“Meridian”

By Kris Farmen; Blazo House, 2023; 204 pages; $16.99.

“The water around her is icy cold like winter and it grips her chest like she owes it money,” writes Kris Farmen on the first page of “Meridian,” the third and final novel in his “Seasons of Want and Plenty” series. The sentence, which sort of encapsulates the ominous mood of the interconnected stories that make up this mini-epic, leads into the opening sequence where readers finally learn the full origins of Zia, a soul eater who has pursued Ivan Lukin, the trilogy’s central character, across the landscapes of western Alaska, determined to destroy him and everything he loves.

As I’ve written in reviews of the previous volumes, Farmen, who lives in Fairbanks, is a formidable novelist inclined to delve deep into Alaska’s history and environments, recreating its past and its landscape in painstaking detail. And in these books, as in one of his earlier works, “Turn Again,” Farmen then infuses the world and era he explores with magical realism, exploring the hidden realms that occupied those who lived before the age of scientific rationality. A time when mythical creatures inhabited the wilds on the fringes of human habitation.

“Seasons of Want and Plenty” is set in the 1860s, the decade in which Alaska slipped from the Russian Empire into the hands of the United States. That the transfer of power is increasingly rumored to be imminent among the inhabitants of western Alaska in the first two novels, “Elder” and “Signals.” In “Meridian,” set in 1868 and ’69, that has finally happened, leaving natives and white residents alike to wonder what fate awaits them and how their lives will change forever. Uncertainty, nervousness and the need to decide which nation they belong to have overtaken the employees of the Russian-American company that for nearly seven decades owned the fur trade in what to Europeans was the most remote corner of North America. Many of these employees, including Lukin, who is based on a historical figure, were of mixed Russian and Alaska Native ancestry, leaving them caught between two cultures, connected neither to the United States nor the encroaching British, and thus untethered from the larger world powers which competes for Alaska. They were only tied to the land itself.

(Book Review: “Signals” confirms Kris Farmen’s status as one of Alaska’s best historical novelists)

It is through this changing political and physical landscape that Lukin travels, neither willing nor particularly able to leave it for Russia, part of his heritage but a place he has never known. As the book opens, he chooses to remain in Alaska and travel inland to areas previously unvisited by Europeans, trying to continue his career as a fur trader while hoping to escape the demon Zia and the parts of his broken life that haunt him . Knowing that his very survival hangs in the balance.

The farm blazes through an almost entirely overlooked part of Alaska’s past. The western coast during the time of the Russians is little explored either in historical or fictional accounts. Yet the Russians were there, running trading posts, interacting and mingling with the indigenous population in the most isolated extension of an empire that had transcended itself. This time and place, of which even Alaskans with a strong knowledge of our history know little, provides the perfect setting for these novels. Remote in both time and place, it allows the Farm to unleash its imagination and challenge its characters with the hardships of the land and climate and the alien forces that alternately aid and attack them.

“Meridian” follows Lukin on a journey up the Tanana River (here spelled Tananah, in keeping with the Farm’s use of 19th century Russian spellings), trying to establish his own corner of the fur trade to do business with the incoming Americans. He is accompanied by his daughter Anastasia, her American husband to whom she is newly married, and several others, including Anfisa, the ex-wife of his former friend and now rival and enemy Yosif Denisov. For his part, Denisov is engaged in a similar pursuit of wealth. Now married to Zia, the child demon who has haunted and followed Lukin since he was a schoolboy, Denisov, like his bride, seeks not only to defeat Lukin in trade, but to kill him.

In the earlier volumes, Zia appeared to Lukin at important times, haunting and tormenting him and increasingly attempting to take his and others’ lives. She has the ability to see Lukin’s every move from the face of the moon. Zia is Tlingit, here called Kolosh, again using a Russian term from the era. Lukin first met her in New Archangel (Sitka). She inhabits the body of a girl who drowned at the age of 14, and she remains at this age throughout the three stories.

Zia pressures Denisov, already estranged from Lukin for taking his first wife, into increasingly violent acts as the two men travel further upriver. Seeking both survival and revenge, Lukin turns to a resident shaman and ultimately a giant for help and protection, guiding the novel into the realm of fantasy that runs parallel to The Farm’s consistently eloquent and evocative descriptions of the lands where the story takes place. .

“The sun warmed the world and you could see from the flight of the camp robbers and the chickens that the winter was not long for the world,” he writes in a section about the changing of the seasons. But still needing to stave off the evening chill, the wayfarers built great fires and watched the sparks from the poplar rise into the stars like inverted meteors.

As “Meridian,” and with it the “Seasons” trilogy, catapults toward its cataclysmic and otherworldly conclusion, The Farm never lets the fantastical get in the way of the real. He keeps the story grounded in an Alaska long gone in some ways, yet ever-present in others. These are books about the land and the mysteries it holds, and there is nothing like them in Alaskan literature. Like its characters, The Farm has ventured into uncharted territory and returned from it with something remarkable.

(The 10 Best Works of Historical Fiction 2024)

(Book Review: After broaching religion and politics, the fourth book in the ‘Upon This Rock’ series offers more nuance)

(Book Review: Thomas McGuire’s second novel is as lyrical, intelligent and suspenseful as his first)