Dust

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Dust - Reviews

National Post

Elizabeth MacCallum: On Children's Reading

Saturday, September 1, 2001

To dust kidnapped children's souls shall be ground

With more scribes per capita than any other province, Saskatchewan is bound to produce some winners, and Arthur Slade is one of them. His extensive output varies from novels based on Icelandic folk tales to comic books. Dust (HarperCollins, 186 pp., $14), Slade's most recent young adult novel, disturbs readers with the compelling force of its strange scenario.

He describes the drought-ridden prairie community so vividly you can feel it: "The prairie had marked Matthew as one of its own. When the sun darkened his skin, he knew the invisible rays were also working on the field of wheat beside him." But that realism is there to bolster the queasy fog of surreal events surrounding seven-year-old Matthew's bizarre disappearance. One day, he accepts a ride in a truck and is gone, evaporated like dew into dry prairie air. Just then, a huckster -- Abram -- arrives and convinces the God-fearing townspeople --skeptics by breeding-- that they can construct a rainmaking tower. Everyone but Matthew's older brother Robert is euphoric, especially when rain does come. This summer, we all can understand. His parents even forget Matthew, not realizing Abram powers his machine with powder he extracts from kidnapped children's souls, eternally barring them from heaven. Young Robert, however, is "on the cusp, between dreaming and reality." He alone withstands the charlatan's thrall and manages to blow up the rainmaking machine. The drought returns but many of the children revive and the thrall of the rainmaker is broken. People reconnect to reality.

Slade dedicates Dust to W.O. Mitchell, Wallace Stegner and Ray Bradbury -- fitting models for a book that combines homespun storytelling with mystery and sophisticated metaphysical aspects that create multi-layered tension. Like the British author Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, Slade works with the terrifying combination of souls as products to use and of maniacs shorn of any moral fibre. For questions readers, it's a thoughtful study of the power of evil, and -- more elusively -- the evil of complicity.

Globe and Mail

Aug 25th, 2001

Forward Into Our Past

Susan Perren

Dust

by Arthur Slade,
HarperCollins, 168 pages, $14,
ages 10 to 14

Arthur Slade dedicates his new novel to W. O. Mitchell, Wallace Stegner and Ray Bradbury, and their benevolent shades inhabit this sparklingly original work. They are present in the dustbowl landscape of Depression-ridden Saskatchewan, a landscape rendered beautifully -- heartbreakingly beautiful as well as just heartbreaking. And they are there -- or certainly Bradbury is -- as this novel leaves earth and moves up into the realm of fantasy.

As the novel begins, seven-year-old Matthew Steelgate is walking the five miles from his family's farm to the nearest town, of Horshoe. He has five cents in his pocket and his candy purchases in mind. His parents will follow him by car. But Matthew never gets to town and his parents never catch up with him. As he walks, dreaming of licorice and bubblegum, a heavy truck draws up beside him. The driver, an oddly menacing man wearing dark glasses and, improbably in the hot weather, black leather gloves, offers Matthew a ride to town. Matthew takes it.

Time passes, and of the grieving family and townfolk, only Matthew's older brother, Robert, believes that Matthew is still alive. Enter one Abram Harsich, of no known provenance, wearer of dark glasses and black leather gloves. Described by some, after the fact, as a snake-oil salesman, he promises the town that his specially built raintower will provide the desparate farmers with rain. As Robert intuitively and doggedly pursues Harsich, dust comes to mean more than just the matter that blows off the dry fields to coast plates and coffee cups as they leave the cupboards. Robert's search for a different kind of dust also leads him to Matthew, in a climax that almost takes one's breath away.

Quill & Quire

August 2001

Feature Review

Cosmic Saskatchewan

By Sarah Ellis

Dust

Arthur Slade: $14 paper, 168 pp. HarperCollins Canada. Reviewed from advance reading copy.

At first the dedication seemed mystifying. "For W.O. Mitchell, Wallace Stegner and Ray Bradbury." Surely Bradbury was the odd man out. Was this going to be grain elevator meets alien de-moleculizer? But then I remembered Bradbury's Dandelion Wine, a lyrical novel of a boy growing up in 1920's rural America, and I thought I knew what I was in for. The opening image of Dust, a small boy wearing a straw hat walking along a prairie road, seemed to confirm my expectations. As it turned out, however, my initial intuition was correct. This book is a fusion of two genres. In Dust Arthur Slade, author of the Northern Frights novels and Saskatchewan-born and bred himself, melds the classic small-town horror tale -- evil charismatic stranger with unearthly powers wreaks havoc upon trusting rural folk.

The plot here is tightly constructed. The setting is Saskatchewan in the 1930s. The kickoff event is the disappearance of a small boy, seven-year-old Matthew Steelgate. Matthew's family, his parents and older brother Robert, join police and other townspeople in a fruitless search. A month later Robert is still in despair but his parents seem to be forgetting Matthew. This odd behaviour coincides with the arrival in town of Abram Harsich, a man who plans to reopen the town's movie theatre. The inaugural event in the theatre is a spectacle involving smoke, mirrors, visions, flashing lights, and a kind of mass hypnotism. (Shades of Robertson Davies' Magnus Eisengrim.) Harsich then announces that he is going to build a rainmill to bring prosperity back to the drought-ravaged community. Skeptics are squelched and the townspeople fall under the spell of this promise.

All the while Robert, a sensitive boy, remains disturbed and dubious. More small children disappear. Adults become increasingly zombie-like. Robert and Harsich have a confrontation in which Harsich reveals the nature of the "dust" that he collects: the souls of children, which he refines and sells to intergalactic buyers in search of power and immortality. Nobody believes Robert's story and he himself is starting to lose his grip on reality. Besides, the rain machine is effective and prosperity looms. Next year's harvest will be excellent.

Finally Robert decides to investigate Harsich's farm and the rainmill. There, in the climactic scene, he discovers the inert bodies of children, including Matthew, their souls being stored as butterflies, and a "sale" about to take place. There is a battle complete with lightning, aliens, pulsing lights, sparking electricity, and a "sulfuric rancid stench." Robert triumphs. Matthew is freed. Harsich disappears. Real life, including the drought, returns.

A reader who roams

Robert is a bookish boy and this is a bookish book and all the better for that. Pulp science fiction, the Bible, Homer -- Robert's imagination is fed by reading. Slade walks easily in the footprints of Mitchell and Stegner as he captures those closely focused moments of childhood so beautifully express in the Prairie writing tradition. A busybody woman puts her hand on Robert's head: "It felt heavy and hot and sweaty like an African toad." Robert, eating chicken, gets caught up in the dream of prosperity: "Chickens. Ham. Money. Rain." Slade's melding of prairie realism and sci-fi speculation works best when applied to concrete reality: "The De Laval cream separator, with all its bowls and pipes, loomed on the cupboard like a Martian instrument of torture." The notion of "dust" as some sort of universal essence, a theme we also encounter in Philip Pullman's fantasy series His Dark Materials, is here grounded by references to real dust, dust that gets into the coffee and the gravy, dust that makes it necessary to store all you dishes upside down.

On occasion Slade falters with point of view. Our window on this world is Robert but at points he sounds too adult, as when he describes his mother: "her body a frail vessel for her spirit." When he observes that his mother and his uncle have the same gaunt features and speculates that they might have shared some frightening event in their youth, I don't feel I'm inside the head of an 11-year-old boy.

Slade doesn't often trust us to believe in Robert. We know that Robert reads widely and sees his life in terms of story. We see him enjoying language. We believe that he is articulate. We don't need "She was not as ... what was that word? Judgmental." When he sees himself as a runner in Marathon we don't require the explanation, "Robert had read about it in one of his uncle's books." Such overexplanation derails us temporarily from the trajectory of the plot. That's too bad because this is a plot that pulls us firmly along, whether we are the kind of reader whose souls resonates to butterfly-faced aliens and electron battles or the kind who is lured by the love between brothers, the sight of a boy playing with his long shadow as the sun sets, and the scent of wolf willow.

Sarah Ellis is a Vancouver writer, storyteller, and librarian.

Star Phoenix/Saskatoon

July 28th, 2001

Depression-era story attracts older readers

By Beverly Brenna for the Star-Phoenix

What makes writing for children different from writing for adults? Some award-winning childrens' authors relate that they don't initially intend particular audiences -- that a story unfolds and then later they determine the age range it will satisfy. Many new chapter books for teens and juniors will satisfy a range of age groups this summer season, although a few may disappoint.

The most inventive of these is Dust, a young adult novel by Saskatoon author Arthur Slade (HarperCollins, paperback, $14). It begins evocatively, "Matthew Steelgate had five cents in his picket and a yearning for chewing gum ..." It sets the stage for the Depression-era tale of a boy who goes missing, a town bewitched by an ominous stranger and an older brother whose responsibility carries him, and the story, forward, from the starkness of realism, through dreamlike sequences of fantasy, then back.

It is this returning of the tale to realism and a happy ending that hold it within the bounds of teen fiction, yet it brushes adult tastes; older audiences will find it sophisticated enough to be savored. Even the cover, reminiscent of themes by A.S. Byatt, is superior. Watch this author; he manages to promise one good word after another, then live up to it.