Like the South African plains of the title, Alberta author Fred Stenson’s eighth novel is vast and sprawling. It’s historical fiction with the emphasis firmly on the historical.
    For nearly 500 pages, The Great Karoo follows the adventures of Alberta cowboy Frank Adams, as he struggles to survive and understand the Boer War at the turn of the last century. As a member of the Mounted Rifles and, later, as a scout, Adams befriends Ovide Smith, a fellow cowboy; Jeff Davis, a Blood Indian tracker; and a succession of horses. He also falls hopelessly in love with a Boer girl.
    Stenson undertook a huge amount of historical research, and the details he amasses are extraordinary. In one scene, he plays on actual graffiti that was captured on a contemporary photograph of a Boer farmhouse. Many of the novel’s interesting subsidiary characters are actual historical figures. The reader hears about, or meets, John McCrae, Kipling, Churchill, Red Cloud, and several real Canadian and British officers and soldiers.
    However, Stenson’s twin desires to include historical figures and not leave out any significant events mean that the fiction is often driven by the research, rather than the other way around. Characters
sometimes seem to go places merely because something interesting is about to happen there. And for much of the book, the main characters are almost painfully laconic. Dialogue is at a minimum; in places the novel reads a little like non-fiction.
    Fortunately, Stenson writes with power, and his descriptions – particularly of the landscape and the trials of the horses – are masterful. Overall, The Great Karoo is a fascinating book. Readers with an interest in the past will be drawn in and swept along by a fine recreation of time and place and by an insight into a little-known episode of Canadian history.