Book Review
'Last Crossing': Worlds collide in sweeping tale of search party

By Michael Upchurch
Seattle Times book critic

	DETAIL FROM BOOK JACKET / “THE STORM” PHOTOGRAPH BY EDWARD S. CURTIS Worlds collide in Guy Vanderhaeghe's sweeping tale of a search party and changing times
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The Canadian western interior, just as it's about to turn from wilderness to thinly populated frontier — that's the historical moment Saskatchewan author Guy Vanderhaeghe captures in "The Last Crossing," his second foray into period fiction following his award-winning novel, "The Englishman's Boy."

Most of the action in the new book takes place in 1871, when the high plains above Montana weren't thought of as Canada but "British territory" and the line between the two Americas was a hazy affair. "No difference to remark between here and there," one of Vanderhaeghe's characters notes to himself as he heads north. "Dirt isn't patriotic, doesn't wave a flag."

It's against this setting of "dirt," sand hills, coulees and grasslands — all under the uncertain jurisdiction of American whiskey traders, British soldiers and a still-sizable Native American presence — that Vanderhaeghe sets a story triggered by the vanishing of an eccentric English Christian missionary, Simon Gaunt, in a sudden plains blizzard. Simon's father, a self-made railway magnate, isn't about to tolerate his son's disappearance, so he sends Simon's two brothers, ex-soldier Addington and would-be artist Charles (Simon's twin), off to find him.

"The Last Crossing" by Guy Vanderhaeghe Atlantic Monthly, $24

But finding Simon is easier said than done. No rumors of his survival have reached Fort Benton, the Gaunts' base camp on the Missouri River. The territory the brothers need to cover is enormous, and Addington, as older brother, has put himself in charge. The trouble is he's abusive, bigoted, syphilitic and much distracted by local hunting prospects and the enticements of Fort Benton's "pestilential brothels."

He also, once the expedition is under way, is given to overruling the advice of Jerry Potts, the Gaunts' "Scottish half-breed" guide. Ignoring that advice seems risky, given that Potts, whose mother was a Blackfoot, carries in his head "a map of every river, every butte, every coulee, every pimple on the prairie's ass."

Potts, a character drawn from real life who would go on to become a legendary figure in Canadian history for his rescue of a lost Canadian North West Mounted Police expedition in 1874, is a troubled, ambiguous figure, as Vanderhaeghe portrays him. Charles Gaunt — cool observer that he is — has some measure of Potts as a man but no idea of his full story or the way he's torn between two mutually exclusive worlds. Indeed, no one in the novel has a complete picture of anyone they're dealing with. Only the reader is privy to the interior thoughts of each key figure, as Vanderhaeghe keeps shifting point of view.

Author appearance Guy Vanderhaeghe reads from "The Lasting Crossing," 7:30 p.m. March 8 at Seattle's Elliott Bay Book Co. (206-624-6600 or www.elliottbaybook.com).

It's quite a crew that heads north with Potts and the Gaunts. Chief among them: vengeful, grief-stricken Lucy Stoveall, trying to track down the murderers of her younger sister; kindly if clumsy-mannered Civil War veteran Custis Straw, determined to keep Lucy safe and perhaps persuade her to love him; and American "gasbag" journalist Caleb Ayto, tagging along to glorify Addington's feats of bravery in the wilderness.

Their stories all blend into an intricate saga encompassing culture clash and cultural chauvinism, family secrets and enforced family duty, instinctive love and by-the-book propriety. Some of Vanderhaeghe's switches of voice let you hear the narrative gears shifting a little too audibly. But the overall picture, especially with Jerry Potts as the close-mouthed linchpin of the book, is striking and powerful.

Vanderhaeghe's photo-sharp prose renders this high-plains terrain with all the bleak grandeur of filmmaker David Lean's "Lawrence of Arabia." And as in "Lawrence," the book strikes a nice balance between epic sweep and close-up personal drama.

The vanished Simon's secrets and the way he baffles his twin are subtly parsed out in flashback. The tensions within the Gaunt search party are meticulously caught. On a larger scale, the bloody skirmishes between tribes (Crow, Blackfoot, Cree) and the ravages of whiskey and smallpox among them are brutally, rendingly drawn — and made sadder by the knowledge that the final-phase showdown between indigenous population and newcomers is about to take place. Vanderhaeghe's English-countryside detail is almost as good as his visions of Canada's high prairies.

By book's end, the swath of American continent portrayed has become a kind of mirage, meaning too many different things to too many different people for any one of them to get all they want out of it. Vanderhaeghe, in dealing out deserts both just and unjust to his fictional characters and the real-life figure of Jerry Potts, delivers a many-stranded narrative as persuasively chance-ridden and binding as Fate itself.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company