Brandon Reid's ​Beautiful Beautiful

Reviewed by Marcie McCauley

(Nightwood Editions, 2023)

​When readers meet twelve-year-old Derik, he’s nearing his destination. He’s travelling by boat to Bella Bella, with his father and a family friend, to attend a funeral. There’s talk of Pokémon cards and intergenerational trauma, and their dialogue is a steady hum.

When they arrive, his father George says it took nine hours, Raven remains quiet, and Derik says it took three days. There’s a sense of awkwardness, but simultaneously a sense that this awkwardness resides within Derik: the men’s conversations unfold organically, in easy and good-natured banter. With family there, meals are shared—like “rice, dried seaweed, canned salmon and ooligan grease”—but sleeping arrangements are conflict-ridden, and Derik’s unease swells.
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This discordance gently invites readers into Derik’s struggles with identity and belonging (he’s part white, part Heiltsuk), and related feelings of loneliness and disorientation. Later in the novel, readers receive this more directly:

​“I have nothing. Nothing! My dog died last year, I have to go to a new school, with no friends, and look where I am: a dumb, primitive land, for dumb, primitive people. You can all die for all I care, and know what? Take me with you while you’re at it, ‘cause I’ll be a hell of a lot better off than I would being here any longer.”

This is what’s simmering beneath readers’ burgeoning understanding of Derik, via the perspective of his guide and guardian Redbird Anon.
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Redbird is “in the background” but “occasionally the narrator.” Even though “it’s unclear who’s in charge”, Redbird has clear opinions about Derik’s narrative. “If he wants me to tell you his story,” Redbird says, “I’m going to tell it the way it should be told.” And he warns that “no one can be blamed for any liberties taken.” Which leads to exchanges like this, between George and Derik with a Redbird flourish: 

“Don’t say that about our people.”

He’s being such a hypocrite. Choked me at dinner when I mentioned the same thing
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No, just grabbed you by the collar.

Redbird is also clear about colonial relations—and menu items.  “Yes, they come from far and wide to stay at the lodge—between episodes of sport fishing and taking what isn’t theirs—to drink domestic beer, get hammered in the restaurant, which has served a good burger ever since the Heiltsuk took over.” And about historic conflict between colonial power and Indigenous nations: “Nowadays it’s all Heiltsuk territory which…is the way it was before the settlers arrived and told them, ‘You can have the nest, but we get the tree.’”

But much of the commentary on Indigenous identity is George’s: “We’re all Natives. White people took our land,” he chuckles. “We all have that in common.” In describing how the sweat lodge tradition stems back to Sioux or Ojibwe traditions, rather than Heiltsuk, George highlights interdependence and resilience: “We made great bentwood boxes and war canoes. We were revered as the only ones who could stand up to the Haida, who used to raid everyone else’s village.”

There’s a note of irony about cultural change. “At one time, a time they thought they yearned for, foraging was necessary for survival. These days, however, they foraged supermarkets, where the fruit was always available and ripe.” And a practical view of the high demand for dispensaries in Bella Bella, where weed is a “valuable commodity to trade for salmon and dried seaweed” and seems to be the “lesser of evils compared to alcohol or prescription drugs.”

Derik’s experience being between cultures is impacted by his sense of being between eras. “He realizes he’ll never know” what it was like for his father to grow up in “such a lawless, racist land”, but that “experience—the tension and lessons—trickles through in the telling.” His ancestors’ stories being rooted in a faraway time and place intensifies his disconnect from Heiltsuk culture. “You have your book smarts and urbane colloquialisms and attitude; we’ll stomp you into the ground! We turn your whiteness to coal.”
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Perspective is key in Reid’s novel, which readers learn via dialogue that’s sometimes colloquial and sometimes philosophical. This feels suitable, given the impetus for this journey. Raven’s questioning what’s normal, for instance: “Everyone sees the world through their own eyes,” he says, and “everyone has their own world they experience.” Even the landscape is depicted as roiling and in constant motion, as irrepressible as Derik’s own act of becoming. 

The waves continue to crash against the boat, crash against each other, crash against the shore, crash against the rocks. Palpable is the static. Derik leaves for his cabin below deck, leaving George to deal with the boat. Raven probably thinks I’m a wimp. 

The defining element of Beautiful Beautiful is Reid’s decision to begin with an arrival that can also be viewed as the launch of a journey: the point at which Derik’s inherited view of the world as threatening and hostile begins to transform.
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“Sailing is a delusional existence,” Derik observes, “constantly mistaking waves for fins.” But even as one moves backwards to heal trauma, one can simultaneously move forward to engage with the future. Derik has a fresh opportunity to view himself as part of something larger, to see that the waves buoy the boat and facilitate his travels. Reid ends his debut by affording Derik the opportunity to begin, by telling his own story, in his own words.

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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.