53 pages • 1 hour read
Thomas KingThe Back of the Turtle
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 31-43Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapters 31-43 Summary
Gabriel contemplates his growing affection for Mara. He has never been at ease with intimacy and has always felt separated “from his family [and] the world” (184). This alienation worsened after his father’s death. He shuns close relationships entirely because people inevitably leave, whether due to death or other circumstances. Mara, on the other hand, feels that it’s possible to start over and form new relationships despite losing everything.
Returning from his shopping spree, Dorian gets more bad news. Word of the Athabasca River leak has gotten out, and the reporter Manisha Khan called looking for a comment. The search for Gabriel’s lineage has stalled. As a teenager, he lived in a First Nations community in Lethbridge, Alberta, with his whole family but later moved to Minneapolis with his father Joe. Joe was a police officer who was later killed in the line of duty. Gabriel’s mother and sister have since moved away from Lethbridge and cannot be located. Dorian is alarmed by Gabriel’s apparent isolation and mental instability, wondering how someone like that was allowed to work with such lethal biological material.
On the beach, Sonny meets the black-haired girl and presents the trunk, welcoming her back to Samaritan Bay. The girl takes the trunk and disappears into the fog. Sonny thinks that she must be “one of the Indians who died” on That One Bad Day (199). He decides to violate his father’s rule against going to the hot springs and attend Crisp’s birthday party.
As he walks to the springs, Gabriel remembers the first time he ever entered a hot tub, at a party thrown by the head of Stanford’s physics department. At this party, he spoke to Parker Levinson, a consultant who told him that in the sciences, profit matters above all else. Parker referred Gabriel to the well-paid summer internship program at Domidion.
Mara spends the afternoon before Crisp’s party sketching out paintings of Elvin Grunes and Thelma Walker, two reserve elders who died after The Ruin. She remembers how Elvin managed to save many of his neighbors by driving them to the hospital. As darkness falls Mara leaves for the party, intercepting Gabriel on the way.
Dorian reads through the trial transcript about Joe Quinn’s death. Joe was killed after he and his partner responded to a domestic dispute at the home of a man named William Church. When Church opened the door to them, he shot both officers, killing Joe. He claimed to have had an altercation with an “Indian” man earlier and to have mistaken Joe for the same man come back to kill him.
Gabriel and Mara arrive at Beatrice Hot Springs, where Crisp tells the story of “The Woman Who Fell from the Sky.” The story begins with a pregnant woman “in the black realm of space” digging for root vegetables (223). She digs so deep that she opens a hole in the sky and accidentally falls through it. As she hurtles toward a planet covered entirely in water, the birds of this new world spot her falling and create a canopy out of their wings, catching her and lowering her gently onto the back of a turtle. The woman soon gives birth to twins, one right-handed and one left-handed. With no room on the turtle’s back for the expanding family, the woman hosts a contest between all the sea creatures to see who can reach the bottom of the sea and find dirt. Only the muskrat succeeds at bringing up mud.
After the muskrat covers the planet in mud, the twins commence shaping it. The right-handed twin makes “a world of ease and convenience” (236), and the left-handed twin alters his designs, adding danger and complication. Together, they make a balanced world, Earth.
As Crisp tells the story, Sonny sneaks up to the banquet table, where he meets with the girl and a plethora of other black-haired people. Sonny shares food with them before slipping away.
Later, Crisp expresses his wish that Sonny would have joined them, revealing that Sonny is his nephew. Sonny’s mysterious father and Crisp are twins, though he implies that Sonny’s father is either dead or has moved away from Samaritan Bay. With that, he dives back into the hot springs, leaving Gabriel and Mara to head back to her house.
Reflecting on his party guests, Crisp is surprised that Mara returned to Samaritan Bay after The Ruin. He doesn’t understand what drives her. He understands Gabriel better, knows “the sharp secret be wrapped up in his skin” (246).
Chapters 31-43 Analysis
Crisp continues to develop as a godlike figure. His superhuman qualities are especially apparent in the scenes that take place at Beatrice Hot Springs, an ethereal setting lit by the full moon and shrouded in the mists. Crisp directly references immortality by announcing, “I endure eternal” (246). He has the ability to leave and reenter the water “without leaving so much as a bubble or a ripple” (246).
At the hot springs, Crisp finally tells the entirety story of “The Woman Who Fell from the Sky.” It is a creation myth in which the symbol of a turtle’s back, referenced in the novel’s title, represents the first foundation of a new world. In the story, the balanced Earth is shaped by the parallel forces of the good-hearted right-handed twin and the evil left-handed twin. The question of which twin Gabriel embodies remains open, but the myth’s emphasis on balance implies that the answer may be less black-and-white than he thinks.
Another important element of the story is how the new world emerges from the collaborative efforts of every animal and human being. This vast collaborative effort parallels what’s beginning to happen in Samaritan Bay. Since The Ruin, each character has been isolated: Mara by grief, Gabriel by guilt, Sonny by fear. To build back the strong community that existed before, they will have to dismantle their protective walls and come together to help one another. Crisp’s goal when he invites Gabriel, Mara, and Sonny to his party is to bring them together and encourage the formation of the bonds that will help them move past grief and into action.
The hot tub anecdote Gabriel recalls in Chapter 37 continues to flesh out the story of how he ended up in the world of research driven not by human curiosity but by the desire for profit and power. So far, the narrative has shown several instances of Gabriel’s morality being challenged by people in positions of power over him. Harden, Parker, and Dorian have all expressed the sentiment that profit is the only thing that matters, suggesting that they were either corrupt from the start or became so by gaining wealth and power. Gabriel presumably chose a position at Domidion over a job with a more ethical company because he was attracted to the idea of profit and power. Yet after leaving Domidion, Gabriel lives an extremely minimalist life. He spends almost no money, and the power of his title is meaningless because he declines to reveal it to any of his new acquaintances. Whatever fulfillment he was chasing through a job at Domidion has proved elusive, and instead the decision to sell out his ethics has ruined his life and many others’.
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By Thomas King
