Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Setting, #4.

What contribution to the story is made by its setting? Is the particular setting essential, or could the story have happened anywhere?

The setting is a major component in the novel A Complicated Kindness, there is no way that the story could have kept its shape and taken place anywhere else. The novel is set in the rugged countryside of Manitoba, in an oppressive Mennonite village where you must do, say, and act as you’re told, or be excommunicated (regardless of age). Nomi is a teenager growing up in this town struggling with normal teenager struggles like drugs, sex, love, lust, being accepted, boyfriends and figuring herself out as a person. The tricky part is, she cannot be caught, or she (like her mother and sister,) will be excommunicated. The Mennonites’ world is described with lots of confusion; rules, boundaries and explanations are either not clear, or do not exist, as Meno Simons (who invented the religion, and who Nomi speaks of (and curses) regularly throughout the novel,) was not one for explanations. Nomi is terrified of growing up in this one-horse, behind the times town, where she already knows how her life will end up, that is, if she’s not excommunicated. “I’m already anticipating failure. But then what the hell will it matter to me while I’m snapping tiny necks and chucking feathery corpses onto a conveyor belt in a dimly lit cinder-block slaughterhouse on the edge of town…Most of the kids from around here will end up working at Happy Family Farms, where local chickens go to meet their maker. I’m sixteen now, young to be on the verge of graduating from high school, and only months away from taking my place on the assembly line of death.”(p.2) The town is very simple, somewhat like a pioneer town you would visit, in fact, tourists come from far and wide to see the people of East Village live as they do. “The crosswalk was a new concept in town. It was feared and loathed.”(p. 37) There are also many places where the teenager’s hang out, to be teenagers, away from all of the watchful, judgmental eyes. These places are described in great detail and are significant pieces of the novel’s setting. “I met Travis five months ago at a New Year’s Eve party at Suicide Hill. Good Mennonites don’t technically celebrate the arrival of yet another year of being imprisoned in this world. It’s a frustrating night for them. But we weren’t good Mennonites.” (p.29) Nomi travels to the outer, less inhabited parts of town so that she can escape, relax, smoke a joint and smoke her sweet caps and think and fantasize about life, and why she’s here in the first place. She hangs out at the old lagoon behind the sewage plant, the dump, the “blue field”, Suicide Hill, and many other places that are essential to the novel’s setting. I believe that this novel could not be as powerful, without its current setting, and I think that without as much descriptive setting, the novel would lack altogether.