The woods were lovely, dark and deep

Finland has a population of 5 million today, and the Finnish-American population is about half a million. The Scandinavian-American community is dominated by the 3.5 million of Swedish origin. Given these numbers, it is not surprising that most people know little of the Finns in America — their history, when and why they emigrated from Finland, and the early years of the community in America.

In Deep River, Karl Malantes has written a family saga; a sprawling history of a Finnish family in America that helps to flesh out the Finnish-American immigrant story.

In the late 1800s, Finland is under Russian control. The Koski family consists of Tapio, the father; Maijalisa, the mother who acts as midwife for all the neighbouring areas; Ilmari, the oldest son; Aino, a 13-year-old teenage girl, and Matti, the youngest son. Two other children have died of cholera. A nearby family has a child, Aksel, who is alive only because of Maijalisa’s midwifery at his birth.

The three Koski siblings and Aksel all migrate to America, one by one. Ilmari emigrates to avoid being drafted into the Russian army. Aino gets involved in anti-Russian resistance, and is arrested, raped and tortured before she flees Finland; and Matti evades a manhunt before he makes his way across the ocean.

Aino is at the center of this novel, and she is an unusual character. Fiercely independent: she spits in the face of a Russian man who wants to dance with her. Deeply compassionate: she sneaks her family’s food to the starving Finns in the bitter winter famine. A lifelong socialist born of early exposure to Marx and Engels: she fights injustice throughout her life.

Unfortunately, Aino in this book is little more than a collection of these characteristics, and her own personality remains hard for the reader to discern, empathize with, or understand. She falls in love at various points, but these affairs seem like little more than vehicles to move the story forward. The other main characters, too, remain oddly impersonal despite the novel following every detail of their lives.

The Koskis and Aksel end up in Washington State, where the logging industry needs men to bring down the trees, and women to run the boarding houses and enormous kitchens.

The only paying jobs for someone who didn’t speak English were logging and fishing.

A lot of research has gone into this book, which is generally a good thing for historical fiction:

He’d never seen anyone move one of those [huge] trees. Logs lay on their sides, rising well above a man’s head. Men, tiny against the hillsides, scrambled to the logs, hauling heavy lengths of steel cable. A small boy tugged on a long wire, making some sort of signal on a steam whistle attached to the steam donkey. The man running the donkey signalled back. Men far down below in the ravine seemed to scramble for their lives as power was applied to one of the huge spools on the donkey, drawing the cable tight, lifting the log, then pulling it bouncing up the hill to where Matti was standing. That log must have weighed tons. These little men, like ants in this vast landscape, were moving what to most people would seem immovable. Matti felt excitement rising in his throat. He looked out over the logging show, as it was called, and saw a huge old-growth Douglas fir slowly fall to the ground, visibly shaking the standing trees around it.

As you see above, the author manages to pack a lot of detail into the descriptions, but they are functional rather than beautiful or captivating.

The novel moves forward steadily and chronologically through to 1970: the Koski siblings grow up and marry and have children, while the logging industry becomes more sophisticated. World War 1 changes the economics and demand for lumber. Capitalism does its thing, squeezing the individual loggers to produce a little more profit for the owners. Aino, the eternal socialist, is viewed with deep suspicion as she attempts to organize the loggers into a bargaining union. The economic crash of 1929 changes everything again.

Marlantes delineates the complicated economic and social intertwinings with care. Sure, the capitalist owners care little about the loggers’ lives or injuries, but it’s not a simplistic black-or-white portrayal: many of the loggers themselves aim to be independent capitalists as well.

For a student of history, this novel is often interesting, but there is a LOT of historical detail, and it gets rather overwhelming. Every historical event that could conceivably affect the Washington State Finns is included. Spanish Flu. The first automobiles. Fishing. The Wobblies. Bootlegging. No detail goes unmentioned.

Aksel returned to Tapiola in a 1920 Chevrolet 490 half-ton truck, carrying five war-surplus Springfield rifles, one fitted with a sniper scope, five war-surplus Colt .45 caliber automatic pistols, a Thompson .45-caliber submachine gun with four hundred-round drum magazines, plenty of ammunition, and several cases of dynamite, along with electric blasting caps and thirty-two 1.5-volt D batteries.

By the time we hit the 1940s, the extensive digressions make it difficult to retain any focus on the individuals. The cast of characters, too, has grown to include wives, husbands, children, employers, and in-laws. At the core of the story, I think, is the tension between workers’ rights and capitalistic exploitation, but it often gets lost in the side-stories. On the other hand, if the core of the story is the family saga, it is sidelined by the socioeconomic discussions. Jess Walter’s The Cold Millions covers some of the same socialist movements of the same period, but does so with warmer, more appealing characters.

That said, there is a wealth of information here for anyone interested in the Finnish-American community, the history of the Pacific Northwest, or the logging industry.

The essential and distinctive Finnishness of the community is exemplified by the concept of sisu, a sort of stoic determination no matter how dire the situation.