Ian McGuire’s last two novels firmly established his mastery of a unique brand of historical fiction that blends dense research, propulsive plotting and blood-rousingly visceral prose. The North Water (2016), set on a 19th-century Arctic whaling ship, and The Abstainer (2020), set in the aftermath of the execution of the “Manchester Martyrs” in 1867, both explored tensions between different ethnic, national and religious communities. In his latest work, set in northern Canada in the 1760s, colonial encounters now take centre stage.
White River Crossing follows an expedition that sets out from the Prince of Wales Fort, a fur-trading outpost of the Hudson’s Bay Company, in search of a rumoured gold find hundreds of miles north, beyond the frozen tundra of the Barren Grounds. This off-books mission, masterminded by the Governor of the Fort, is attempted by the Governor’s unworldly nephew, his shrewd if brutish deputy, two Dene hunters and their wives, and the profoundly disillusioned, socially recalcitrant, grief-stricken Tom Hearn, the closest this novel has to a hero.
In an insightful foreword, McGuire, an erstwhile scholar of American literature, emphasises the “double-voiced” nature of historical novels, which “speak to and about their own historical moment as well as speaking to and about the period in which they are set.” There is nothing wooden or mannered about McGuire’s men and women, who, as he notes in the foreword, speak in a more or less contemporary idiom and are very much living, breathing human beings, excreting sweat, shit, piss, vomit, phlegm, pus, blood and every other kind of bodily fluid.
Beyond its overt concern with toxic masculinity, sexual violence and trauma, the most obvious marker of this book’s contemporaneity is its nuanced understanding of early colonists, not as conquerors of a culturally unified and homogenous native population but as a new faction disruptively intruding into a complex, pre-existing political landscape – a faction that rival indigenous groups are ready to exploit for their own economic and political ends. Indeed, it is tensions between and within the Dene and Inuit communities, which are consistently underpriced by the European protagonists, that produce the most surprising twists in this tautly plotted tale.
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In this brutal, beautiful, luminously lyrical novel, McGuire pulls off yet another triumph of historical fiction.
