnerability. Her use of the railway resonates geographically, historically, and symbolically. In the context of Canadian history, it is a traditional symbol of national unity, but the Peloquin family’s experiences remind us that many Indigenous nations were permanently displaced by those immovable rails, and many immigrants’ lives were lost in the network’s construction. And while locomotives represent mobility and opportunity for some in 1930s Canada, there’s an undeniable echo of the trains delivering millions to their deaths in the concentration camps in 1930s Germany.

Berkhout’s novel resides on a shelf with historic prairie stories—like Sinclair Ross’s 1941 novel As for Me and My House, which presents agricultural life in conjunction with domestic strife, and Willa Cather’s One of Ours (1922), set where rural life and world war intersect—and modern stories like Saskatchewan writer Sharon Butala’s 1984 novel, The Garden of Eden, which also considers abundance/scarcity and self-actualization/sacrifice on local and global scales. More recently, Michael Crummey’s Sweetland (2014) explores one man’s solitary nature—his sensitivity and stoicism—and broaches the question of how long hope is sustained when everyone else has gone. And Barbara Joan Scott’s 2022 novel, The Taste of Hunger, which is also set largely on the prairies in the 1930s, focused on both literal and figurative hunger alongside thwarted desire.
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Nina Berkhout’s This Bright Dust frames the life of Abel Dodds nearly one hundred years ago in the context of enduringly relevant themes: the privilege of the elite, the vulnerability of the working class, the rise of fascism, and the devastation of war. The view from the railway station presents tracks stretching in only two directions: novels like this remind readers to look around, to attend to the unobserved and to unseen possibilities and, most importantly, to seek other ways of moving through the world. 

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​Marcie McCauley's work has appeared in Room, Other Voices, Mslexia, Tears in the Fence and Orbis, and has been anthologized by Sumac Press. She writes about writing at marciemccauley.com and about reading at buriedinprint.com. A descendant of Irish and English settlers, she lives in the city currently called Toronto, which was built on the homelands of Indigenous peoples—Haudenosaunee, Anishnaabeg, Huron-Wendat and Mississaugas of New Credit—land still inhabited by their descendants.