Snow Falling on Cedars, David Guterson's first novel, is a classic courtroom murder drama, set in the 1950s in the north-west of the United States. The book's architecture, built around the tension of the courtroom - a deceptively easy genre - is greatly enlivened by the suspect being a Japanese American. The reader is plunged into an ethnic subculture previously unconsidered. Pearl Harbour is a recent memory and flashbacks to scenes of second World War fighting are among the best written. Guterson town) revealed that his model was To Kill a Mockingbird and that his father was a criminal lawyer. Attention to both role models paid big dividends; the book was an international bestseller.
This is Guterson's second novel. Ben Givens, a heart surgeon in Seattle, sets off with his two dogs on a shooting trip - but this is to be a trip with a difference. Ben's wife died 18 months ago and now he has been diagnosed with terminal cancer of the colon. In constant pain, knowing as only a doctor can what the final months will be like, Ben determines to spare his family his inevitable decline and has settled on suicide. Trekking into mountains where he has shot and hunted since childhood, Ben will tangle himself in a wire fence and then blow his head off. It will look like an accident. Ben's preparations are described in detail and off he sets. But on his way east across the mountains he crashes his car, is badly shaken and cut, and has to hike a lift with a couple of beautiful alternative lifestylers in their camper van. This encounter is the first of many that arise as a result of Ben's having to improvise his plans: his new circumstances send him into a whole spiral of contacts and experiences, including marijuana, that are new to him until eventually he arrives at an apple farm across the river from where he grew up. Here, despite the plunging state of his health, he delivers a woman of her baby.
The parable, if simple, is clear. During Ben's anguished journey he reflects on his life, which allows Guterson to write with great precision, and in some cases, passion, on a variety of topics. These include apple growing and harvesting in the luscious lands east of the Wenatchee Mountains, hunting with dogs and guns, camping out, surgery on both humans and animals, obstetrics, life as an infantry soldier in the Italian campaign in the second World War and field medicine as practised in battle.
Guterson's research is painstaking, he writes with equal authority about pursestring sutures and picking apples. His feel for the outdoors is sure. He understands war and its consequences.
But narrative alone, however polished, can become threadbare in the absence of well realised character. This is something of a problem here. Ben Givens never really succeeds as a character. His relationships with other people during his improvised hunting trip are all transitory; his deeper relationships occur only in flashback. We never become enough involved in any of Ben's crucial affiliations to care either about him or the people he loves. In this context, narrative can become tedious.
There is also, surprisingly, evidence of lazy writing. To say "She slid one hand into the pocket of her sweatshirt and inspected his damaged face" is to risk recalling Robert Ludlum at his worst, a fate Guterson does not, in fairness, deserve. He is a writer with gifts far beyond a one-dimensional tale such as this.