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The Last Crossing

by Guy Vanderhaeghe

The Last Crossing, Guy Vanderhaeghe’s seventh work of fiction, rewalks the landscape of 1996’s The Englishman’s Boy. We are back in Fort Benton, snugged up against a tributary of the muddy Missouri, the whiskey posts sirening out to the Assiniboine and Crow, Blackfoot and Cree and to the Metis caught in the deadly tug between native and white, past and future.

The story is simple. Charles Gaunt and elder brother Addington travel into the lawless New World of 1871 searching for Charles’s lost twin, Simon, last seen leaving England under the sway of a shady evangelist preaching the kind of religious claptrap so popular among the Victorians.

The trip, whether rescue or inquest, is clearly doomed. Charles in England is a dreamer, a milk-fed artist in an eccentric but powerful family. Charles in America is a kipper out of water, butt of scorn and flinty humour from the posse he and Addington assemble. Included in this posse are a no-good American journalist picked up along the way (Boswell to Captain Addington’s syphilitic Johnson), an assortment of hard-living, chap-wearing cowboys, a couple of frontiersmen tagging along for reasons of idealism, a half-breed scout, and a revenge-bent Lucy Stoveall, who cooks their meals and stumbles along behind them in a lather of self-punishment. Buffalo, Indians, and weather intervene frequently.

Vanderhaeghe allows us to see Charles’ inadequacies from multiple perspectives. Charles himself is a frequent voice in a novel of braided voices, and his sections describe – poetically, forlornly – his anxiety over Simon, his anxiety over his troubled relationship to his stern father and perverse Addington, his anxiety over the haunted Mrs. Stoveall. Vanderhaeghe is a master ventriloquist, and Charles’s mounting despair is both note perfect and absurd as the hard-bitten team rides into Montana’s heart of darkness.

Vanderhaeghe exults in the period language available to him across the social registers. A.S. Byatt has written that authors who are drawn to the historical novel yearn to “write in a more elaborate, more complex way, in longer sentences, and with more figurative language.”

Vanderhaeghe’s sermonly cadences in the omniscient passages are a delight, and his meticulous research is as clear in the colourful dialogue as it is in the complexity of the geography. A poor woman considers the love of a gentleman: “A fact is a hard grindstone to rub your nose on, but I’ve done it all my life. Yoked to me, an ignorant country woman, he’d have a bitter time of it.… He would wear down over time. It’s the nature of whatever is soft and fine to be done so.” Notice the lovely opening and closing lines: practical, salty. And the short, brutal intervening sentences, expressing an impossibly sad moment with little more than list-like efficiency. Then closing with the old-fashioned syntax of “to be done so.” It’s tragedy expressed with a worker’s economy.

But this is really all just a cunningly designed, immaculately stitched backdrop for the novel’s central relationship between Charles and Addington Gaunt. It’s a quest story transposed into the New World of the 1870s, the history and geography of the still-wild west embodying the clash between gentle, modern Charles and Addington, ruthless servant to the Empire. Told back in England, in time-worn, implacable London, theirs would be another social novel of the Henry James variety. In the heaving West, a land redefining itself politically, socially, spiritually, it’s a story with the potential to attain the level of myth.

The Englishman’s Boy was all about myth. Into the frontier of the 1870s, Vanderhaeghe intercut narrator Harry Vincent’s burgeoning 1920s Hollywood. This strategy allowed Vanderhaeghe the distance to establish and comment on a crucial theme: America’s struggle to recast its true past as a history of glories. To present that mythmaking, Vanderhaeghe relied on a cast – frontiersmen, studio-system stars and producers, Metis and first nations – running before the scythe of civilization, as well as a narrator distanced enough from that history to comment upon it.

The Last Crossing (beginning with that elegiac title) also looks back to a hinge of history: the meeting of history and modernity, natives and settlers, as well as soldiers and artists, men and women, workers and aristocracy. Yet its characters are bereft of the self-awareness, their understanding of their place in history and eventual transcendence to myth, that Vanderhaeghe poured into his previous novel. The Gaunts are every bit as doomed as the tragic last cowboy in The Englishman’s Boy, but they lack his bitter resignation and are too nuanced to easily pass into mythology. The complex Lucy Stoveall, lifted up by the power of her mind, held down by her class, comes closer to tragic hero, as does the “half-breed” Jerry Potts, distrusted by both races that spawned him.

Vanderhaeghe is mining history’s crannies here. The Last Crossing drops deep into these crannies, emerging with an embarrassment of beautifully rendered detail, base metals that never quite achieve the gold of myth.

 

Reviewer: John Burns

Publisher: McClelland & Stewart

DETAILS

Price: $37.99

Page Count: 400 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 0-7710-8737-3

Released: Sept.

Issue Date: 2002-9

Categories: Fiction: Novels