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Sun Going Down

by Jack Todd

Jack Todd is best-known for his hard-hitting sports journalism in Montreal’s The Gazette and his 2001 memoir of dodging the draft, The Taste of Metal. Unfortunately, the road from non-fiction to fiction is not always smooth, and Todd’s first novel, Sun Going Down, has several stumbles.

Sun Going Down is a long, rambling tale set against the settlement of the American midwest. The book’s six sections are named for rivers and follow the lives, loves, and adventures of the Paint family, who are loosely based on the author’s own ancestors. Its 450 pages range from the Civil War to Prohibition and are packed with incidents of rape, murder, beatings, and a failed hanging. There are also cattle drives, horse rustling, Indians, and endless prairie vistas.

The novel is heavily plot-driven, but it is difficult for the reader to care for the characters, as they are allowed little in the way of internal dialogue. They do things to advance the plot, rather than because of who they are. For example, Cora Paint, an intelligent and hardy woman, dies after walking out into an approaching storm, unbelievably ignoring warnings and her own instincts.

There is much description of nature and landscape, but long lists of items – 12 species of tree in one case – do not necessarily provide a sense of time or place. Some descriptions jar – the sun rises “like a rotten tangerine over the molten river” –  and others are simply strange – a catfish breaches the river’s surface for a “toothful of dragonfly.”

Occasionally, even the action is overdone – it is hard, for example, to see how a man with a gouge in his biceps the size of “a turkey egg,” a broken forearm with “a jagged edge of bone” poking through, as well as cracked ribs, manages to keep fighting and even get his opponent in a “death grip” before pawing at a whip.

It is possible to be drawn through a book of this type by the beauty of the language, by a vivid sense of time and place, or by characters that readers can relate to. Unfortunately, Sun Going Down informs without engaging.

 

Reviewer: John Wilson

Publisher: Viking Canada

DETAILS

Price: $34

Page Count: 450 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 978-0-670-06723-7

Released: April

Issue Date: 2008-3

Categories: Fiction: Novels