The first impression that Three Day’s Road imparted upon me was that the novel would be a bildungsroman, a German term for coming-of-age themed stories, due to the way the prologue was narrated. While Three Day’s Road doesn’t quite adhere to the structure of a bildungsroman in a number of ways, I still saw it as coming-to-terms novel due to its central themes and wonderful use of flashbacks. While traditional bildungsromans focus on a character coming of age in a chronological order, Three Day’s Road begins as Xavier returns home from the war, with his flashbacks and memories filling in the gaps for the reader as Xavier attempts to come to terms with himself and what happened.
A captivating piece of historical fiction, the novel highlighted not only the horrors of trench warfare in the First World War, but also a second, more subtle war being fought on Canadian soil by the First Nations peoples. The two narrators, battle-scared Xavier and his aunt Niksa, one of the few remaining medicine-woman, weave together a dual narrative that showcases the war in Europe alongside the one back home – fought between the early Canadian government and the remnants of the First Nations’ heritage. Both conflicts are intense in their own separate way, and the fates of both Xavier and Niksa hang on the outcome of each battle.
One of the more unique aspects of Three Day’s Road is its use of flashbacks to reconstruct the narrators’ pasts. In the present day, Niksa is paddling Xavier back to their home village on a canoe. During the flashbacks, we as readers are transported back to a different time and place in order to witness how everything in the novel came to be. Xavier’s flashbacks jump out at him like ghosts from the past, and recount his time in the trenches and how he, along with his childhood friend Elijah, made the jolting transition from boys to men due to the onset of the First World War. The flashbacks shed light on Xavier’s weary soul and highlight the magnitude of his post-traumatic stress.
On the other hand Niksa’s own flashbacks occur as she attempts to convey the story of her family’s past (and by extension her peoples) to Xavier in an attempt to ease his spiritual pain, though there is no doubt that Niksa’s recounting of her past seems to have a therapeutic effect on herself as well. The earliest flashbacks are of her childhood, and how she and her ill-fated band suffered mistreatment by the Canadian government, who attempted to “civilize” them to Western ways.
Overall both narratives (and their flashbacks) flow together fluidly, and intertwine with each other to become something more. Shell-shock mixes in with culture shock, and the narrative just expands from there. An exhilarating novel, one which I was glad I read.