This is a western for people who don’t like westerns. It takes a reader onto the raw frontier of 1871 and, like Lonesome Dove,
follows a small band of characters as they make a long overland journey. In
this case, the novel opens in Fort Benton on the upper reaches of the Missouri
River in Montana Territory, and its characters travel to Edmonton, Alberta, and
back.
Like McMurtry’s
novel, its story is different from the traditional western’s more usual quest
of an individual hero to bring outlaws to justice against all odds. McMurtry
and Vanderhaeghe take the usual topics of frontier fiction—loyalty, friendship,
love, courage, family, integrity, and so on. But enliven them in a way meant to appeal to a broad audience.
Plot. The back cover will tell you that the story is about two
English brothers in search of a third one who has disappeared in the American
wilderness. That’s only one thread of a tangled plot line that involves a
battle-scarred Civil War veteran, an Irish saloon keeper, a mixed-blood
Blackfeet-Scots scout, a writer of adventure books, a woman abandoned by her
husband, and yet another pair of brothers believed to have murdered the woman’s
sister.
The characters press
northward from Fort Benton into Canada, following scant evidence that the
missing brother is still alive. He seems likely to have died from misadventure
or to have been killed by Indians. Members of the search party itself are
hardly sanguine in each other’s company. Addington and Charles, the missing man’s
brothers, have a long history of mutual distrust. Meanwhile, two of the men are
enamored of the woman traveling with them.
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| Red River carts, near Edmonton, Alberta, c1870 |
Near the end of
almost 400 pages, there are revelations that clear up some mysteries while
producing others. Before the story is done, we have lost a character or two
along the way, and in the final chapters, one of the brothers returns to
England.
Character. Charles is a modestly talented portraitist, who
has disappointed both Addington and their wealthy father by having no talent
for brutal domination of others. Addington, who represents the high tide of
British imperialism, is a proud, angry man, determined to leave his mark by
killing a grizzly with a longbow. Given to pontificating, he says that what
defines a man is his relentless effort to overcome any obstacle. To that end,
he has engaged a writer to enshrine his achievements in a book about himself.
We get to know the
third brother, Simon, in the memories that Charles has of him. Simon has been
swept up by the Victorian interest in spiritualism. A student at Oxford and
dressed like Matthew Arnold’s “scholar gypsy,” he abandons his books to learn
directly from nature. Before leaving for America, he becomes involved in a
dubious religious sect that believes Indians are the Lost Tribes of Israel.
