As an epic vision of reality, Karl Marlantes’s Deep River takes up the enduring cultural theme of primitivism. By seeking out the margins of civilization, the author frees himself from culture’s endless entanglements. Marlantes was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University. He shows (at times) a powerful command of the language. His novel’s hardscrabble loggers, farmers, and fishermen educate their children. But when the phrases “terrible beauty” and “band of brothers” grace this book, Marlantes isn’t thinking of Yeats and Shakespeare. The western literary tradition casts no shadow. It is strange that a historical novel should be, on a literary level, anti-historical. Looking closely, though, we find that this seeming paradox is no accident. Marlantes summons his readers to the early days of the Pacific Northwest, in order to pursue an alternative to modern civilization and to escape what remains of the Christian imagination.
Deep River’s visionary burden falls on a Finnish blacksmith named Ilmari Koski. An immigrant homesteading in Washington State at the turn of the twentieth century, he is the first of three Koski siblings to escape the terrors of Russian occupation. Like other characters in the book, he is derived from The Kalevala, the Finish epic, which sparked a nationalist revival of the Finnish language upon its publication in the nineteenth century. J. R. R. Tolkien likewise found inspiration in The Kalevala.
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