WHITE RIVER CROSSING

A fast-paced, elegantly written adventure novel about the moral and physical perils of gold lust, set in the subarctic Canadian wilderness in 1766.

After being tipped off by a fur trader, Magnus Norton, chief factor of a Hudson’s Bay Company outpost in what’s now northern Manitoba, decides to send a secret expedition far north to excavate for gold. For the sake of inconspicuousness, he dispatches, as soon as the spring thaw will allow it, a miniature group of seven: three company men and four native guides. The party’s main combatants, it will turn out, are Norton’s thuggish, cocksure second-in-command, John Shaw, and young Thomas Hearn, a bookish, decent ex-sailor who’s able to speak the guides’ language. When one of the Indigenous men, young, impetuous Nabayah, loses his wife, Keasik, in a wrestling wager, Shaw issues a counter-challenge and wins her back—but as the price for this act of “salvation” he demands a night with Keasik. His act of brutish droit du seigneur unravels the group and, bit by bit, over the coming months as they collect and purify the ore, sparks a fateful chain reaction of violence both within the group and from outside. Novelist McGuire inhabits a wide variety of characters here, moving impressively among points of view, between historical sources and his own imaginings, between the literary-psychological mode and old-fashioned adventure yarn. Eventually the gold—the Indigenous tribes of the region find the white men’s obsession with it bizarre, just another inexplicable custom—ends up in Hearn’s hands. Can he, in the end, resist the moral disfigurements he’s seen mineral-lust cause in others?

McGuire nimbly combines historical narrative and high suspense.