A stunning work of historical fiction, with many points of comparison to Canadian Guy Vanderhaeghe’s The Last Crossing.
A young Englishman’s North American adventure during the War of 1812.
In a preface, Scottish author Elphinstone (The Sea Road, 2001, etc.), grandniece of James Fenimore Cooper, identifies her narrative as a memoir written some 20 years after the events it records by her protagonist, Lakeland Quaker farmer Mark Greenhow. It’s the story of his journey to “Upper (i.e., eastern) Canada” in search of his sister Rachel, excommunicated by the Society of Friends after she had fled from a mission in York with her non-Quaker lover and eventual husband Alan Mackenzie, an employee of the bustling North West trading company. The illusion of a past time is beautifully sustained by Elphinstone’s detailed re-creations of indigenous (mostly Native Canadian and American) period detail, and by her narrator’s reserved and wondering voice, whose lilting, dignified rhythms perfectly capture his unshakeable goodness and innocence. Mark’s adventures take him not only across Canada’s vast expanse with the “voyageurs” who transport furs for sale but into broader understandings of his sister’s courageous and rebellious spirit, and of the integrity and value of cultures completely alien to all he knows: those of the native tribes caught up in the burgeoning war between old England and young America. Even more to the point are Mark’s evolving relationships with his half-French, half-Indian guide and mentor Loic, as well as with the elusive Alan Mackenzie, whose uncertain loyalties to both Rachael and his supposed political allies open the ingenuous Quaker’s eyes to moral complexities he grows to understand and acknowledge (e.g., asking himself “whether a man should be held guilty of a sin that is entirely invisible to his own conscience”). His voyage is thus a passage to greater wisdom, tolerance, and wholeness.
A stunning work of historical fiction, with many points of comparison to Canadian Guy Vanderhaeghe’s The Last Crossing.Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2004
ISBN: 1-55278-375-8
Page Count: 466
Publisher: Canongate
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.
Another surprise from an author who never writes the same novel twice.
Though Whitehead has earned considerable critical acclaim for his earlier work—in particular his debut (The Intuitionist, 1999) and its successor (John Henry Days, 2001)—he’ll likely reach a wider readership with his warmest novel to date. Funniest as well, though there have been flashes of humor throughout his writing. The author blurs the line between fiction and memoir as he recounts the coming-of-age summer of 15-year-old Benji Cooper in the family’s summer retreat of New York’s Sag Harbor. “According to the world, we were the definition of paradox: black boys with beach houses,” writes Whitehead. Caucasians are only an occasional curiosity within this idyll, and parents are mostly absent as well. Each chapter is pretty much a self-contained entity, corresponding to a rite of passage: getting the first job, negotiating the mysteries of the opposite sex. There’s an accident with a BB gun and plenty of episodes of convincing someone older to buy beer, but not much really happens during this particular summer. Yet by the end of it, Benji is well on his way to becoming Ben, and he realizes that he is a different person than when the summer started. He also realizes that this time in his life will eventually live only in memory. There might be some distinctions between Benji and Whitehead, though the novelist also spent his youthful summers in Sag Harbor and was the same age as Benji in 1985, when the novel is set. Yet the first-person narrator has the novelist’s eye for detail, craft of character development and analytical instincts for sharp social commentary.
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.Pub Date: April 28, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-52765-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
BOOK TO SCREEN
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