In his new novel, established British Columbia novelist Dennis E. Bolen injects the iconic story of a quest journey with gritty solidity: immediate and intense, it is also, increasingly, thoughtful and introspective.
By 1967, the year of the story, the 1942 farm truck of the novel’s title, Amaranthine Chevrolet, has accrued an intense aura—especially for the 15 year old protagonist, Robin. Acquiring the prized vehicle as his inheritance, he determines to drive it from a farm in Saskatchewan to his home on Vancouver Island.
It is only at the end, however that the other word in the title, “Amaranthine”, however, becomes fully—finally—understood.
The trek across two and half provinces is gripping stuff. Like Homer’s Odysseus, the young protagonist encounters an adrenalin-pumping number of difficulties and memorable characters.
With the threat of the RCMP always looming over the underage driver, the boy must, for example, navigate the old truck off-road along rutted farm tracks and over rocky mountain tracks. In the process, he has to cope with the ever-present practical difficulty of husbanding food, gas, water, and money. Often driving at night, he simultaneously has to cope with mechanical crisis after mechanical crisis. It is hardly surprising that he is “filled with a combination of wonder and dread at…risks and dangers.”
The detailed descriptions of the guts and groans of motors and gears colours the whole novel.
Yet clearly Bolen enjoys getting his narrative hands grimy with the greasy internals of machines. The detailed descriptions of the guts and groans of motors and gears colours the whole novel.
As in his other novels, Bolen infuses the storyline with distinctive techniques, sometimes echoing local idioms, sometime elevating the narrative language into a kind of raw “epic” timbre. Some of the most striking language comes through the voices of vivid characters —nearly always appearing when conditions are teetering on the edge of disaster. It seems deeply integrated into the book’s very vision of humanity to show, repeatedly, how so much can depend on “the kindness of strangers.” Not all strangers are kind, of course: a pot farmer provides a striking exception—and a grindingly suspenseful sequence of events.
And, strikingly, strangers emanate not just kindness, but much more. Perhaps most remarkable amongst these is John (like Bolen in one of his former lives), a parole worker. Like many of the others, John provides not just practical help—his repairs on a broken oil pan are vital to Robin’s trip—but also sagacity. Rising above the grime of a remote gravel road, John’s voice acquires an almost visionary cadence: “And in your life you will do things that make you a remembered biography. You will save a life in both the corporeal and spiritual realm….”
Even Robin’s largely derelict father, when he finally finds him, rises above the here and now: “Life is pretty much just trying to get through without your heart turning to frozen stone.”
Does Robin come fully to terms with what he is told by those he meets? In constructing his protagonist, Bolen has chosen to make his young voyager not just strangely innocent and deeply decent (in the old-fashioned sense of the old-fashioned word), but also deeply affected by his time on the road—feeling at times like “the last boy on earth.” Though far from passive and repeatedly shown to have the cunning that would make Odysseus himself arch an eyebrow, Robin travels through a baffling series of emotions with an affecting poise. As someone tells him at one point, “I knew we had a calm customer here by the way he just sits there listening. By the way he drinks little and talks less.”
Increasingly, he accepts the weight of his trip: “He knew he would have to think on his experiences…and come to some settlement about what they meant and what he might take from them.” In the end, Bolen shifts largely from the adrenalin-laced prose which has dominated the novel to something much more internal. The focus of the narrative thrust, the ’42 Chevy, becomes also the focus of a deep change in Robin. He finds himself “moved into an emotional region new and liberating.”
How so? He tells one of the Long Beach dwellers at the end of his trip that the pickup truck is an “amaranth.” The response he gets from this man illuminates the original Greek meaning. At last the title is clear. In changing his relationship to the truck and the material world it represents, Robin realizes that the Chevy has, in profound sense, become truly “eternal.”
Its journey has ended.
Dennis E. Bolen is the author of several novels, short story collections, and one volume of poetry. His fiction explores the experience of varied careers: social worker, university instructor, arts journalist, accounts clerk, mill worker, farm hand. He grew up on Vancouver Island and now lives in Victoria, BC.
Publisher: Dundurn Press (May 13th, 2025)
Paperback: 8″ x 6″ | 256 pp
ISBN: 9781459754775
Born on Vancouver Island, Theo Dombrowski grew up in Port Alberni and studied at UVic and later in Nova Scotia and London, England. With a doctorate in English literature, he returned to teach at Royal Roads, UVic, and finally Lester Pearson College in Metchosin. He also studied painting and drawing at Banff School of Fine Arts and UVic. He lives at Nanoose Bay. Visit his website here.
