Karen Chisholm
REVIEW
THE TENDERNESS OF WOLVES - Stef Penney
Reviewed By
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
THE TENDERNESS OF WOLVES won the 2006 Costa Book of the Year, and I confess to often reading prize winning novels with a less than subconscious desire to work out what the judges were thinking. This novel came as somewhat of a surprise - despite the prize winning, despite the talk about it since it was first released.
Slowly the story builds, told partially from the point of view of Mrs Ross. It is her son that has disappeared, she is the one who has found the body of trapper Laurent Jammet. The book switches perspective from her personal story, to the observations and actions of others central to the unfolding mystery. Friends of Jammet; the authorities (Company men); other members of the Dove River community; other communities. But the story returns, time and time again, to Mrs Ross. To her reaction to her son's disappearance, about her own background, how she comes to be tracking her son and Jammet's murderer through the extreme weather conditions in a winter in the frontier outback of Canada.
Whilst the central point of this book is the truth behind Jammet's murder, the book is about a lot more than just that. It takes the reader back to that time in Canadian (and probably a lot of other immigrant) outback settler communities. It provides some possible insight or reasons behind why people left their homes and went so very far away, and what it must have felt to have done that and to be "stuck" in their new world. It also provides some insight into the difficulties that anybody - indigenous or new settler - experiences in living in extreme weather conditions and amongst people with such diverse backgrounds. There are little indications of the tensions between the native Indian populations, the French and the English (or Scottish) immigrants, to say nothing of the isolation of a small Norwegian community.
In the world that the author has built, there is a central female character who has a difficult background, who, possibly because of that background, finds the most amazing strength and insight and fearlessness. The reasons behind the murder of Laurent Jammet are revealed, the reasons behind her son's disappearance resolved, what happens to Mrs Ross is a lot more complicated than that.
THE TENDERNESS OF WOLVES is one of those books that you have to slow down and allow the thing to carry you along, but the experience is well worth the requirement.
BOOK DETAILS
BOOK INFORMATION
BLURB
The year is 1867. Winter has just tightened its grip on Dove River, a tiny isolated settlement in the Northern Territory, when a man is brutally murdered. Laurent Jammett had been a voyageur for the Hudson Bay Company before an accident lamed him four years earlier. The same accident afforded him the little parcel of land in Dove River, land that the locals called unlucky due to the untimely death of the previous owner.
A local woman, Mrs. Ross, stumbles upon the crime scene and sees the tracks leading from the dead man's cabin north toward the forest and the tundra beyond. It is Mrs. Ross's knock on the door of the largest house in Caulfield that launches the investigation. Within hours she will regret that knock with a mother's love -- for soon she makes another discovery: her seventeen-year-old son Francis has disappeared and is now considered a prime suspect.
In the wake of such violence, people are drawn to the crime and to the township -- Andrew Knox, Dove River's elder statesman; Thomas Sturrock, a wily American itinerant trader; Donald Moody, the clumsy young Company representative; William Parker, a half-breed Native American and trapper who was briefly detained for Jammett's murder before becoming Mrs. Ross's guide. But the question remains: do these men want to solve the crime or exploit it?
One by one, the searchers set out from Dove River following the tracks across a desolate landscape -- home to only wild animals, madmen, and fugitives -- variously seeking a murderer, a son, two sisters missing for seventeen years, and a forgotten Native American culture before the snows settle and cover the tracks of the past for good.
| Review | THE TENDERNESS OF WOLVES - Stef Penney | Karen Chisholm
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Tuesday, July 1, 2008 |
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