Voyageurs

I picked this book up in the library a few years ago, just impressed with the cover art and the summary on the back. The story has stayed with me for over two years, so I knew I had to buy the book! Beautifully written and open-hearted. Wonderful for anyone looking for a model of behavior and principles in an imperfect world.

I couldn't disagree more with the people who said this book was slow in parts. Once I started the story, I couldn't put the book down. Elphinstone's descriptions of the land are so vivid, her characters believable and her writing just flows. If you want to learn about the War of 1812 and what the fighting was about, what it is like to survive on an island over winter in the upper Great Lakes area and read a good mystery and romance rolled in one, this book is for you.

"Voyageurs" was named one of The Christian Science Monitor's best books of 2004. Surprised that I had missed something that sounded so good, I made sure to pick Margaret Elphinstone's novel up on a Canadian vacation. I was not disappointed. This is a fine historical novel that looks at an unusual period of history from an unusual point of view in clear, compelling language. The novel is set along the U.S./Canadian border in the early 19th century, before Canada was unified and at a time that the young U.S. was testing its power as a nation. An English Quaker named Mark Greenhow arrives to search for his younger sister Rachel, who came to Canada as a missionary, married a Scottish fur trader, and vanished into the wilderness. Mark is strong in his faith and determined to bring home to his grieving parents the truth of what happened to their daughter even though her marriage to a non-Quaker caused her to be disowned by her order. The search takes two years through a wilderness on the edge of a war over its resources, and Mark and his faith will be truly tested. Can--or should--he hold to his pacifist beliefs when others see war as the best choice? The book takes the form of Mark's journal as rewritten by himself many years after his journey. The pretext is that the journal is discovered by the modern-day purchaser of the Greenhow's farm--a device which is awkward and unnecessary enough to cost the novel half a star. Still, "Voyageurs" is very satisfying, with meticulously developed characters and a rich sense of time and place, highly recommended for readers who crave adventure with substance and history with a beating heart. I have another Margaret Elphinstone novel by my bedside, ready to go. Reviewers at the Monitor were right on.

In the early years of the nineteenth century, life in the harsh, northern wilderness of Upper and Lower Canada is a mentally and physically demanding pioneering existence made even more difficult and tenuous by the politics of the War of 1812. Rachel Greenhow, a young Quaker from Scotland responds to her calling as a missionary by emigrating to Canada and ministering to the early settlers in Ontario, the voyageurs of the North West Company and the aboriginal native tribes along the fur trade routes between Montreal and Michilimackinac. The realities of pioneer life in the Canadian boreal forest and her faith come into conflict as she falls in love with Mark Mackenzie, a fur trade agent, and marries outside the Society of Friends. Despondent over the loss of her first child and her expulsion from the Society because of her marriage, she wanders into the forest on an island in northern Lake Michigan and disappears without a trace. One might be forgiven for cracking open this novel expecting adventure, a swashbuckling account of a fast-paced rescue and tales of derring-do! In fact, it is anything but! Voyageurs is an exquisitely detailed first person account of Mark Greenhow's two year search for his lost sister with the assistance of Loic Kerners, a mixed breed outdoorsman of Indian and Scottish parents, and Alan Mackenzie, Rachel's husband and agent provocateur under direct orders from General Sir Isaac Brock to recruit native support for Canada inside US territory. While it is certainly not languid or plodding, the pacing of the novel and the enormous volume of the detail might be described as at once overwhelming and tortuous as well as frightening and breathtaking, an apt metaphor for the monumental difficulties that a voyageur of the North West Company might face in his every day working life and the compelling setting in which the story takes place - waterfalls and rapids; excruciating clouds of mosquitoes or black flies; extreme temperature swings; backbreaking 90 to 100 pound loads hauled over strenuous ankle-breaking portages; the open water of the Great Lakes that might better be described as inland oceans when observed from the perspective of a canoe; changeable unpredictable weather; the dumb-founding athleticism of ten to twelve men paddling in perfect synchrony at 50 strokes per minute for hours on end singing, if you please, to provide a rhythm and take their minds off the numbing pain in their backs and shoulders. Voyageurs is peppered throughout with themes of conflict and tension - the yet to be formed Canada versus a newly established US flexing its muscles at only loosely defined borders; a corporate turf war between the North West and the South West fur companies; Quaker moral standards and resolute strictures against alcohol, weapons, licentiousness and fighting constantly under assault by the exigencies of frontier living and simply staying alive in the context of war; European culture versus aboriginal culture; aboriginal