The Back of the Turtle

Content warning: The section of the summary covers a suicide attempt.

Each chapter of The Back of the Turtle switches between several primary characters’ perspectives.

Gabriel walks toward a cluster of rocks called the Apostles. The beach town is a familiar location, and he notes the emptiness of the once-vibrant shore and the run-down neon sign of the Ocean Star Motel. It’s low tide, and the receding waters have cleared a path to the Apostles. Gabriel plans to find a spot among the Apostles and remain there as the tide comes in, drowning himself.

Gabriel finds a seat among the rocks and produces an elk skin drum, singing a memorial song. As waves start to batter him, a black-haired girl appears in the water and grabs his ankle. Gabriel pulls her to safety on the rocks, then spots dozens of other black-haired people in the ocean. He interprets them as figures from First Nations mythology, “the first people […] who had come from the ocean when the world was new” (9). He saves each one of them, distracted from his suicide attempt. When everyone is safe, Gabriel begins to sing again. The black-haired people join him, harmonizing until the tide retreats and clears a return path to the beach.

Meanwhile in Toronto, Dorian Asher, the CEO of biotech company Domidion, speaks with his assistant Winter about the company’s recent missteps. Domidion creates viruses and disease cultures primarily for agribusiness, but their creations are sometimes exploited by the wrong people. Their latest controversy involves a ship called the Anguis, which was sent to dump a load of biowaste into the ocean. A change in Canadian law rendered the plan illegal before it could be carried out, and now no port will take the Anguis in, leaving its crew and cargo adrift. Dorian shows no concern for the crew or their families.

Winter also tells Dorian that Dr. Gabriel Quinn, the Head of Biological Oversight, has gone missing. A quietly brilliant man, Gabriel helped Domidion create many viruses. Dorian remembers that Gabriel liked watching the sea turtle that used to live in Domidion’s lobby. At some point, that turtle disappeared from its tank. Now Gabriel is gone too, with his last known sighting months ago.

Winter shows Dorian photographs of the house Gabriel was renting before he vanished. He had covered the walls in references to human-made ecological disasters like Chernobyl and Chalk River. A photograph of the front door displays the last message Gabriel wrote before disappearing, which isn’t revealed to the reader. Dorian tells Winter that they must find Gabriel quickly.

At the Ocean Star motel, a boy named Sonny bemusedly watches Gabriel lying naked on the beach. Sonny has an intellectual delay that causes him to think and express himself in a childlike manner. He fondly remembers Samaritan Bay as a thriving town before “That One Bad Day” (27), the day all the sea turtles vanished. In the distance, he hears an odd screeching sound.

A woman named Mara Reid intercepts Gabriel on the shore to deliver his pants and shirt, which she found farther up the beach. He tells Mara bluntly that he is trying to kill himself, to which she responds, “you’re not very good at it” (32). Gabriel returns to the trailer he’s renting from Crisp and writes the names of several more human-made ecological disasters on the deck.

At Domidion, Dorian is irked by recurring headaches and tinnitus. He learns that during Gabriel’s absence from Domidion, Gabriel accessed the company’s restricted archives and pulled files on a bacterium called Klebsiella planticola. While Klebsiella planticola is a naturally occurring bacterium, Domidion’s genetically engineered variation, SDF 20, is “an environmental nightmare” that kills on contact (42). Dorian believes that mistakes like SDF 20, while unfortunate, are inevitable. Most of the planet’s soil is now infertile thanks to pesticide usage and over-farming, so biochemical intervention from companies like Domidion is necessary to keep the world from starving.

Mara wakes early in her rented house on the outskirts of Samaritan Bay. She thinks of her late mother and grandmother. They died in “The Ruin,” as Crisp calls it, the event that destroyed the local Smoke River Reserve. Gabriel is the first new arrival to the area in a long time. His name reminds Mara of a First Nations creation myth called “The Woman Who Fell from the Sky” (49). In this story, Mara recalls that Gabriel is the name of either the right-handed twin who creates a perfect world, or the left-handed twin who sows destruction, but she can’t remember which.

Sonny walks along the beach, combing the sand for items discarded by beachgoers. While he misses the wildlife that used to populate the shore, he notes that the Smoke, which feeds into the bay, is finally running clear again. He moves on the Beatrice Hot Springs trailhead, where he finds an elk skin drum. He starts to wonder where it came from but chastises himself; his father warned him that curiosity can lead to “rebellion […] calamity and chaos” (54). Still, Sonny can’t suppress the happy thought that “the Indians have returned” (54).

At the Domidion offices, Winter preps Dorian for a keynote speech at a university. She cautions him that he may encounter a small protest on the way, orchestrated by an ecological protection group called “the Zebras.” As he gets dressed, Dorian notices a dark blemish on his temple, “a distinct and unmistakable sign of decay” (59).

Crisp drops by Gabriel’s trailer to give him two complimentary passes to Beatrice Hot Springs. He mentions that “the destroyers of worlds” have come to town again (62).