Review: Ducks (2022)
You know that cliched shit about how having a job is a source of dignity and working to support yourself and your family is virtuous? Well, this comic says fuck that, things are way darker and more complicated.
Kate Beaton’s Ducks is fundamentally a book about labor. I mean, it’s about a lot more than that, including climate change, environmental destruction, sexual violence, misogyny, and colonialism. But work and the need to have a job to survive in a capitalist society is the memoir’s most prominent throughline.
The story begins with Beaton’s graduation from college, where she studied art and took on a “debilitating” amount of debt to pay for it. Her path is dictated by her economic situation: The well-paying museum job she wants doesn’t exist, her small home town offers no options, and her only viable decision is to get a job in Alberta’s oil sands.
Over the next 400 pages, Beaton learns how to survive in the grim, male-dominated labor camps in the oil fields. She’s trapped by her student loans, but most of the guys she works with are trapped in other ways. She talks to middle-aged men with families who used to work in industries that are long gone and listens to young, naive men who believe the current oil boom will last forever. There’s one particularly haunting scene in which Beaton pauses to listen as a man sings songwriter Lennie Gallant’s melancholy ballad “Peter’s Dream,” a song about the collapse of eastern Canada’s fishing industry in the 1990s and the annihilation of the communities it supported.
Beaton tells a complex story that recognizes two realities: These men are victims of economic conditions beyond their control, but at the same time, these jobs don’t ennoble them. Most treat Beaton and the camps’ handful of other women with derision, both objectifying and infantalizing them. Some are much much worse.
In short: This comic is an unsparing look at Canada’s oil industry and its human cost.
(CW: the book depicts sexual assault)
Follow my bookstagram: @panthercitybooks