Far North: A Novel [Hardcover]

Marcel Theroux (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 9, 2009

Far North is a 2009 National Book Award Finalist for Fiction.

My father had an expression for a thing that turned out bad. He’d say it had gone west. But going west always sounded pretty good to me. After all, westwards is the path of the sun. And through as much history as I know of, people have moved west to settle and find freedom. But our world had gone north, truly gone north, and just how far north I was beginning to learn.

Out on the frontier of a failed state, Makepeace—sheriff and perhaps last citizen—patrols a city’s ruins, salvaging books but keeping the guns in good repair.

Into this cold land comes shocking evidence that life might be flourishing elsewhere: a refugee emerges from the vast emptiness of forest, whose existence inspires Makepeace to reconnect with human society and take to the road, armed with rough humor and an unlikely ration of optimism.

What Makepeace finds is a world unraveling: stockaded villages enforcing an uncertain justice and hidden work camps laboring to harness the little-understood technologies of a vanished civilization. But Makepeace’s journey—rife with danger—also leads to an unexpected redemption.

Far North takes the reader on a quest through an unforgettable arctic landscape, from humanity’s origins to its possible end. Haunting, spare, yet stubbornly hopeful, the novel is suffused with an ecstatic awareness of the world’s fragility and beauty, and its ability to recover from our worst trespasses.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Theroux's postapocalyptic road novel will inevitably be compared to that other postapocalyptic road novel Oprah liked, and while Theroux (son of Paul) is not the existential stylist McCarthy is, he is a superior plotter. Global warming has decimated civilization, and narrator Makepeace Hatfield is the sole survivor of her Siberian settlement. After coming across another survivor and seeing a plane in the sky, Makepeace heads out to find other settlements. Unfortunately, Horeb, the first settlement she finds, is Hobbesian, and the camp's leader, Reverend Boathwaite, sells her into a slave gang. Marched a thousand miles west to an old gulag, Makepeace spends five years as a slave and eventually escapes after she's dispatched as a slave-guard to a ravaged city now known as the Zone. Teaming up with another escaped slave, the two try to trek back to Makepeace's original home, but tragedy strikes again. Granted, the novel suffers from a certain predetermination—to tell the tale means that the taleteller survives—but Theroux succeeds in crafting a wildly eccentric and intelligent page-turner that's ultimately and strangely hopeful. (June)
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Review

“How refreshing to meet Makepeace Hatfield, who faces a world gone wild with hope, humor, and a scrappy tenacity that manages to find beauty in a ravaged arctic landscape, and hangs on to humanity against all odds.” —Pam Houston, author of Cowboys Are My Weakness

“Theroux is a master storyteller, and the narrative is as full of surprises as it is of murders. And in Makepeace he’s created the moral centre of a heartless world: hardened by . . . experiences [yet] capable of great courage, friendship and loyalty, so that the bleak vision of this novel contains a glint of consolation.” —Brandon Robshaw, The Independent on Sunday (five stars)

“An absorbing end-of-days fable.” —GQ

“It’s a great pleasure to fall into the pages of a natural-born storyteller. If you’re looking for an unforgettable character, your search ends here.” —Russell Hoban, author of Riddley Walker

“Imaginative and extremely well written.” —Kate Saunders, The Times (London)

“An atmospheric tale of a near-future dystopia . . . One for fans of Margaret Atwood.” —Evening Standard

“Marcel Theroux delivers a masterly sleight-of-hand . . . and after the third chapter deftly pulls the rug from under the reader’s feet. I was completely duped. It is set in a cruel Siberian landscape that is dotted with slave camps and where ‘human beings are rat-cunning and will happily kill you twice over for a hot meal.’ This is an action-packed, dystopian adventure story with cracking set pieces.” —Sebastian Shakespeare, Tatler

“Theroux’s postapocalyptic road novel will inevitably be compared to that other postapocalyptic road novel Oprah liked, and while Theroux . . . is not the existential stylist McCarthy is, he is a superior plotter . . . Theroux succeeds in crafting a wildly eccentric and intelligent page-turner that’s ultimately and strangely hopeful.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (June 9, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374153531
• ISBN-13: 978-0374153533
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #851,157 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Marcel Theroux is the author of four novels, A Blow to the Heart, A Stranger in the Earth, The Confessions of Mycroft Holmes: A Paper Chase, which won a Somerset Maugham Award, and most recently, Far North, which is a 2009 National Book Award Finalist. He lives in London.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A memorable and gripping tale, June 28, 2009

By 

Gamma (SF Bay Area) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Far North: A Novel (Hardcover)

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!

28 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Inadvertent Spoilers, August 10, 2009

By 

Cary B. Barad (Baltimore, MD) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Far North: A Novel (Hardcover)

First--DO NOT read the blurb on the inside jacket or any of the comments/guest reviews printed on the back cover. They give away the general trajectory of the outcome and serve as inadvertent "spoilers." Moving on, the novel itself is of the post-apocalyptic journey genre--generally a bit above average in construction, narration, twist and reader interst. Not quite as intense as McCarthy's "The Road"---but certainly well worth your time.

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Searing glimpse of a bleak future, April 5, 2009

By 

Steve Benner "Stonegnome" (Lancaster, UK) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Far North (Paperback)

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 merits.