Far North

Because the plot of Marcel Theroux's FAR NORTH has one surprising twist after another, it is another of those novels like THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST, for instance, that you should complete before reading anyone's review. Suffice it to say that things are almost never as they first appear. The protagonist and narrator of this story, Makepeace, the oldest child of Quaker parents who had left Chicago and had gone to the far north for a simpler life, is the last poet-philosopher and a constabulary officer from the city of Evangeline-- now a ghost town. The events of this dystopian saga take place sometime in the near future where civilization as we know it has vanished although anthrax (or at least the fear of it), slavery and repressive religions have survived. Marauders rove the bleak landscape pillaging and raping; abandoned cities, rife with poison, are uninhabitable. Makepeace aches for human contact but at the same time misses the solitary life-- "You can build your new world without me I thought"-- and sees knowledge slipping away: "A burned book always makes my heart sink a little." This lonely survivor remembers that "the stars once had names, every one, and once shone down like the lights of a familiar city (a beautifully appropriate description) but each day they grew stranger. . . The sky was becoming a page of lost language." But what Makespeace ultimately fears most is being at the end of everything: "It doesn't make sense to fear it, because you're never around when it happens. Fear hunger or cold, or the pain of sickness--but this? And yet, this is the one that preys on me. . . I fear annihilation." For all its bleakness FAR NORTH finally is about hope as well as survival and compassion. During the darkest of times "the sky still had some beauty in it" and the cranes continue to fly south every year. Furthermore Makepeace finds redemption in "acting rightly" and is overcome by the smallest of things, "the blue crown on a honeysuckle berry" or a tabby cat, finding a four-leaf clover or glimpsing a parrot. Marcel Theroux shows in FAR NORTH that he is both a master storyteller and a word magician.

"Far North" riveted me and I basically read it in two sittings. I found myself compelled to keep reading to keep finding clues as to who Makepeace really was and what happens to this survivor of a global disaster. I'm a fan of apocalyptic novels and this one truly fit the bill. I think it was the writing that drew me in ... Marcel Theroux has a wonderful style of stating an intriguing fact about a character ... a fact that comes out of left field with no other background ... and compelling you as a reader to keep reading to learn more. It's like he states the outcome before the action, and you keep reading to get the action. Very interesting writing technique. I liked that the book's characters were unexpected, that the setting (the "country") was unexpected and that the outcome was unexpected (no spoiler here). I also finished the book still wondering about Ping ... in the end we're left with some mystery, which left me a bit unsatisfied. I loved Cormac McCarthy's "The Road," but I found this more readable (and a bit less horrifying) while being equally as cerebral when it comes to issues of courage, character and humanity when people are faced with the end of the world as they know it.

The narrator of Theroux's post-apocalyptic novel, Makepeace Hatfield (who lives up to the name), is the last survivor of an immigrant Siberian community - a place Makepeace's British parents had come to to escape the material world. But the rescue of a starving waif awakens Makepeace's longing for companionship, love and civilization, spurring the road trip that drives the novel. Theroux's vast, harsh landscape complements Makepeace's lonely, hardscrabble, survivor's life, and elements of stark beauty parallel human vulnerability and hope. The journey in search of others shares some elements with Cormac McCarthy's The Road, and will attract the same readers. It's a page turner of a road novel without a lot of faith in human altruism, but with plenty invested in communal ingenuity and individual resourcefulness. Makepeace, disillusioned and battered, has a deep inner resilience that relies on heart for its strength. Theroux (The Confessions of Mycroft Holmes, A Blow to the Heart) shapes Makepeace's character in language that illuminates the relationship between what we tell ourselves and what actually is and the hope that bridges the gap.

I learned about Far North from a brief review in the London Financial Times. I don't typically read "post apocalyptic" novels (how many are there, anyway?) but the concept of this novel sounded interesting. This is the first book I've read by Marcel Theroux, and given this excellent novel, I'll be looking for others. Once I started reading Far North, I found it hard to put down. I found that I just wanted to know what happened next to this very interesting and complex character, and the revelations come a bit at a time - like peeling an onion, layer by layer. It is a thought-provoking book, and the writing style has that high quality where you read a sentence, pause, and then just absorb how much meaning that Mr. Theroux is able to pack into just a few words. Right on the first page, the main character contemplates the state of middle age and says "somewhere along the ladder of years I lost the bright-eyed best of me." I found that lines like that just hit home with me, connected me to the character, and drew me into the novel. I recommend it!

Post-apocalypse survival tales seem to be all the rage at the moment, with Marcel Theroux's latest novel, "Far North", joining the growing ranks of books providing a gaunt vision of a not too distant future, in which mankind is reduced to a basic, brutal struggle for survival in a world torn apart by warfare, plague and environmental disaster. The 'vain quest' and 'preservation of morality' elements of "Far North" contrast interestingly with Cormac McCarthy's "The Road", with which it shares a similar landscape and equally bleak outlook. Both books concentrate on the individual's raw battle against the odds to maintain their humanity and sense of morality when faced with the single most basic of survival options -- to kill or to be killed. Theroux's first person perspective gives us a deeper, personal insight into these struggles, while McCarthy leaves his reader simply observing the behaviour and its effect, and therefore freer to form one's own value judgements -- in some ways a more powerful approach than the more standard spoon-feeding one adopted by Theroux. McCarthy spends less time on back-story too, thereby emphasising his protagonists' current predicament as the real issue, not their life-story and its direction towards some point of closure. Again, his tale is all the more powerful for that; in "Far North" the back-story is an essential part of the overall narrative tale and continues to drive the storyline right to the very end, once again giving the story a more traditional feel to it. Things are a little more subtly nuanced with Theroux, though. The religious (especially puritan) directed overtones of the book lead also to comparisons with Sam Taylor's "The Island at the End of the World", although that books deals much more with one man's rejection of the corruptions of modern-day society and the evils that arise from it than does "Far North". In a sense, Theroux's Makepeace has to deal with the fallout inherited from an earlier generation's rejection of the outside every-day world as well as to come to terms with the sheer impracticalities of living to some religious and moral ideals, in a world reduced to new levels of savagery. As such it is more of an indictment against such approaches to life than a tale about them per se. By and large the book is well written and makes for a lively and engaging read. It is not without its flaws, however, having a plot line that wavers uncertainly in places (as well as somewhat unclearly from time to time as the author labours to keep some of the book's many shocks and surprises from being guessed at). Just now and then the story descends just a little too far into the realms of the scarcely credible for comfort and starts bordering on the science fantasy writings of Sheri S. Tepper ("The Gate to Women's Country") and Paul O. Williams' "Pelbar Cycle". Prospective readers need not be deterred by this book's flaws, however, as they are essentially minor and are easily outweighed by its many