DANIEL PLAINWAY

Reid’s expert appropriation of the benign world of Charles Dickens continues in this third volume of his richly entertaining saga (Cordelia Underwood, 1998; Mollie Peer, 1997).

It’s an agreeably overplotted farrago, set once again in Portland, Maine, and environs in 1896, and featuring the ineffably Pickwickian Tobias Walton, his stouthearted young comrade Sundry Moss, and their irresistibly ingenuous and gentlemanly fellow “Moosepathians” Ephram, Eagleton, and Thump. After some overstuffed early pages that creak and wheeze a bit making plot connections with the earlier books, Reid settles into the business of juxtaposing the “odyssey of the heart” undertaken by the eponymous Daniel, a lawyer who may know something about the orphaned boy Bird of Mollie Peer, with the Moosepathians’ intricately interrelated separate ordeals and discoveries. These involve variously motivated searches for Viking artifacts, an elopement and an illegitimate birth, a ghostly visitation, a possibly sinister antiquarian society’s quest for the “lost city” of Norumbega (now Bangor) located on the fabled “northwest passage” to Canada, a body found in the Portland harbor, the twice-told tale of “The Rune and the Worm” (a delicious amalgam of Native American and Norse mythologies), and the remarkable word boustrophedan. Also implicated, in cheerfully mystifying ways, are such memorable folk as expert woodsman “Capital” Gaines, the five elderly Pettengill sisters, secretive Ezra Burnbrake, and Tobias’s rival for the love of matronly Phileda McCannon: Charleston Thistlecoat. If this engaging folderol doesn’t charm your socks off, you’ve probably been reading too much Bret Easton Ellis and A.M. Homes. Reid really has mastered Dickens’s techniques of cross-plotting and creating narrative echoes that function as both foreshadowing and revelation—not to mention comic characters so vivid and heartwarming you wish their crazily entangled stories would never end.

And perhaps they won’t, as an intriguing Epilogue and coy Author’s Note slyly suggest. Long may the Moosepath League flourish.