53 pages • 1 hour read
The Back of the Turtle
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Chapters 21-30Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapters 21-30 Summary
Energized by Crisp’s visit, Mara resumes painting a portrait of her old friend Lilly. Though they were close as teenagers, sharing an ambition of leaving the reserve to pursue their dream careers, Lilly is gone now. Mara recalls finding out about the birth of Lilly’s first child through a photograph she received in the mail showing Lilly and her baby, Riel. As she continues to paint, Mara feels like Lilly and Riel are coming back to life. This feeling helps her “make the world whole again” (127). Though neither Mara nor Gabriel knows it yet, Lilly was actually Gabriel’s sister Little—and Lilly’s son, Riel, was Gabriel’s nephew.
Dorian continues to experience a plethora of physical ailments. At his office, he watches CBC. A reporter named Manisha Khan interviewing Dr. Thicke about Klebsiella planticola. Thicke claims that the dangerous GreenSweep never escaped Domidion’s laboratory environment. When asked about Gabriel, he slips up and mentions that he is missing.
Dorian heads to his private gym but is intercepted by a PR agent named Victoria Lustig. Lustig informs him that the press are catching wind of Gabriel’s disappearance. Lustig says that major networks are already asking Domidion for comment on Gabriel’s disappearance. They decide to invoke “employee confidentiality,” meaning that no one is allowed to speak to the presses about Gabriel. Lustig says that Gabriel’s disappearance might have the positive effect of keeping the Athabasca River incident off the news.
Gabriel walks to the beach, still missing Soldier. He meets Crisp, who asks if Gabriel knows the story of “The Woman Who Fell from the Sky” and invites him to the hot springs party.
Crisp goes to the Ocean Star to bring Sonny a trunk from the beach and to invite him to the hot springs. Sonny opens the trunk to find a collection of family photos that depict the black-haired girl he glimpsed in town.
Mara spends the day at the Smoke River Reserve, remembering The Ruin and its aftermath. The government relocated the surviving families from the reserve to other parts of Canada. Their empty homes have since been looted, including her grandmother’s. Through the window of her grandmother’s house, Mara spots the figure of a young girl moving in the fog. Angry at the suspected squatter, she vows to return with Soldier and Gabriel to scare her off.
Crisp wanders through town, reflecting on recent odd happenings. Though businesses continue to shutter, and the remaining residents are moving away, there are signs of life in the town, including goods going missing from store shelves. Crisp believes that one day the sea turtles will return, and with them the residents of Samaritan Bay.
The next morning, Mara finds Gabriel on the beach and invites him home with her for breakfast. She asks what his job is, and he replies, “I destroy worlds” (168). Over breakfast, Gabriel reminisces on his first class at Stanford graduate school. After winning the favor of a tough professor named Harden, he was asked to lead class for a day. He chose to speak about Dr. Katheryn Kousoulas. Kousoulas was a neurologist who oversaw a clinical trial for Lucror, a migraine drug, for a major pharmaceutical company. After realizing that the drug caused brain tumors, Kousoulas violated her contract with the company to end the trial. Gabriel praised the ethics of her decision but was swiftly rebuked by Harden.
Dorian visits Dr. Toshi, who suggests an MRI. Dorian reluctantly agrees. To cheer himself up, he has himself chauffeured to a luxury menswear store.
Sonny walks along the beach, carrying the trunk. He thinks of the baby sea turtles that used to hatch on this beach and wonders why the mother turtles weren’t there “when their children needed them” (181). He wonders who will protect him now.
Chapters 21-30 Analysis
These chapters introduce the theme of the Media and the Obfuscation of the Truth, especially regarding the media’s vulnerability to becoming a propagandist’s tool. The character of Lustig draws attention to Domidion’s press strategy, which currently involves suppressing negative information about the company and spinning any information that has already found its way to the public eye.
As events in Dorian’s life spiral out of his control, he copes with stress through consumerism. His isolated lifestyle doesn’t allow for human connection, so he derives genuine fulfillment from making a lavish purchase. In Chapter 29, he begins to worry that he’s dying, and his immediate solution is a shopping spree. His solution to every problem is more consumption, an attitude both humorous and emblematic of how extreme wealth can distance a person from normal human experiences.
Through the Domidion narrative and Gabriel’s backstory, King touches on the ethics of for-profit science. An anecdote from Gabriel’s time at Stanford graduate school depicts him as ethical to the point of naivete. His admiration of the fictional Dr. Kousoulas demonstrates his human-oriented approach to science and his care for others. Somewhere along the way, Gabriel went from a wide-eyed student motivated by curiosity to a high-paid employee at the obviously corrupt Domidion. It becomes clear that Gabriel was influenced at the beginning of his career, as he was swiftly condemned for his praise of Kousoulas’s ethical choice. The question Harden asked in response to Gabriel’s assertion that the side effects of Lucror were unacceptable—“to whom?”—is a central question of the narrative: Who gets to decide what consequences are acceptable in the name of scientific progress? In The Back of the Turtle, those who hold that decisive power are the ones furthest removed from the consequences.
Chapter 28 brings readers closer to the truth of what happened at Smoke River. In telling Mara about his job, Gabriel says “I destroy worlds” (168). Though the quote derives from the Bhagavad Gita, it is more often attributed to J. Robert Oppenheimer, a theoretical physicist who championed the creation of the atomic bomb. Later, when Oppenheimer watched the first nuclear weapon test, he felt the weight of his actions and spoke the quote in question. Gabriel’s own quotation of the words suggests that he, too, has had a hand in causing large-scale death and destruction. This, combined with his fixation on GreenSweep and the slowly accumulating details about The Ruin, begins to paint a picture of what happened at Samaritan Bay—a picture that portrays Gabriel as the left-handed agent of chaos.
King also touches on the Canadian government’s mistreatment of its Indigenous people through Mara’s recollection of the government forcibly relocating the remaining families off the Smoke River Reserve after The Ruin. Though this was ostensibly done for their own safety, the residents were relocated to far-flung places, destroying whatever was left of the community. The Canadian government’s callousness exposes its indifference to the wellbeing of its Indigenous populace. It’s also no coincidence that the survivors’ relocation means there are fewer people left to oppose the renewed attempts to construct an oil pipeline. The Back of the Turtle warns of how powerful institutions can exploitatively and carelessly discard the lives of marginalized people.
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By Thomas King
