Fiction:Stef Penney's excursion into genre fiction has many weaknesses, primarily in characterisation, although there is no denying her attention to multi-dimensional plot, writes Eileen Battersby.
Take a shrewd woman possessed of obvious intelligence and a sarcastic turn of phrase, a good-looking French trapper found with his throat slit, a runaway son who may or may not be a killer, a bumbling, quasi-romantic company investigator, two sisters, one of whom is very beautiful, the other irritatingly clever, a lot of drink, a lot of woe, furtive sexuality and the winter snow of 19th-century Canada and you will have some idea of what to expect from Scottish writer Stef Penney's episodic, top-heavy and mannered debut.
There is also an interestingly shabbily elegant older man, Sturrock, whose charm formerly assisted his passage through a chaotic life which now sees him facing old age, penniless yet still intent on finding a piece of carved ivory that may be of archaeological, scholarly and commercial value. Oh yes, yet another sub-plot concerns a second set of sisters, who disappeared in the wilderness as children 17 years earlier, causing their parents to die of broken hearts. Not forgetting the beautiful widow who insists her cowardly lover abandon his children to make a new life with her and her children. Confused? You may not be alone.
Despite the title, and no doubt because there is so much else going on, the wolves - aside from eating an ill horse - have only a shadowy minor role in this dense yarn, which surprisingly emerged last week as the winner of the Costa - formerly Whitbread - Book of the Year award. Most of the post-prize publicity honed in on the fact that Penney, a recently recovered agoraphobic, researched The Tenderness of Wolves at the British Library and had never been to Canada, more than it did on the book itself, which had a quiet reception when originally published some months ago.
Cryptic Mrs Ross narrates much of the action. No longer young, but still handsome, she makes no secret of her disappointment with life. It seems she originally came from a mysterious Scotland of which she reveals little save her asylum years, and references to her personal history dribble out from time to time. Her marriage has settled into mutual discontent, an adopted and increasingly difficult son, Francis, appears to stand between the couple. But the boy, now 17, has disappeared. Stef Penney has arranged her novel as if were a set of building blocks. To read it is to become caught between a series of revolving doors.
For all the various sexual complications - desire, frustration, anger, compromise and the almost comic spectacle of one character falling for one sister only to realise he thinks he loves the other - it is a thriller in that all the momentum is drawn from curiosity as to how on earth Penney is going to organise her large team of not overly convincing characters. At times it seems that a subversive eccentricity would propel the book to a higher level, but this potential subversion never moves beyond the conventional social revolt indicated by the independent behaviour of Mrs Ross and several other female characters.
A man is butchered and several characters go in pursuit of the killer. Another trapper is accused of the crime, is controversially set free and sets off in the company of Mrs Ross, an emancipated woman if ever there was one. She wants to find the killer, and she also wants to locate her son, who she hopes is not the murderer. Mrs Ross begins the story, and almost immediately her acidic tone and her personal history bring to mind Grace, the central character of Margaret Atwood's 1996 Booker Prize-shortlisted Alias Grace. Both novels also focus on violent deaths and unsolved crimes.
But Penney never establishes a sense of period, and rarely, for all the descriptive writing, evokes an authentic sense of place except in the passages in which the various characters are suffering from the cold. The dialogue is too modern; these characters could as easily be interacting in 1990s upstate New York. The Canadian winter aside, it is a cold, rigidly executed book with all too few welcome flashes of barbed humour. Mrs Ross, who can recall having shock baths as an asylum patient back in Scotland, never quite convinces, and this problem is compounded by Penney's introduction of a second character, the young Maria Knox, a carbon copy of Mrs Ross - both sound and behave as if they were one. Both are sharp, shrewd and confident of their superior intelligence. They never meet, which might have been intriguing.
It is a long, deliberate book and many of the sub-plots are self-contained stories in themselves. But the connections are too easily made. Most thriller readers will spot the clues. Even in the most dramatic sequences, Penney all too often uses a modern expression. It may be set in the Canadian wilderness, but The Tenderness of Wolves could have been set aboard a ship such is the claustrophobic nature of the narrative.
Those tonal and thematic echoes of Atwood's earlier book also sit heavily upon Penney's tale, which is admittedly less heavily researched. Early in Penney's novel, Mrs Ross, on being interviewed by one Mr Mackinley, muses privately, "He is a fascinating case - one of those rare Scotsmen, whose expression reveals his mind. Assimilating all this information, his face changes yet again, and on top of the surprise and deference and courtesy and mild contempt is a keen interest. I could watch him all day, but he has his job to do. And I have mine."
Penney's excursion into genre fiction has many weaknesses, primarily in characterisation, although there is no denying her attention to multi-dimensional plot. At no time does this performance match the colour, invention and sheer eccentric panache of Susanna Clarke's 2004 period debut, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
The Tenderness of Wolves By Stef Penney Quercus, 440pp. £10.99