Rufous, a modern-day cartographer in his 40s, is losing his memory.
Contending with the unreliability of his own mind and navigating the rough terrain of B.C.’s Interior, he heads out on a solo expedition looking for the treehouse where he and his siblings spent one summer.
That’s where things begin in Nelson, B.C., author Sarah Louise Butler’s latest novel, Rufous and Calliope, a complex tale told from the perspective of both Rufous, a middle-aged man today, and a child in the 1970s.
The desire to write about dementia grew from Butler’s own experience with her grandmother, who lived in a nursing home near where Butler grew up.
“In my earliest years before starting kindergarten, I was there almost every day,” she told CBC’s North by Northwest.
“I actually remember my youngest brother learning to walk in the halls of the nursing home, and as he was learning to walk, my grandmother was forgetting how to.”
At the time, she said she worried that her memory would one day fail, too.
“In a lot of ways, Rufous’s story is a way for me to imagine that outcome in a way that was more whimsical and less terrifying.”
Butler spoke with CBC’s Margaret Gallagher about the novel and what comes next.
LISTEN | The inspiration behind Sarah Louise Butler’s latest novel, Rufous and Calliope:
North by Northwest15:03Nelson, B.C.’s Sarah Louise Butler on new novel Rufous and Calliope
Nelson author Sarah Louise Butler explains how the mysteries of nature blur with fading memories in her new novel Rufous and Calliope, a story of love and loss set in B.C.’s Interior.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You send Rufous on a quest to find the treehouse that he lived in with siblings. Why did you want to send him on this journey?
The treehouse was sort of a central image of the book, and honestly, it was just a way to sort of fictionally live out my childhood dream of living in a treehouse. I think it’s so common among children, and I just always think it’s interesting. I have a son who’s 20, and I’ve seen how when you get a small kid and you put them in a tree, if they possibly can, that child will climb that tree.
I also really wanted to emphasize how, although it can sound quite stark, these children [were] without parents living in the treehouse. I really wanted to focus on those sibling relationships. I think there’s so many books about romantic relationships or there’s a lot about parent/child relationships, and I think there’s fewer about siblings and as families get smaller, I think that trend might continue.
I grew up as the third of four. So my siblings were my whole world. We’re all Generation X, so we were around our siblings much more than our parents. The adults were sort of in the distance a lot of times. My older siblings were the ones I looked to to see what the world meant, how to be in the world, what music to listen to, what clothes to wear, all of it. I really wanted that to be sort of the central longing of Rufous was to be with his siblings again and for that to be at that treehouse in that time in that place where it was just all of them together.
This story is set in B.C.’s Interior in a fictional town. Tell me about how the landscape inspired this story.
The fictional setting from this book actually is brought over from my first book because there’s some characters in common. After having created the fictionalized version of this area for that book, I felt like I had to stick with it. It’s not exactly the Kootenays, and I’ve had to change a lot of things just for practical purposes so that I could go and immerse myself in a place and feel the setting of the book without having to travel hours every day, which, of course, I didn’t have time to do.
Sarah Louise Butler is an author based in Nelson, B.C. (Bobbi Barbarich)
Some people, people who live here, I actually put a note in here because of my last book, people from the area were always grilling me. So to spare us all that, I put a note saying it resembles our area, but it’s not. It’s fictionalized.
The little village near where he grows up does have some similarities with the village I grew up in, which was in southern Ontario. And so I still have some family back there. And they were very amused to find little remnants of especially the Catholicism of our childhood. There were a lot of little bits pulled over into the story.
He maintained such a connection to the animals and the flora and the fauna that come in and out of his consciousness in different ways. Why was this important for you?
I spend a lot of time out wandering by myself. I live in a town of about 11,000 people, but it doesn’t take long getting out of town before you start to be in areas that are fairly wild. It’s not at all uncommon for me to see a moose or a bear. There’s an incident in the book involving a grizzly bear and her cubs. I had an encounter that was very similar to that and even that feeling of the bear being able to read my thoughts felt absolutely acute and true to me in that moment. I wanted to reflect that with Rufous and also take it a level further where he is literally hearing [the bears] speaking to him in his mind.
You play with time and perception. How were you able to keep that all straight?
Honestly, as a writer I just can’t recommend it. It probably added more than a year to writing the book, the structure that I chose, but I feel like a novel, it sort of asserts its own structure, and you argue with that at your own peril. I almost came to think of it as a quilt where I created all these individual squares and then I had to sew them together in a way that made sense, but mostly that was pleasing to the eye.
While it was complicated for me to put them together, I really wanted it to feel really smooth and engaging and immersive for the reader.
Do you think you’ll return to Rufous?
It’s really interesting because now that I have two books with some overlapping characters and I’ve begun working on my third [book], and it’s not at the point yet where I’ve figured out who or what’s going to overlap, but just a few days ago I was actually thinking, how interesting would it be to see Rufous from the outside? From someone else’s perspective. It’s too early to make any promises, but who knows, maybe.