A crazy venture beneath the skies
Amaranthine Chevrolet
by Dennis E. Bolen
Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2025
$25.99 / 9781459754775
Reviewed by Ryan Frawley
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There are, depending on who you ask, only three or six or seven or nine different types of story in the world. However long or short the list, The Journey is almost always one of them. Think The Odyssey, The Divine Comedy, The Lord of the Rings, or On The Road. And there’s some part of the Canadian heart that is especially attuned to the forced narrative of travel. Maybe it’s the continent-spanning distance, the mind-bending empty space.
Victoria resident Dennis E. Bolen’s Amaranthine Chevrolet offers a fresh spin on this ancient structure. Set in 1967, a time as turbulent as our own, the book follows the story of 15-year-old Robin Wallenco, a young man of extraordinary resourcefulness and almost zero introspection, on his self-assigned quest to drive a 1942 Chevrolet pickup truck from near Kincaid, Saskatchewan, out to the west coast of Vancouver Island and the edge of the world.
The joyride starts with a fraud. Robin, a hard-working and honest lad by nature, tells a lie to get the truck registered to him, even though he’s too young to drive, and this action drives much of the narrative, as Robin does everything in his power to avoid the cops on his long road trip. The truck is, as the people Robin encounters on his journey keep reminding him, a museum piece. But it means something to him all the same.
Exactly what it means is tied up in the nature of Robin’s quest itself, and the reason this BC boy found himself working on a farm in Saskatchewan during his tender teenage years in the first place. Bolen’s prose is lean and modern, as free of bells and whistles as the cab of the three-on-the-floor war-era Chevy itself. It doesn’t take long, though, to get a glimpse of something behind the boy’s flat affect: Robin “had determined not to allow sentiments at least until the crescendo of his journey,” we are told. “Being of the practical land himself and thus resistant to metaphysical sentiment, he did not ponder hard.”
Robin doesn’t ponder hard, but this is less because he lacks the capability than because it’s easier for him not to stare into the darkness of his past. And he’s not the only one. As he drives across the endless fields of Saskatchewan, heading to Alberta where we see “a few and then many pumpjacks pecking petro-fluid from the stubbled earth,” Robin encounters a revolving cast of farmers and criminals, hippies and dropouts, enticing young women and working-class philosophers.
“You’re the envy of every decent man,” remarks one of the characters Robin meets along the way. “The thought of just picking up and driving out in your personal vehicle for parts little-known. Even for a little while it would suit one man or another at some part of his life.”
Maybe so, but it’s only as the vast plains of the prairies give way to the soaring mountains and deep forests of British Columbia that we start to get more glimpses into the real reason for Robin’s quest.
With that spare style Bolen (Anticipated Results) conjures up the vast expanse of the prairies where the story starts; but that’s not to say he isn’t incapable of ornamentation. Sometimes, the narrative contains charming bursts of lyricism—“as the heretofore comforting silence vanished inside the ardent tintinnabulation, the vibration made him strangely know that others existed on this freshening morning”—and lines like this burst out of the prairie sparseness like song birds plunging from the branches of trees.
But the style is not just suited to the environment, but a match for Robin’s closed-off mental state too. Just like the “smoke-belch crackle-mad conflagration” of a forest fire that casts its flickering shadow over the later chapters of the novel.
It’s inevitable, in a way, that the truck becomes a character of its own, standing in as it does for another force that has shaped Robin’s young life. Like many of the men Robin meets, the truck is a veteran of World War II. And as he encounters camps of nomadic draft dodgers close to the US border, Robin can’t escape the shadow of another war going on around him.
Robin’s quest is not so much a homecoming as a search for his father. A man who, Robin is warned as he gets closer to his goal, has “got some kind of philosophy now. He doesn’t need anything.”
It’s a philosophy that becomes increasingly tempting to Robin, too, as he nurses his ancient truck over mountains and sea passages: “it occurred to Robin that true life might not best be supported by such attachment to things. Attachment… solely meant grief.”
Bolen’s prose style is spartan at times, but he gives us more than enough to understand the inner lives of his characters. From the first moment when Robin takes the new license plates for his truck “with what he hoped were steady hands,” we understand just how much this moment means. And Robin’s conversations with the characters he encounters on his journey give us a deeper and deeper insight into the heart of this unusual young man.
“My own blend. Perfect for the road. Amaranthine tea… Tea for the ages. Ageless tea. Everlasting tea.”
So says a middle-aged woman at a hippie camp in Alberta where Robin awakes one morning about halfway through his journey. Robin’s quest to keep the old Chevy running is, in the end, as doomed as many other quest we set ourselves. And when Robin finally gets to where he’s going, he is forced to confront what we all find as we grow into adulthood: that our dreams often let us down.
It’s the quest itself that is ageless, that is everlasting. Not the tired old truck, but the road it runs on, the horizon it drives toward, grinding gears and leaking oil and leaving a trail across the burning world. Amaranthine Chevrolet builds not just to a shocking climax, but to something beyond that. When we finally get to the core of Robin Wallenco’s everlasting story, the payoff is well worth the journey.
[Editor’s note: The Victoria launch party for Amaranthine Chevrolet: June 10, upstairs at The Bent Mast, 512 Simcoe St., James Bay, Victoria. Time: 6pm.]
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Ryan Frawley is a novelist and essayist whose short fiction has won numerous awards in BC and across Canada. He is the author of a novel, Scar, and a travel writing collection, Towers Temples Palaces: Essays from Europe. He also writes essays on medium.com and can be contacted at ryanfrawley.com. [Editor’s note: Ryan previously reviewed Don McLellan, Vijay Khurana, and Cynthia LeBrun in BCR.]
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The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
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