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'The Jaguar's Children' and the Many Gods of Our Moment

John Vaillant's debut novel tackles 'huge cosmic questions' with emotional urgency. A Tyee interview.

Sarah Berman 17 Jan 2015TheTyee.ca

Sarah Berman is an associate editor at The Tyee. Her writing has appeared in VICE, Adbusters, Maclean's, the Globe and Mail and many other publications.

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'I was sitting at my computer, and the first lines of the book just came out of the air,' John Vaillant says of his debut novel, 'The Jaguar's Children.' Photo: John Sinal.

''These are the times we live in, where the Spanish god of Jesus and the ancient gods of Mexico and the modern gods of business are harder and harder to tell from one another.'' -- John Vaillant, The Jaguar's Children

John Vaillant's first novel, The Jaguar's Children, would not exist today if his family had not moved to Oaxaca in 2009 at the urging of his anthropologist wife Nora. Vaillant was hard at work on The Tiger, his second non-fiction book.

''I was working on The Tiger then, still writing and doing heavy editing, totally immersed in it and in no position to be thinking about any other project,'' Valiant says. That award-winning true story of a battle between man and beast in the Siberian forest followed his debut non-fiction opus, The Golden Spruce, which unpacks the mythology, history, industry and physiology surrounding the murder of a 300-year-old tree on Haida Gwaii.

Vaillant tells me the southwestern region of Mexico presented new psychic territory. Rather than seeking out a subject -- as he did with his previous books -- Vaillant's latest book found him.

''I was sitting at my computer, and the first lines of the book just came out of the air,'' he recalls. ''A voice said, 'Hello, I'm sorry to bother you but I need your assistance.' ''

That voice belonged to the book's protagonist Hector, who finds himself trapped inside a water tank mounted on a truck somewhere along the Mexico-U.S. border, abandoned by smugglers. ''I don't hear things,'' he says of the disorienting experience. ''I'm a journalist, I'm a non-fiction guy and everything has to be verifiable and fact-checkable -- you lose your job if you make stuff up.''

A confession: I have such reverence for Vaillant's non-fiction prose that before opening The Jaguar's Children, I hoped it might barely tip over the line into non-fiction -- capturing the same expansive timelines of The Golden Spruce or The Tiger, perhaps replacing some of those ''fact-checkable'' truths with another person's greater capital-T Truth.

But sitting with Vaillant at a Kitsilano café in Vancouver, his lived experience of the book is so apparent, so glaring, I must sheepishly abandon my hunch that this could be another non-fiction book in disguise. It's not that this novel doesn't weave together similarly epic elements: ancient spirituality, the logic of monoculture, Mexico's colonial history and the spell of loneliness all crackle above and below the surface.

'I didn't sit down and interview survivors of botched smuggling operations,'' he explains, ''which is what I would do if I was writing a non-fiction book. I'd go to the hospital or a refugee centre and find those people . . . I thought I was falling down on the job by not doing all that.''

The Jaguar's Children is as much about the gods as it is about subsistence farming, government corruption or immigration policy. But the journey is an entirely new one, born out of Vaillant's deep relationship with his characters. This channeling brings an emotional urgency to Vaillant's writing, which feels so necessary in a political moment barbed by financial stress, social precarity and the threat of collapse.

In the throes of an international book tour, the Governor General award-winning author sat down with The Tyee to discuss his newfound writing process, having too much freedom, Zapotec indigenous wisdom, and what's keeping him up at night.

Big picture, close up

The Jaguar's Children reads like a feverish reverie, experienced at a suffocatingly close angle. As the hours in the tank pass, and water grows scarce, Hector pieces together the sequence of events that landed him in such a dangerous predicament -- a run-in with police, his father's pressures to work in El Norte -- in a series of voice recordings on a cell phone.

Vaillant says the book pushed him inside his own heart and brain like never before. He tells me it couldn't be further from the process that produced The Golden Spruce, where he sought to intellectually understand everything that came before B.C.'s logging boom -- achieving a near all-seeing perspective.

''I realized I'm not going to be able to understand what's going on here until I pull back far enough to see the curvature of the Earth,'' he says of his research efforts for his first book. To achieve that satellite view, he sat down and read everything he could find.

''It's such a terrible mercenary thing to do,'' jokes Vaillant. ''You're reading these people who laboured over some tiny miniscule piece of the story -- it's a PhD thesis or life's work and you’re cherry picking gems out of it. You know, 'Thanks for those 10 years of work, now I got my quote.' ''

Vaillant has broken away from that synthesis and discipline, instead relying on the tensions inside himself. ''With non-fiction, you're not really allowed to have your own feelings. And other people's feelings might be really intense, but they're never going to be as powerful, or as eloquently portrayed as the feelings you can bring to it,'' he explains.

Full of big symbols and humble details, Vaillant drew on his first-hand experience camping along the U.S.-Mexico border and swimming across the Rio Grande. He listened to migrant stories, ''borrowing'' the details that left him reeling -- like a child's sock, stitched into the crotch of a parent's jeans, holding a small wad of bills. ''I just imagine the dad, keeping this child's sock, and it's light, portable, maybe it still smells like his daughter -- it's heartbreaking.''

From there, he looked further inward, unsure if he was channeling his characters, or if his characters were channeling him. ''I would try to get myself into that emotional state he was in, and see what's coming up for me,'' he says. ''That kind of dynamism occurs when your feelings and the truth of the character mesh. His might be blue, and you might be red, but they come together and make this really authentic and rich purple.'' The result is a big, vivid picture, from a close-up lens.

Confronting the gorilla

As a writer who begins and ends his creative process with what keeps him awake at night, Vaillant has no shortage of crises to worry about. Here in Canada, he says, one of the most glaring human dilemmas lies just over the Rocky Mountains.

''The tar sands has been on my mind ever since I learned about it,'' he says. ''I've been fretting about it, lying awake at night thinking about it for 10 years.

''It just seems like the stupidest, most short-sighted thing in the world, to take that stuff out of the ground at this time in history and pump it across this pristine landscape and then ship it across an imperiled ocean,'' he continues. ''I can't imagine something less responsible.''

It's this crisis of conscience that pushed Vaillant to write a rousing call to action against Kinder Morgan in November, when protesters blocked the company's survey work on Burnaby Mountain. He named the Texas oil giant ''the gorilla'' -- observing the havoc its drills wreaked on the mountain. He wrote: ''I am angry at the gorilla but I am angrier at the government that invited it into our home.''

These are the ''huge cosmic questions'' that push Vaillant out of bed at four in the morning. The challenge lies in shaping those gut-feelings into a story. Of Alberta's oil patch, he says, ''I don't quite know where the narrative book is.

''There's a Tar Sands Moby Dick somewhere. And I'd love to write it.''

And 'narrative killers'

The trouble with taking on our most pressing global crises in literature is that these issues are so often steeped in technicality, political punditry and jargon -- ''narrative killers'' as Vaillant terms it. From mortgage-backed securities to genetically modified foods, there's an abstractness that defies a compelling story.

But The Jaguar's Children readily grapples with these big questions anyway, folding the trouble with globalized food production into a high-stakes plot point. ''GMO corn is the last thing I would ever want to put in a novel,'' he says. ''I can see writing an article about it but I can't imagine someone reading fiction, something about GMO corn, you know what I mean?''

''But the fact is there are seeds that have been designed to kill themselves,'' he continues. ''What if you've been selectively breeding corn in the same location over 7,000 years from this tiny grass to the corn we know today -- to what is now the most valuable crop in the world and shapes so much of our lives and diets.''

It's Hector's friend Cesar who negotiates with corporate gods, putting his Zapotec relations in peril. Vaillant sets up a mythology and a choice: ''All of a sudden, you have to go to the man to get the seed. Well what self-respecting farmer would go for it?''

Of course, Vaillant doesn't present any easy answers -- he takes care not to romanticize traditional lifestyles, to show influence but not superiority. ''Indigenous culture has so much to teach us,'' says Vaillant. ''It was amazing to go to these pueblos. People have been living there for five hundred years, a thousand years, the hillsides aren't deforested, the soil is still fertile, you can drink out of the rivers.''

''But right now people are choosing whether or not to drink the Kool-Aid of capitalism,'' he continues. ''Or stick to their guns and live in what is sort of described as poverty.''

The ancient and corporate deities battle on through the novel, but there's ultimately no resolution. Yes, Hector appeals to his Catholic faith for solace -- proclaiming he'll light church candles for his family, should he ever escape -- but he doesn't throw off the gods of globalization, either.

''It's about how you harmonize those influences and the different benefits that they offer in a way that is balanced,'' says Vaillant. ''And that's the supreme challenge.''  [Tyee]

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