🍃🌿🌱🐞 Stacy's Idea Garden 🐞🌱🌿🍃

I didn’t expect to like this book. Actually, I had to force myself to start reading it after renewing it from the library a week late. Once I got started, though, I couldn’t put it down. This review contains many spoilers.

No Man’s Land tells the story of generations (?) of people struggling to transcend their circumstances. Davey, the 14-year-old protagonist, is rescued from a battlefield and raised in a violent pillaging cult. She is characterized from the beginning as being an outsider to the group who dares to question those around her. She cannot leave the group because she has nowhere else to go.

The story starts with a long, violent prologue about a character named Will. While Davey is looking to understand how she ended up in the care of the cult, she doesn’t learn much about her biological family except through a tale told by the Reverend - the cult leader. It is well established by Vigna through Davey that the the cult leader does not tell the truth, though, so even if the prologue and his story might describe the same character and similar events, the reader can’t believe what the Reverend tells Davey. The story is gruesome, disturbing to read, and describes the life of a young boy who learns how to prostitute himself for money and the revenge he then seeks from his father. There are parallels that suggest that this boy grew up to be Davey’s father, but this is never confirmed. After the story is told, Davey meets the same character from the prologue, Will, and for some reason believes that he is her father although she’s got no reason for thinking this. The character Will dies shortly after being re-introduced.

There is a great deal of build-up to the reverand’s story, but everything that happens after feels misplaced. Neither Davey nor the reader find out who his story is about, nor how much is true. 100 pages in, there is an established cast of characters with confused relationships. Vigna has a habit of generating a great tension and then immediately and unceremoniously killing off the relevant characters.

While the story that this book tells is narratively interesting, Davey actually doesn’t change much at all for the remainder of the book. She starts out as a reluctant bystander to her carer’s crimes. She remains as such until the end. The woman who raises her, Bulah, starts off an accomplice to the reverand and remains so until the end. The other support characters who meet various fates do not go through great metamorphosis either. Even a prostitute, Laura Bell, who starts a tentatively hopeful family with an RCMP officer midway through the book, is once again a childless prostitute 26 years later when Davey encounters her in the epilogue. Maybe that is part of the point that Vigna is trying to get across - nothing and nobody really changes.

Other reviewers seem to think that the major themes of this book have to do with confronting religion and wrestling with questions of fate and self-determination. I am of two minds on this - on one hand, this book can be read as being about the strength of religious influcence over group behaviour. On the other hand, it repeatedly emphasizes the a-religiosity and amorality of the roaming group of reverend’s followers, and Davey and a few others are seen to consistently reject his influence. As a character who starts off being a reluctant accomplice, her eventual splintering from the group is not surprising or undexpected. She is there because she is 14 years old. The reasons for her developing her opposition to the leader are never mentioned or explored. The only arguments of fate are ones that come from the reverand, who is from the beginning established to be manipulative and unreliable. Of course Davey escapes the first chance she gets.

This book might have made more of an impact on someone who is more familiar with religion. Sometimes when reading fiction with religious undertones, I feel that there might be some hidden meaning that I’m missing.

Still, the story of a group of roaming pillagers surviving in frontier Canada left me feeling haunted.

Review: 4/5 stars