Summary
The novel opens with the protagonist, Lisamarie, waking up after getting little sleep. Upon waking, she experiences six crows speaking to her the Haisla word “la’es.” She had been up late in a meeting the previous night to discuss her brother Jimmy, who has disappeared out at sea while on a fishing job with a man named Josh.
The narrator explains the history of the Haisla reservation territory, which is located on Princess Royal Island in British Columbia, Canada. The Coast Guard calls Lisamarie’s mother to tell her that Jimmy still has not been found. Lisamarie’s parents, Gladys and Al, leave to fly to Vancouver. From there they will travel to Namu, where they will search for Jimmy.
Lisamarie reveals that the night of his disappearance, she dreamt she saw Jimmy at Monkey Beach. Lisamarie remembers a story that her father used to tell her and Jimmy when they were children about trappers who were confronted and attacked by sasquatch men in the woods. Lisamarie’s grandmother (Ma-ma-oo) always insisted that Al told the story wrong—too gruesome and dramatic. The stories inspired the young Jimmy to buy a camera and go to Monkey Beach, where he believed he could photograph the sasquatch. Lisa now takes us to this flashback.
The whole family, as well as Lisamarie’s aunt and uncle, goes on a boat trip to Monkey Beach. Everyone views it as a chance for a relaxing vacation, except Jimmy who is adamant about photographing the sasquatches. When the boat reaches the shore, Jimmy tries to run into the woods but is stopped by his family. They wake up the next morning on the beach to discover that Jimmy is gone. Lisamarie goes to look for him, running after what she thinks is her brother, only to be left with a strange “prickled” feeling in her body. She glimpses a brown fur-covered man who smiles at her and then vanishes behind a tree. She screams and Jimmy appears and excitedly starts taking photos. Lisamarie decides not to tell him about what she saw. Both children are punished.
The flashback ends and Lisamarie returns to the present moment, again contemplating her dream and the message of the crows. She smokes a cigarette on her patio. There is a flashback to another old memory of Lisamarie as a little girl sitting besides a ditch, observing a wounded dog. A strange little man with red hair comes by and tells her to return home. Then she hears her mother calling for her. She wants her mother to come see the dog, but she insists that Lisa come back for lunch. When she returns to the ditch later, the dog is dead.
Lisamarie sometimes has a hard time distinguishing if some of these old memories are dreams or not. She also remembers seeing the little man again one night when she was six years old. The man appeared on her dresser while she was trying to fall asleep. The next morning she tells her mother about the little man, but Gladys insists it was just a dream. That day is Gladys’s birthday and in the morning a man appears at their door, which shocks both of Lisa’s parents. The man is her Uncle Mick who has been gone for awhile. Lisa’s parents inform Mick that most of his relatives and friends had thought that Mick was in jail after being shot and taken away by the FBI.
The next day, Lisa’s father takes her with him on a trip to the village for groceries. They stop at the bank and discover that Mick has deposited a large amount of money in Al’s account. They stop by Mick’s house and Al insists on giving him back the money, chasing his brother into the house. Mick comes back out into the car and we learn that Lisa’s father has backed down and accepted the money. In the next scene, Lisamarie’s family is helping Mick at his house with tidying up and going through all the paperwork that has piled up since he has gone missing. Lisa’s father tells Mick about the tidal wave that happened in July. We flash back to this incident: there had been an evacuation order and as Lisa’s parents are packing the car, she runs away, wanting to have an adventure. She is found up in a tree by her Uncle Geordie.
We are then taken to the next spring when Lisa’s dad announces he will start a vegetable garden. It turns out he is quite talented at farming and their garden blooms successfully. One year he buys chickens, much to the Gladys’s disapproval. Although Al has sealed the chickens off in fishnet to protect them, the hawks get to them one day, killing several of them. The rest of the chickens escape to the beach and refuse to come back, eventually getting eaten by other animals.
Analysis
In the beginning of Monkey Beach, we become acquainted with Lisamarie and her family through a tragic event: the disappearance of her brother, Jimmy. Although this incident opens the book, most of these first few pages are used to actually go back in time, depicting different pivotal moments of family history through Lisamarie’s daydreaming. Right away we realize that Eden Robinson will not be telling this story in a linear fashion. Rather, a series of vignettes, going back and forth in time, are strung together in order to provide us with a greater perspective of all that these people have been through and the many strange, dreamlike events that have characterized Lisamarie’s early life.
A contrast is set up right away between the world of children and that of adults. We are introduced to Lisamarie’s parents and their various quirks and characteristics which paint them as people who, while clearly having a traditional Native background, also are trying to assimilate into the Western culture and its rationalistic approach. While Lisa and Jimmy are very attuned to the mystical side of reality—with various instances of paranormal sightings—their parents would rather push this away, as we see when Gladys tells her daughter that the little man is just a dream. They have a disbelief in the mystical, an affinity for pop culture stars like Elvis, and a desire to attain certain markers of class status: a beautiful garden, manicured nails, and fancy dishes.
Robinson illustrates this childhood state in all of its mystery and excitement, where stories and fairytales possess a realness that most adults brush off as fantasy. We are shown the natural connection children maintain with their surroundings, which usually erodes gradually as they grow to be adults. We can see this when five-year-old Lisamarie watches a dying dog and wants her mother to come see it, while her mother is not at all interested and is strictly focused on the daily routine. At the news of a major tidal wave approaching their area, Lisamarie as a child is eager not to retreat into the safety of her parents’ car but to climb a tree and watch this powerful force of nature unfold before her.
In the present tense of the novel, Lisamarie is 19 years old and thus at the transition phase between being a kid and a grown-up. We see in this part of the book how in some ways she has taken on the behaviors of the adults, such as in her routine chain-smoking and coffee drinking. Yet in other ways, she has not completely lost the mystical aspect of herself quite yet; the book opens with her conversing with crows, who speak to her in the traditional language. She also is still connected to her dreams and views them as spiritually significant. The dream of Jimmy at Monkey Beach serves to set the stage for the events to come.
As a descendent of a Native culture, Lisamarie has also kept with her the tribal vision of animals as important messengers. Chickens, crows, and a dog all appear in the story with a particular symbolism that is not directly stated by Eden Robinson but more so meant to be felt and interpreted by the reader. There is something eerie about the story of the chickens, which were originally meant to be an exciting addition to the family backyard, but then brutally killed and eaten by hawks. We can perhaps see a parallel in the way that Jimmy has now been taken away from them in a sudden and unexpected way. However, as the narrative jumps between past and present, it is likely that certain scenes will take on a more clear meaning as we continue reading the story.
Eden Robinson’s language is highly metaphorical and full of rich imagery that evokes a sense of time and place without having to directly state certain facts. She sets the scene using elemental descriptions of the ocean and sun to symbolize the overarching tone or mood of the story. For example, in a scene in the present storyline while Lisamarie is smoking cigarettes on the porch, there are very strong gusts of wind. This forceful wind matches the deep and somewhat chaotic changes that are taking place in the uncertainty of Jimmy’s disappearance. Lisa’s inability to light her cigarette in this weather brings a sense of the smallness of humans within the greater movements of life and death.
