Customer Reviews

Far North: A Novel

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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!

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.

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.

This novel started out with a bang (literally) and its cold and ominous atmosphere hooked me immediately as few of my recent reads have done. The first chapters were riveting: one unexpected scene after another while the author skillfully wove in the larger historical and political background as we went. Theroux also developed a sort of homespun metaphysic for Makepeace that allowed her to survive. and make sense of, her dangerous post-apocalyptic world. Her suicide attempt, aborted with the sight of a plane droning overhead, was only one of many splendidly conceived scenes.

Why then did my disappointment mount as the novel went on? Perhaps it was because the next 300 pages were more of the same: the same sorts of surprises, more bad guys who can't help it, the same edge-of-the-cliff crises. The story began to resemble more the Perils of Pauline than the organic development of a character within a evolving narrative. Neither the main character or the novel ever moved to a different level (a requirement of the more ambitious literature that this tries to be).

It is illustrative of this developmental failure that the final scenes required the manufacture of a coincidence (Makepeace meeting again a major figure from her childhood); as Aristotle noted, creating coincidences (deus ex machina) to close a narrative rather than using the logic of character and organic plot development is a failure of literary imagination.

As an example of Theroux's failure to develop character, I never quite believed in the femininity of Makepeace. Granted, she had `masculinized' herself to survive in this macho defined world. Still, I never got the sense from this male author that his main character was, underneath it all, a woman. Makepeace was a guy, despite Theroux's occasional reminders to the contrary.

Finally, the narrative contained loose ends in abundance: why did Makepeace lose her first child, what were the actual powers of those coveted blue lanterns? And so on. Are these teasers for a sequel or just careless plotting?

Nonetheless, I returned to this well-written novel, with its sympathetic hero(ine) and, above all, inventive plot with anticipation every evening, though that lessened every day as well.

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.

Synopsis: The story tells of the lone survivor one-generation post-apoc, the only remnant on a Quaker community that settled in the "Far North" to avoid the chaos of the end.
Pros: Superlative. The story of the present and past are both slowly revealed like curtains being drawn away from the reader's eyes. The pacing and narration turn a fairly slow story into a page-turner. I can't say much about the plot without spoiling the affect.
Cons: While I liked how each part of the main characters life is told in a chapter or two, the tumultuous and surprising twists and endings occasionally seemed implausible. Perhaps I just wanted a happy ending to spring from desolation.

If you're looking for a novel with a strong female protagonist who is never overshadowed by any male characters or caught up in romantic subplots, Far North beats most of those I've read.

The strength of this novel is the protagonist and first-person narrator, Makepeace. She's tough, practical, and capable of being violent when she has to be, but never without purpose or remorse. She has a very straightforward way of telling her story -- she doesn't seem to dwell on things or spend too much time doubting herself or bemoaning her often tragic circumstances. But the author (through her) still describes her environment in all its vast, frozen majesty, and also describes the way society fell apart, the way decent people act very badly, and, gradually, things that happened before Makepeace was left alone, before everyone she knew died, which come back to haunt her years later. It's a stark but textured novel. None of the characters are saints, and they're mostly sinners, but no one is purely evil. Makepeace makes a lot of decisions, some good and some bad, and then lives with them.

This story of a lone survivor in an empty land follows the trend of many recent post-apocalyptic novels, in that the exact nature of the apocalypse and how civilization fell isn't specified, though there have obviously been climactic changes, and there are hints of a big collapse precipitated by shortages, wars, and other disasters.

The ending was neither happy nor sad. When civilization falls, you're not realistically going to see some bright new world rising out of the ashes any time soon. At best, you'll see a gleam of hope for future generations, and that's what you get here.

I debated between 4 and 5 stars. I'd probably give it 4.5, but I'll be generous and round up to 5. I have no specific complaints, as the writing was richly descriptive, nothing pushed my suspension of disbelief, and the characters were all complex and believable. I guess my hesitancy is that the story itself didn't quite jump off the page for me until the very end. But overall, one of the better books I've read recently.

There were moments, particularly in the beginning of this novel, where I really understood all the critical acclaim. Particularly around the character of Ping, Theroux is so daring with this use of understatement that I wanted to hang the laurel wreath on his brow right there and then. Thinking back on it, there were bits so lovely I want to use all of the adjectives that make reviews so tedious: lovely, sad, fragile, luminous. Pick your overused review word-- the good ones probably apply somewhere here.

The preceding paragraph would probably make you think I loved this book. Or, at least, leave you pretty confident that I really liked it. And sadly this is not quite true. I nearly loved this book. I almost loved this book? Anyhow. It was a near miss, in the end. But definitely a miss.

It's difficult to discuss the whys of the miss without getting into spoilers. But it was the last quarter of the book that did it for me. Too many artificial linkages, a few points that were unrealistic enough about women to make me cringe, some weird redemption stuff that the book didn't need or deserve. It didn't quite unravel all the good work to that point, but it was all left hanging. Unfinished, I guess.

Still, worth reading if you'd like a smart post-apocalypse yarn. I'd recommend it despite my concerns.