FictionA wayward romantic pursues the woman he loves. She, in turn, stalks the killer of her adored little sister. Meanwhile an uptight Victorian Englishman hunts for his missing twin, lost in the course of a religious goose chase orchestrated by a lunatic.
Their other brother, a disgraced soldier turned villain, engages in a crazed quest of his own that is far more about his flight from hell than the search for a sibling.
A team of characters, a volume of stories and fascinating episodes from 19th century Canadian history are contained within the wonderful pages of The Last Crossing, Guy Vanderhaeghe's fabulous picaresque through the Canadian north-west. It is his fourth novel, a major achievement, and acts as a sequel of sorts to The Englishman's Boy (1997), a bestselling double hander of a narrative in which the dying days of the US West meets the birth of the Hollywood movie industry.
In that convincingly evocative novel, Vanderhaeghe, author of the collections, Man Descending (1982), The Trouble with Heroes (1983) and Things as They Are? (1992), as well as two earlier novels, My Present Age (1984) and Homesick (1989), and long-established as yet another fine Canadian short story writer, consistently evoked the contrasting worlds of his dual narratives that eventually met through the tragedy of a single character, old cowboy turned Western actor, Shorty McAdoo.
In The Last Crossing, Vanderhaeghe surpasses himself in a complex, atmospheric roller coaster saga of sagas that is brilliantly sustained until the very last line. At 468 pages, it is a big novel, but in reality it is far larger - a huge work. US writer Annie Proulx describes it on the jacket as "a feast of a book". She is right. It is long, seems bigger and you wish it were four times the length.
It is a multiple narrative told, with occasional help from an omniscient narrator, by a number of sympathetic, well-defined characters surrounded by grasping baddies and dogged by complications invariably of the human failing variety. For all the drama and violence, there is also immense humour, beautifully exact writing and unforgettable physical images of a epic wilderness trying to retain its savage privacy as the Old World relentlessly overtakes the New.
Above all though, Vanderhaeghe draws upon traditional storytelling at its very best. This is an old-fashioned, punchy novel you simply can not escape from. Unlike many clever novels in which long, often stylistically disparate narrative passages are grouped together and offered as a single artificially contrived book, a powerful narrative cohesion consolidates this performance. .At a time in which so many "big" novels are merely fake composites of sequences, this is the real thing.
Charles Gaunt, an ageing artist and loner, begins the story. Or rather, is reminded of it as a chance letter brings news of a death and with it, memories from some 25 years earlier. Gaunt is a study of inhibition and regret.
He is also an Englishman acutely aware of his Englishness, or perhaps this is the legacy of his experiences in Canada which saw him tracking an adored brother while observing a despised one - all outsiders in a frontier. Charles and his brothers are all products of their domineering widower father and their lives have been created by their respective responses to the old man's harsh influence.
Charles has managed to survive in the shadow of Simon, whom he always loved. But Simon took to God and in the course of this mission, under the crazy Reverend Witherspoon, goes missing somewhere in North America. Then there is Addington, the eldest son and heir, "a merciless rider" and career bully given to brutalising horses and humiliating women. For him, the hunt for Simon is an excuse for an adventure to feed his ego while keeping his ghosts at bay. The Englishmen stand out in a wilderness populated by cowboys, Indians and assorted half breeds.
This is a world busy with rivalries and hatreds, as well as illegal whiskey, guns, gold and horses. In the midst of the chaos is Custis Straw, a greater romantic than Charles. Straw, damaged by his experiences in the Civil War, is an interesting obsessive and something of an eccentric in the frontier town he lives in. A young girl is murdered and her beautiful older sister Lucy is intent on revenge.
Equally intent is Straw who is briefly suspected of killing little Madge, clearly did not and anyhow, worships Lucy. Much of Straw's unrequited agony is watched by his ever-loyal friend and protector, Aloysius Dooley, a tough Irish saloon-keeper possessed of a well developed sense of justice.
All of these central characters play their parts in telling the story along with Jerry Potts, half Blackfoot, half Scots, a doomed individual caught between cultures. Potts was a real-life frontiersman and saviour of the Mounties.
It is a tribute to the flow of Vanderhaeghe's prose and his feel for the individual voices of his characters that this novel carries such an amount of historical research with apparent ease. Each time one of his narrators steps up to speak, the narrative becomes their own property.
The tale never falters, the shifting perspectives convince. Even Lucy's desperate moments of passion with Charles somehow ring true, as does his failure to fulfil his dreams.
Of particular interest is the evocation of the Indian societies consisting of several tribes, often warring, all existing on the fringes of the emerging civilisation. Many of the Indian sequences are directly related to Jerry Potts and just as he became a dislocated son, so he too in time, must see the same fate befall his son. Vanderhaeghe never becomes as heavy handed as Cormac McCarthy, who is at times overwhelmed by the epic weight of his material and the Biblical grandeur of his prose. Of course there is a difference, the brutal story of the American West has been well chronicled, that of the Canadian West far less so. Potts is the true hero of the book, although Straw is also heroic.
For all the historical information this is an engaging adventure carved from the story of the North American wilderness, it is also a romance, a family history, a series of personal dramas and a quest interlaced with sufficient score-settling to satisfy the most blood thirsty of readers. The Last Crossing is above all, a rich, imagined, sustained and honest novel that celebrates storytelling as a spell that draws the reader in.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
The Last Crossing By Guy Vanderhaeghe Little Brown, 468pp, £14.99
