It was Ian McGuire’s second novel, The North Water, longlisted for the Booker prize in 2016 and later adapted for television, that established his reputation for savage historical noir. A professor of American literature at the University of Manchester, McGuire specialises in the late 19th-century realist tradition; at its best his work blends the unsparing violence of Cormac McCarthy with a bleak lyricism reminiscent of Welsh poet RS Thomas.
Both The North Water, set onboard a whaling ship dispatched from Hull to Baffin Bay in 1859, and The Abstainer, inspired by the hanging of three Irish rebels in Manchester a decade later, probed the grisly underbelly of Victorian imperialism, harsh worlds where a “man’s life on its own is nothing much to talk about”. In White River Crossing, McGuire travels across the Atlantic and back another 100 years to the Prince of Wales Fort, a remote trading post of the Hudson’s Bay Company in what is now northern Manitoba. Founded by royal charter in 1670 and granted sole right of trade and commerce across some 1.5m sq km of territory, the British venture was established to exploit the indigenous fur trade, but investors also hoped for other profitable discoveries, particularly silver and gold.
It is the frozen winter of 1766 when a ragged pedlar brings a chunk of rock to Magnus Norton, the fort’s chief factor. The rock is “shot through with a pair of thin and branching yellow lines like twin rivers”, proof, the pedlar says, of gold fields in the Barren Grounds 600 miles north. Norton can barely contain his greed. He dispatches his deputy, John Shaw, and two other company men to seek out and claim the treasure, along with two couples of the Dene tribe, known to their white paymasters as Northern Indians, to serve as their hunters, guides and cooks. He is careful not to inform the company of his mission. He lets the other men in the fort believe that the mission is for copper ore. Norton is near retirement, his health is failing. A rich man already, he intends to return to England a good deal richer.
Although the novel moves between the viewpoints of all seven members of the group, it is granted mostly to the bookish Thomas Hearn to tell the story of the arduous and ill-fated expedition. Poleaxed by grief and loss of faith, Hearn, a one-time ordinand, has sealed himself up inside a fiercely austere self-restraint. Shaw, by contrast, is a man of brutish appetites for whom both the land and its peoples are chattels, his to exploit as he chooses. As they travel north the group encounter other communities and, when the younger of the Dene guides, the hot-headed Nabayah, loses his wife to a rival in a wrestling match, Shaw steps in and wins her back. Deaf to Hearn’s warnings, Shaw insists on a night with her as his reward. The consequences of his crude arrogance will undo them all.
Like The North Water, with which it shares much DNA, White River Crossing moves at a propulsive lick, its bloody meat marbled with cruelty and violence. McGuire does not let us look away: the clumsy amputation of a gangrenous arm is described in almost voluptuous detail, while the desolate beauty of the vast landscape is summoned with a sharp precision, “the blueish peaks of frost-tipped hills” as crisply vivid as “the piles of shattered marrow bone and antler”.
Inside his characters’ heads, however, McGuire moves with less confidence. Backstories provide context but little complexity or depth. Hearn is convincing enough as a man who, broken open by horror, is remade anew, but Shaw, like Drax in The North Water, is a frustratingly one-dimensional villain and Abel Walker, the third company man, mostly overlooked. As for the Dene guides, whose perspective might have given this story a very different complexion, they are quickly swallowed by the plot.
In a foreword to the novel, no doubt to pre-empt criticisms of cultural appropriation, McGuire stresses the paucity of first-hand Dene histories and defends his choice in the novel “to emphasise commonality over cultural or historical difference”. The decision is misguided. It is when he abandons that imagined commonality, giving his Indigenous characters the scope to see the world entirely on their own terms, that he succeeds most powerfully: a scene in which a shaman uses his powers to expel an evil spirit from the body of a sick child is one of the most striking – and affecting – in the novel. By emphasising commonalities, in scrupulously eradicating deep cultural difference, McGuire diminishes the power of the four Dene guides to transform the narrative and begs the very question he sought to duck about whether their story was really ever his to tell.
• White River Crossing by Ian McGuire is published by Scribner (£20). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
