High jinks and slaughter

Whatever else may be said of Guy Vanderhaeghe, author of The English Boy, he does at least have one serious fan. The admirer in question is Annie Proulx, who appears on the front cover of this new novel extolling ‘a feast of a book’, and on the back suggesting that ‘here are brilliant writing, picaresque adventure, history and studies of human nature’. Miss Proulx’s work, it may be said, comes from much the same territory as her protégé: that vast, underpopulated expanse of prairie running all the way from Wyoming to mid-western Canada, where a sharp pain in the fleeing horseman’s leg is pretty sure to have come courtesy of the teeth of an opportunistic timberwolf.

Prospective readers looking for another slice of North America à la Proulx, full of characters with names like Tulk Farrago gamely founding their steakhouse diners in defiance of foreclosing banks, will probably be disappointed by The Last Crossing. Set back in the mid-to-later stretches of the Victorian era, it is a historical novel, serious and whimsical by turns, threatening in places to turn into a full-scale romp, but always dragged back to base camp by the elementals of death, dalliance and destruction. Jolly good larks, in other words, along with the slaughter of the innocent and grizzly bears.

Charles Gaunt, Vanderhaeghe’s chief tale-teller — the action is conveyed by half-a-dozen narrative voices — has come west in genteel search of pious twin Simon, last seen in the clutches of a mountebank preacher named the Reverend Wither- spoon, who had managed to convince him that native American Indians are the lost tribes of Israel. Alongside him canters vainglorious, syphilitic elder brother Adding- ton, together with a band of hastily recruited local flotsam: Dooley, the saloon-keeper, Civil War vet Curtis Straw, a Yankee journalist keen to write Addington up as an English Cody, and a buxom beauty at whose feet Charles prostrates himself named Lucy Stoveall.