Voyageurs

Rating:
Summary: A brother's Love or Quakers aren't wimps
Review: In a magazine some actor whose name I can't remember or spell raved about this book. It deals with Mark Greenhow and a letter that arrives from Canada to his home in England. It is about his missionary sister Rachel whom has married out of the Quaker order, has lost a baby, and has wandered off by herself on a small island on Lake Huron. Red eyed and shaken Mark's parent's want to know what happened and who is this man who wrote the letter, who now says that he tried to search for Rachel but had to return to his post at the North West Company.The discriptions and research in this book are bang on, right down to the fact that it is improper to tell stories around the camp fire in summer about Nanubushu - the great Indian spirit or Manitou.My favourite parts are when Mark is on the boat coming over to Canada the year is 1810 and he is wet and cold huddled under his blanket when he throws it off to holler over the side of the boat at his sister Rachel as to why and yet again she drags him into her bad news. Mark gets to learn how to paddle in a Voyageurs canoe and get used to the traders and trappers. There are footnotes at the bottom of some of the pages explaining certain things that went on and at times you have to remind yourself that this story is fiction. Canada is gearing up for war with the States and as Quakers it is hard to pass up arms when eveyone around you isn't. As they (Quakers) have vowed never to bear arms against any man this proves difficult to explain to the average gun carrying Joe.Mark is a believable character and one I'll miss till I read the book again.Yes, Mark meets the man - Rachel's husband but at times Mark is having such an adventure that you forget why he came to Canada in the first place. As to the rest well order it from Amazon and find out you won't be disappointed.

Rating:
Summary: Descriptive landscape
Review: The other reviewers do a pretty good job of describing the book's characters, events and conflicts. And it is, as they describe it and I concur, an interesting story. The operative words I wish to address in their reviews and in the book itself - are "detailed description" and "slow". And these are both true in the context in which they describe the book. However...

What struck me as I read the book (and what interests me in history) is this question, "What did it (the land and man's interactions with it) look like at that moment of time?" Well, yeah, it was big, empty and largely unpeopled. But Elphinstone does a really good job at describing what this area really, really looked like at the beginning of the 19th century and why. If you were Mark this is what you'd see, who you would or would not meet, what you must do to travel, eat, stay warm. Slow?- if you are looking for swashbuckling adventure - yes. I'd prefer to say that it provides an explicit vision of what this spot of frontier looked like- the kind of description that paints a vivid picture in your brain in which the characters can play out their story.

Rating:
Summary: wonderful detail but doesn't always hold attention
Review: Voyageurs is set during the time of the War of 1812 on the then hotly contested border between Canada and America. Mark Greenhow is a young English Quaker whose sister Rachel left to minister in Canada and ended up marrying outside the faith and thus being disowned by her religion, if not her family. When Mark's family receives a letter from her husband (a fur trapper agent named Alan Mackenzie) that Rachel was lost in the wilderness after wandering off desolate at the loss of their first child, he decides to go to Canada and search for her. In simple terms, the book is the story of his quest to do so: his journey to Canada, his joining Mackenzie and Loic (half Indian half European) to travel far into the wild border area, and his return, all of this set against the backdrop of gathering war among Canada, America, and the Native Americans who may fight on either side.
The book, of course, is not so simple. Structurally, it is a story within a story within a story as the major narrative is supposed to be Mark's journal "discovered" by the modern day author who has had it published. The main story it is told as a long flashback as an older, wiser Mark reflects in his journal on his long-ago journey. While this technique allows for more sophisticated language and references, and also for occasional bits of actual wisdom, in general it doesn't add much to the work as a whole. The use of footnotes, some quite lengthy, slows the book down quite a bit in places and though several of the notes are small gems of tone and characterization, in general the payoff is not worth the interruption or the extra complication.
Elphinstone does a better job of complicating matters via setting and especially through the choice of religion. It is made clear early on that Mark is conflicted at times with his religions pacifism, and even before he leaves for Canada we learn of several times where he mentally or actually failed to hold up to the standard of peace set by his community. His journey, set as it is in a time of war, will further confuse him, forcing him to choose again and again whether to hold steady to the Quaker path. In the end, he must decide just who he is. This conflict, as mentioned, is set up early in the book, and is a constant source of tension throughout. It is also nicely paralleled by other elements in the book: the physical setting, a border in the midst of deciding what it is or who it belongs to; two countries deciding what their relationship will be; a multitude of cultures deciding how they will interact, a number of characters of mixed race; a number of characters who must decide to what and to whom their loyalties lie, etc. This sense of identity conflict is perhaps the best part of the book.
If it isn't the best part, the detailed setting surely is. Elphinstone does a masterful job of detailing life during this time and in this place and Mark's trips from settlement to settlement and camp to camp are languorous descriptions of the natural surroundings and the cultural ways of life of trappers, settlers, and Native Americans. I have to admit that at times I found the detail a bit too overdone, not in any given section but overall. Whereas each section was wonderfully written and each area wonderfully evoked, the book did slow down by the middle to latter part and I found myself having to resist the temptation to skim. The book probably would have been better served losing 50-100 pages.
The very end is a bit anti-climatic but the resolution regarding Rachel was, without giving anything away, nicely and originally handled, avoiding cliche, sentimentalism, or predictability.
A leaner book, one that cut down a bit on some of the description and cut out or cut severely the older Mark sections (not to mention the journal's "discoverer") and the book would have rated a strong four. With the somewhat extraneous structure and the sometimes slow pacing, it drops down, though still recommended for its detail, its thematic structure, and the voice of its main character.