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Explanation and Analysis:
Indian Horse is a novel with the marks of poetry—rich, lyrical sentences charge the story with feeling. Varied and shifting, Saul’s prose does what his skates pull off on the ice. At some points, the novel plods with short, deflated sentences. “My body feels stronger. My head feels clear. I eat heartily,” he notes at the story’s outset. At other moments, it struggles to keep in all the emotion: “Even now when I think back to that day, I can see the shimmer of the wake they left behind them, the vee of it and the divergent lines that lapped at the shoreline.” The novel’s dynamic sentences control the pace and tempo of its storytelling.
The book celebrates Obijway culture as much as it showcases the force of language. Deliberate uses of Ojibway terms, such as Maymaygwayseeuk or Zhaunagush, celebrate Indian’s heritage by integrating the language into the novel. Dreamlike sequences, meanwhile, mark Indian’s most formative moments, replicating the Indigenous emphasis on spiritual connection and otherworldly sight. A vision introduces Indian to his ancestors during his first night on Gods Lake; decades later, it reconnects him to his people. Dreams connect the novel to a greater cultural tradition just as they tether Indian to a deeper sense of belonging.
But the most devastating of Indian Horse’s stylistic decision arguably involves what it tries to hide. At the plot level, there is also significance to what is left unsaid. Wagamese withholds information of Saul’s abuse by Father Leboutilier until nearly the end of the work, as though mimicking the subconscious omissions of trauma. Indian never opens up about his sexual abuse until he reaches his breaking point, at which point it springs—startlingly—upon the reader. Drunk, broken, and jobless, he finally confronts “the groping, the tugging, the pulling” that had tortured him for years. Indian Horse builds a powerfully emotional plot through the timing of its exposition and its relation with the past.
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