The call of the wild

The American wild west and the early days of filmmaking are two subjects close to my heart; little wonder, then, that I found Guy Vanderhaeghe's novel so exhilarating, for he combines both in a long, elegiac work that reminds one slightly of the work of Cormac McCarthy, but without the biblical language and the heaviness of intent.

Which is not to say that The Englishman's Boy is as light as thistledown or as two-dimensional as a Zane Grey. No, indeed. There is a lot to mull over in this account of the eponymous Englishman's Boy, as he rides with a band of revenge-seeking wolf hunters towards the Canadian border in the 1870s, and the power-mad film maker, Damon Ira Chance, who wishes, in the l920s, to portray the cowboy life on the silver screen.

Vanderhaeghe uses the device of alternating chapters to tell his story, the quest of the wolf hunters set down in the third person, the film project told by putative screen writer, Harry Vincent, in the first. One knows, of course, that both themes will eventually coalesce and become one, but before that happens much physical and psychological violence take place.

The wolf hunters, led by the messianic Tom Hardwick, have had their horses stolen by two Assiniboine Indians; the Englishman's Boy, after the death of his employer and an altercation with a hotel owner, joins them as they pursue the raiding party through Montana territory towards Saskatchewan and a bloody resolution in Southwestern Canada.

The hardship of the pursuit is starkly delineated, as the hunters battle the elements: the unforgiving prairie, flooded rivers, the sandpaper grittiness of sunblasted deserts, hostile renegades, and each other. For these are rough men, used to a primitiveness of life bordering on that of the brute beast, where no quarter is asked or given, and the weak are left to fend for themselves and to die alone.

Running alongside this narrative is the story of Harry Vincent's efforts to find the legendary cowboy, Shorty McAdoo, whose voyage through life Harry's mentor, Ira Chance, wishes to immortalise on film. Chance, wanting to emulate D.W. Griffiths' Birth of a Nation, is a megalomaniac who sees motion pictures as a manifestation of the American spirit: "The American destiny is forward momentum. What the old frontiersman called westering. What the American spirit required was an art form of forward momentum . . . a westering art form! It had to wait for motion pictures. The art form of motion!."

Nothing too profound in this, but there is a tragic grandeur in the rise and fall of Chance's presumptuous design, and in his efforts to use wealth and power to overcome the dignified reticence and single-minded honour code of the old cowboy's reluctance to be portrayed as a symbol of an American style of greedy rapaciousness.

Minor plot-strands trail and circulate about the major ones; there is Harry Vincent's unrequited love for the sassy screen-writer, Rachel Gold; the hero-worship of a rather simple-minded boy, an aspiring cowboy himself, for Shorty McAdoo; the loyalty of the vicious Irishman, Denis Fitz simmons, to his deranged boss; and the paralleled political workings of the great trading companies of the 1870s with the machinations of the film moguls of the 1920s.

Above all, there is a mighty swirl of colour and happenstance, as the hunters draw closer to their quarry and Harry Vincent manages to extract the secret of his life from McAdoo. Both climaxes end in violence, as befits lives lived on the razor edge. The Englishman's Boy is a big novel of action and ideas, and if melodrama does intrude from time to time, well, what's the harm. We all need to go over the top, now and then.

Vincent Banville is a freelance journalist and critic