Novel: Consumption

Overview

Kevin Patterson's Consumption is a novel set in the Canadian Arctic that juxtaposes the urgency of medical crisis with the slow, disruptive arrival of modern consumer culture. The title carries a double meaning, referring both to the old name for tuberculosis and to the flood of goods, technologies, and values that begin to reshape an isolated Inuit community. The narrative moves between clinical detail and intimate, often painful portraits of people trying to hold on to traditions while the world changes around them.

Plot summary

The story centers on a sudden illness that strikes a young Inuit girl, an event that forces the community and the visiting health workers to confront long-standing vulnerabilities. The medical emergency becomes a focal point for larger conflicts: the clash between northern and southern ways of life, the strains of colonial history, and the blunt forces of capitalism that seep into daily existence. As the case unfolds, allied crises, disease, addiction, environmental stress, and the lure of new technologies and markets, interact in ways that complicate both diagnosis and treatment.

Characters and perspective

The primary viewpoint shifts among local residents and outsiders who come to help, including health professionals whose clinical training collides with culturally distinct understandings of illness and healing. Local elders, parents, and young people are portrayed with care, revealing the complexity of loyalties, hopes, and resentments in a small community under pressure. Patterson uses these perspectives to examine not only individual choices but also systemic failures in health care, governance, and social support.

Themes

A central theme is the tension between tradition and modernity, shown through the community's responses to illness and to the encroaching consumer world. The novel explores how new commodities, media, and technologies alter values and expectations, sometimes offering relief or opportunity but often carrying costs that are easy to ignore from afar. Another theme is the persistence of colonial patterns: public health, resource extraction, and policy decisions made in distant capitals echo through people's lives, often with devastating effects.

Medical and moral complexity

Patterson's background as a physician informs the book's detailed and unglamorous rendering of disease and treatment. Medical scenes are precise without being clinical in tone; they reveal ethical dilemmas about consent, triage, and cultural competence. The narrative refuses simple moralizing, instead showing how decisions that seem pragmatic in one framework can be experienced as betrayals in another, and how good intentions can produce harm when imposed without respect for local knowledge.

Style and tone

The prose shifts between diagnostic clarity and lyrical evocations of landscape and memory. Short, direct scenes of clinical intervention are balanced by quieter, reflective passages that linger on family histories, oral traditions, and the vastness of the Arctic environment. Patterson's pacing keeps the crisis at the center while allowing secondary tensions to accumulate, creating a sense of inevitability that is more tragic than sensational.

Significance and reception

Consumption has been noted for its unflinching look at the human costs of social and economic change in northern communities, and for bringing medical realism into literary fiction. Readers and critics have pointed to its empathetic portrayal of Inuit life alongside sharp critiques of policy and consumerism. The novel invites reflection on how societies respond to vulnerability and how modernity can both save and erode the ties that sustain people in extreme places.