FIDDLER’S GREEN

Old friends are reunited as new challenges rear their heads in this fifth installment of Maine author Reid’s delightful Moosepath Chronicles (Mrs. Roberto, 2003, etc.).

The rangy plot (precisely described by the subtitle) gets underway with the 1897 Portland wedding of Pickwickian Moosepath League Chairman Tobias Walton and his sprightly beloved Phileda McCannon: a joyous celebration that brings back such familiar figures as the trio of Moosepathian comrades Ephram, Eagleton, and Thump; the eponymous Cordelia and her passive cousin Priscilla Morningside; and Mr. Walton’s manly “assistant” Sundry (who takes a strong—and strongly requited—liking to Priscilla). No sooner have the happy couple embarked on a Halifax honeymoon than we’re taken to Mrs. Morrell’s annual charity ball, at which assorted (and sometimes conflicting) personalities are more sharply defined—in a wistfully romantic scene that Reid somehow manages to make echo the Misses Morkans’ Christmas Eve dance in Joyce’s great story “The Dead.” Thereafter, gears shift dramatically, as Sundry stoically accompanies six-year-old waif Melanie Ring and her drunken father Burne north toward Brownville—and is lured instead to the nondescript hamlet of Dutten, where his mettle is tested by a subplot involving two feuding families of dowsers (and, it is rumored, witches) and a search for a drowned body that turns up something entirely unexpected. Meanwhile, sailor Robin Oig (his name, interestingly, borrowed from that of a character in a classic Sir Walter Scott story) undertakes a journey parallel to Sundry’s—bearing a gigantic wooden oar (like a very knight carrying a lance), as he seeks the fabled seaman’s “paradise” known as “Fiddler’s Green.” All ends, as expected, happily, though with enough loose ends dangling to permit Reid escape—should he so choose—from his publisher’s declaration that this is the final Moosepath Chronicle.

Most readers will hope fervently that he does.