Echoes in the Woods

A young man sits alone in a tree on a late afternoon in winter, darkness coming on. The air is cold, and his fingers are numb. A rifle rests in his lap. As he waits for a chance to shoot a deer, a gunshot echoes from the direction in which his father also sits waiting, and the young man senses immediately that something is wrong.

This is how my novel, Undiscovered Country, begins—and how it began for me, as well, one late afternoon years ago in a Minnesota woods as I sat up in a tree, rifle in my lap, imagining that scene. What sort of story, I asked myself, might it suggest? Who was this boy I’d dreamed up? Who was his father, and what in heaven’s name had happened to him? For a long time I didn’t know. But the scene stayed with me until one day, years later, I felt compelled to put it down on paper. When I did that, something was jarred loose in my head. What if I used the same premise that Shakespeare used for Hamlet? I wasn’t casting about for a mythic plot to appropriate, at least not consciously, but I saw right off that it was perfect, just what I needed: a young man—sensitive, vulnerable, strong-minded—loses his father, and then worse, is given reason to question the circumstances of his father’s death.

The act of discovering a story, at least for me, often follows this pattern. An image or scene—some person or situation I happen to observe, or an incident I’ve heard about—collides in a fascinating way with some other image, scene or idea, and I’m off and running. I don’t mean to make the process sound mystical—and in fact I’ll go out on a limb and suggest that I might have been aware, at some level, of how my initial scenario (a boy alone in the dark cold, waiting) is emblematic of Hamlet’s situation and state of mind. His predicament, you could say, is the adolescent predicament, crazily magnified. With his father dead and his mother tangled up with the man who has stepped in to take his father’s place, Hamlet must do what each of us must do as we move toward adulthood—remake himself in his own image. Every support and mental comfort has been knocked away, and he’s forced to discover his deepest reserves of strength. He is stripped bare, the moorings of his psyche exposed.

I should point out that it wasn’t my intention to retell Shakespeare’s tale. Instead I wanted to search out its mainspring, wind it up, and put it to the test. I wanted to find out if a character who issues from my mind—a young man who is the product of a place I know, Minnesota lake country—would, if faced with the dilemma Hamlet faced, make decisions similar to the ones Hamlet made. I didn’t know how my novel was going to turn out until I wrote through to the end of it. And I can’t say that it ends as I would have liked it to end—because it ends as it must end, given who my characters are and who they become along the way. Character, after all, is the beating heart of fiction, and writers need to employ whatever plot will allow them to mine the potential of their characters in a way that’s convincing and authentic.

In some respects Jesse Matson, my seventeen-year-old protagonist, is similar to his literary precursor. He shares Hamlet’s intensity and unblinking pursuit of truth—though not his tormented melancholy. Like Hamlet he learns to doubt the allegiance of friends, yet he has no wish to banish his beautiful but troubled girlfriend to a nunnery or anywhere else. His father is a mayor and restaurateur, not a king. His mother is a singer, a disappointed actress, not a queen. And while there is something rotten in the small town of Battlepoint, Minnesota, Jesse’s attempts to root it out are his alone.

Copyright © 2008 by Lin Engers