FICTION REVIEW

The Descendants by Robert Chursinoff (Nightwood Editions $24.95)

BY VALERIE GREEN

In July 1998, two teenagers are running away from a tragedy involving Hells Angels bikers. Jonah

Seeger and Ruby Samarodin had played together as youngsters in the Kootenays despite coming from two very different backgrounds. When they reached their teens and met again at school, they instantly fell in love. The first sentence in Robert Chursinoff’s debut novel, The Descendants, describes Jonah’s feelings for Ruby as “when you love someone with the force of an atomic bomb….”

It’s a passionate opening that draws the reader in immediately. But their love is doomed.

The Descendants is a captivating story of love, family trauma and loss set against the background of the complex history of BC’s Doukhobors (the pacifist Christian group that emigrated from Russia to Canada in 1899, many members of which eventually settled in Grand Forks and southeastern BC’s Slocan Valley).

Chursinoff’s characters are compelling as they struggle to re-evaluate their pacifist roots, their long-misunderstood religious beliefs and the actions of the Sons of Freedom sect (a.k.a the Freedomites a small, breakaway group of Doukhobors who protested through public nudity and arson). The days of the struggles between the pacifist Community Doukhobors and the Sons of Freedom were over by the late 1990s, but the painful memories remain for Jonah and Ruby, who are suffering the consequences of their earlier Doukhobor ancestors.

The structure of Chursinoff’s story is unusual. Not only is he writing a fictional story of love and hope, but he also begins each section with a non-fiction paragraph or two about the Doukhobor’s complicated past. This helps the reader understand his characters a little better. There is reference to the original Doukhobor leader—Peter V. Verigin, a pacifist Doukhobor—andhow he arrived in Canada from Russia and later mysteriously died in 1935 in an explosion on a train, a mystery that was never completely solved.

Jonah and Ruby feel the reverberations of some of these historical happenings—especially Jonah, whosemother is still affected by the humiliation of being a member of the Sons of Freedom. When he drives Ruby in his Honda Civic, screeching around mountain road curves as they get closer to home, Jonah wonders what he has done to his family: “Was more shame on its way to his mother, already shamed because of her Sons of Freedom family?