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The Orenda Q2: Characters
The Orenda follows three main characters - the Jesuit Priest, Christophe, the Wendat warrior, Bird, and the young Haudenosaunee girl, Snow Falls. Did you find these characters convincing? The narration flips from one character's perspective to another - does each character have equal weight, or does one come to dominate the others? Did you have any favourites among the secondary characters?
Comments
I felt I got on better with Bird than Christophe, but couldn't really identify any one reason for this.
I liked the dynamic between Bird and Fox. I especially liked Gosling - more so than any of the three main characters in fact, probably because she was more enigmatic and (IMHO) interesting than them.
I think all the characters were believable and convincing. I liked how the the perspective flipped from one to the other, so we got to see the thinking behind various actions, even if other characters found them perplexing.
Bird was definitely the villain of the piece. He was a violent, murderous psychopath who enjoyed killing for his own satisfaction. To his mind, the death of his wife excused any number of deaths he inflicted, and he spent most of his life rekindling the rage he felt when she was killed.
Snow Falls' acceptance of life among the Wendat was a bit confusing to me, like @RichardAbbott . It could be because there was more time elapsed in the story than I perhaps realised.
Christophe was interesting, in that he really thought he was doing the right thing and had a lot of respect for the Wendat. Of course, to our eyes, what he was doing was attempting to destroy the Wendat's way of life, but he didn't see it like that. The chapter on the reburial of the bones (during the village move) was interesting. It had some overtones of the whaling chapters from Moby Dick, but also showed how Christophe respected the Wendat's practices.
Some reviewers seemed to think that the Iroquois were the villains, and that Christophe was the hero, and that this made the novel 'predictable'. I certainly didn't see things that way. I think each of the main characters are the hero of their own story - and that their stories diverge. And while I agree that the Iroquois were certainly antagonists, I don't think there was anything particularly villainous about them. In some way, the French were also antagonists. But then again, the three main characters were also antagonists to one another.
I definitely didn't see Bird as a psychopath. He was able to feel remorse and express empathy for others. He definitely did consider the consequences of his actions (even if a times he didn't do it all that well). I, too, liked Bird more than Christophe. I think it's because there's something underhanded about Christophe's goal - or that maybe I can't relate to it. There's something underhanded about Bird, too - he sees the danger in having a close relationship with the crows, but always seems to opt to stick to that relationship when he has the choice (for what I assume are selfish reasons).
I get the impression from reading reviews that the adoption of (mainly women and children) from other tribes was a fairly normal thing. Some have said that the Iroquois tribes in particular were know for this, and that this 'adoption' into the tribe was one of the reasons for raids. Now, that sounds a bit like slavery, but I don't think slavery (in the sense of one person owning another) was a thing here. Once adopted, all these people must have managed to get along OK, so if we try to consider that as the context, her acceptance does make sense.
The two native converts took the Christian names of Aaron and Delilah. I was wondering if there was any parallelism between the biblical characters and the ones in this book, but I'm not that familiar with the Bible to say.
To me the Iroquois were "outsiders" rather than "villains" - we did not get a viewpoint character inside their society (I am not counting Snow Falls because she did not grow up there and so presumably represents a kind of displaced-person viewpoint rather than either Wendat or Iroquois). It was hard for me, not knowing the subtleties of the situation) to discern any real difference between the two groups, but I suppose that in that time and place it would have been profoundly important.
The novel was, surely, written from the French + their allies perspective... the groups that were entirely missing were the other Europeans (British and maybe Dutch at this time?), and we got to infer their actions simply through seeing what the Iroquois had and did not have, eg lots more muskets.
I wonder if the inter-tribe adoption was in origin something more like a way to bind tribes together in matrimony (a strategy used the world over) and also to insure against a small tribe inbreeding and becoming weak - a fate which though not expressed in genetic terms would, I suspect, be a known danger. I can imagine such negotiations turning over time into something more forceful and aggressive.
Aaron seemed a sensible name - he was Moses' brother in the Exodus-from-Egypt account, and so a biblically "good name", but his actions show him to be rather vacillating and easily swayed by popular opinion rather than sticking to the right thing to do. So the name makes sense for a new convert, pulled in potentially different directions between family culture and new faith.
Delilah makes no sense and struck me as a weird choice at the time. She was an antagonist to the Hebrews, using seduction and betrayal to get the hero Samson captured and his work undermined. It is wildly improbable that a Jesuit priest would present her as anything other than a wicked woman, and I cannot imagine Christophe just saying "yeah, sure that's a nice name". He would surely have said something more like "why don't we think a but more about that name and maybe pick something different like Miriam or Ruth".
I'm with @RichardAbbott and see the Iroquois as outsiders. We don't really see their motivations or decisions, so they're more like a force of nature in this book.
As for the raiding for wives, I get the impression that they only person consenting to the whole process was the one doing the capturing. The captured woman was taken against her will, and against the will of her family. It does seem that some women were captured, resisted their fate, and were killed. The process didn't seem to be one of alliance-building.
I thought all the characters were vivid, consistent, and well drawn, from main characters to peripheral characters. I just didn't like them.