MARCIA WALKER
Nadine Sander-Green, RABBIT RABBIT RABBIT.
Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2024. $23.99
“I wanted to be whole” says the unnamed woman who narrates Surfacing, Margaret Atwood’s classic Canadian novel. In her search for answers, the narrator travels to a remote island in Northern Quebec, but isolation and desire fragment her sense of self even further. Wholeness, particularly for women, is a dangerous struggle. Written over fifty years ago, the novel’s question is still just as alive and bristling today: How exactly does a woman become whole? Nadine Sander-Green, in her penetrating and moving debut novel, Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit, takes up this inquiry and follows a woman’s quest for that elusive unity of self.
Like Surfacing, this novel begins with a woman journeying to a harsh northern Canadian landscape. Millicent, a twenty-four-year-old recent university graduate, arrives in Whitehorse in late September, just before night “pulls its blinds over the city for winter,” to start her first job as a journalist at the local newspaper. While navigating her new life, she meets an older man, Pascal, an artist and filmmaker, who lives in a renovated school bus in the Walmart parking lot. His charisma and unconventional life draw her in, and a passionate relationship develops between them. Soon, however, Millicent finds herself giving up time with her friends, procrastinating deadlines at work, and avoiding calls from her family all to devote herself exclusively to Pascal.
Traditionally, the disturbing expectation of most love narratives is that a woman completes herself by finding a partner. Romantic love = wholeness. Despite the obvious flaws in this model, the search for love and its promise makes for compelling reading. The relationship between Pascal and Millicent is captivating, edgy with desire, and laced with erotic tension (even on a school bus, which is saying something about Sander-Green’s abilities as a writer). But, under the author’s careful watch, what begins as intoxicating quickly becomes difficult to sustain as such. Millicent finds herself “split,” frequently lying or making excuses about her relationship to her friends, family, and co-workers. She consoles herself with the thought that she and Pascal were “at their best when they were alone. No one else could know the inside of a relationship ... its tender, beautiful parts.” What from one angle appears as romance reads from another as manipulation and control.
But it’s not only Millicent who experiences isolation—it’s endemic to the area. Her roommate confesses that she came to the Yukon to be alone but realizes “[o]nly now? Sometimes I’m so alone I’m afraid I will just disappear.” One of the undercurrents of the novel is the problem of aloneness and the fallacy of compartmentalization. Millicent doesn’t want to think about her “two worlds colliding.” However, it’s not merely the difficulty of bringing worlds together; it’s the delusion that they are separate in the first place.
This tension is also reflected in the political subplot. As a reporter, Millicent covers the upcoming local election, the result of which will decide the fate of the Gwich’in traditional territory, the caribou breeding ground known as the Vista. It’s also highly valuable property to GoldPower, a mining company. Jakowsky, the current premier and voice for economic growth (i.e., mining), jockeys to keep his position against Charlie, the first Indigenous candidate to run for premier in the Yukon. In Sander-Green’s skilful layering of plot, what continuously emerges is how systems of power rely on separation and a wilful blindness to a larger perspective. What the Indigenous and ecological crisis reveal is how fundamentally inseparable the political, the personal, and the environmental truly are. Wholeness is interconnectedness.
Sander-Green writes embodied prose, alive with intimacy and immediacy. Millicent doesn’t merely receive a text from Pascal, the message wakes her “like a hand on an electric fence.” While lying in bed, the “the insides of her thighs sweat inside the covers.” The language throughout the novel is deeply rooted in how it feels to be inside a body, with all its paradoxical longings. Millicent is “driven by an urgency in her body” that she does not understand and cannot control.
The descriptions of the landscape, meanwhile, offer stunning glimpses of the severity and wonder of everyday moments in the Yukon. As Millicent drives, “broad bellies of mountains slid[e] by,” and elsewhere the sun fights through the morning mist, “the warmth leaking through the thin clouds, yellow as egg yolk.” With fresh and lyrical language, Sander-Green animates the North with raw beauty and urgency. Embedded in this beauty, however, is the inherent danger of living in a remote and severe climate. The wild and uncontrollable forces around Millicent augment the growing parts of herself that become harder to control.
As their relationship progresses, Pascal’s pet name for Millicent changes from “rabbit” to “little rabbit” to “clumsy rabbit” to “crazy rabbit.” He reminds her that he is the wolf; she is the rabbit. The tension ramps as Millicent must face the various parts of herself, and in a critical scene near the end of the novel—the best arm-wrestling scene I’ve ever read—Sander-Green dramatizes a woman’s terrifying and necessary reclamation of strength. Through a show of brute force and mental fortitude her fragmented self begins to mend.
Like any good novel, Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit does not attempt to answer an unanswerable question: How does a woman become whole? What the book offers instead is a penetrating contemplation of the difficulty of becoming oneself, and what wholeness could mean within a world that emphasizes division and separation. The result is a satisfying, intelligent, and tender debut novel. If Surfacing showed us a woman who delved deep into the wilderness to search for her full identity, Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit offers us a narrative of how a woman can return from the wild and integrate her newfound self into the world around her.