Customer Reviews

The Friends of Meager Fortune

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Mid-twentieth century Canada is a time of vast change in the lumber industry, although few can see the decline of the old ways that looms on the horizon, massive amounts of timber moved by the grueling labor of men who have defined their lives in the felling and harvesting of trees. Will Jameson, who takes over his family's business upon the death of his father, is only sixteen when he achieves the status of legend. But Will's untimely death, though prophesied by a palm-reader, throws younger brother Owen into the breech, Owen forever fighting the long shadow of his more accomplished and manly sibling. Even though he has returned from the war a hero, Owen cannot measure up in the eyes of the town. It is never Owen's intent to save his family's fortune, but he feels obligated to aid his widowed mother, the stoic and gullible Mary.

Owen's problems emerge through the power of gossip and innuendo. His war hero status deteriorates as the town whispers of his obsession with Camellia, wife of Reggie Glidden, Will's best friend. Undeniably attracted to Camellia, Owen's affection remains innocent, Camellia the unwary manipulator of the situation as she encourages Owen to take over the company and help her locate the now-missing Reggie. Soon the rumors reach a deafening roar; with Reggie's mysterious disappearance, it is assumed that the couple has done away with the man who stands in their way. That this is mere supposition carries no weight in the world of public opinion, especially when a story is circulated by Lula Brower, a vain young woman set to appropriate Owen for her fiancé until felled by a stroke that alters her fortune as a marriageable woman.

Meanwhile, Own throws himself into the lumber business, desperately harvesting the timber in one of the most dangerous areas of growth, his men held barely in check with their internal feuding and petty grievances. While some, like Meager Fortune, remain loyal to Owen, others allow themselves to be seduced by Owen's rivals, further complicating an already dangerous endeavor to save the Jameson's interests. When an unidentified body is found floating in the river, despite the fact that it is too decayed to be recognizable, the town assumes the worst, pointing the finger of guilt at the suspected miscreants, Owen and Camellia.

As the industry is doomed in its present incarnation, so too are the innocent lovers, tried by public opinion, rumors flying from mouth to mouth in lieu of facts with amazing speed. The locals gather gossip, embellishing it at will, passing it along to strangers until no semblance of the truth remains, the town seething with rancor at an assumed crime. In a rapidly changing century, where mechanization is on the rise, this sad drama plays out against the majesty of the great wooded forests providing sustenance for families who spend their time spilling lies to alleviate their uncertainty. Seen through the telescope of time, the history of an era is rendered insignificant compared to the gratuitous evil of careless and vicious words. Luan Gaines/2007.

A very good read about a time of tough living in the lumbering industry. The story is complex and the historical descriptions of lumbering are woven into the story seamlessly. A book for all types of tastes in reading.

David Adams Richards has done a terrific job of describing the mid-twentieth century Canadian lumber industry. He has provided the reader with a wonderful cast of characters who are all affected by a vicious rumor. I wanted to reach inside the book and shake the characters, who not only believed the rumor, but did nothing to find the truth. Two soldiers become involved with a woman married to one, but attracted to the hero. When her husband disappears, the rumor spreads through the small town.

In the meantime, the logging goes on, the loggers endure the treacherous terrain to get the logs to the river, the valiant horses perform their duties, and the Canadian winter provides unbearably harsh conditions for the loggers. The story includes a faux murder that gets tied into the original rumor, the hero of the story is accused of the murder on the basis of the discovery of a mutilated and unidentified body. All the while, Meager Fortune, who does not appear until well into the story, is taking care of the loggers on the mountain. He is the one who discovers the betrayal of one of the loggers who is tagging the logs with a competitor's stamp. But he does not report this betrayal. In the end, the hero dies an heroic death, and the long-lost husband reappears, putting an end to the long-running rumor that had virtually destroyed reputations and resulted in the conviction of an innocent man for the death of another man, who never died.

This book was so well written. The characters were well described, and I (and I hope other readers) was able to empathize with the rumor victims. I cried real tears when Owen died, breathed a sigh of relief when Reggie reappeared, and wanted to give Meager Fortune a hug for his undying dedication to his logging buddies.

Kudos, Mr. Richards. I loved your book.

I was so taken by this novel that I wrote the following review for a magazine where I work:

Last winter while in Mexico, I met a woman from Alberta who, upon hearing I was from Vermont, asked if I'd read Friends of Meager Fortune, the best novel ever written about horse logging in the Northeast. Though I said no, she pressed on, assuming I had read at least something by David Adams Richards, the celebrated Canadian author, but when here, too, I professed ignorance, she tried to suppress one of those exasperated looks that Canadians find themselves making under such circumstances.

As it happened, she had a copy of the novel with her, having just reread it on vacation, and pressed it on me, insisting I start reading it on the plane ride home. I was skeptical.

But upon returning home, I found myself reading the greatest novel ever written about horse logging in the Northeast. And, moreover, one of the better novels ever written about anything.

Friends of Meager Fortune is set in the Miramichi River valley of New Brunswick in the years on either side of the Second World War, when the last of the original forest was meeting ax and saw and being hauled by horses and floated down river to be sawn into boards to build Toronto, Montreal, and the ravaged cities of Europe. The heros, if they can fairly be called that, are a family named Jameson, who stagger between poverty and riches, land barony and bankruptcy, and the adoration and loathing of their small-town neighbors. Here's a scene that typifies Richards' writing; the second Jameson son, Owen, is wintering in a logging camp, having taken control of the family business following the death (crushed while breaking up a log jam) of his admired older brother:

"Most of the men were doing the only work they knew. Outside of this forest, these confines of somewhat brutal timber, they were no one and even nothing - in here, where death met life and stared it in the face every moment on a run down hill, they were some of the finest men who ever lived. Illiterate, unkempt, harsh on themselves and unforgiving of weakness in order to survive. Owen had known men who had stitched their own wounds in a hurry in order to save someone else.

"In spite of the cold and the foul humanity he slept with, shared his life with, it was still a world of greatness. He did not say greatness easily - he did not say it about himself. He was silent with his men, most of the time. And most of the time they were wary to say anything to him. This was Owen Jameson - the second son, the one they didn't know. Even his bravery seemed different than the bravery of his brother. There was for some reason less fun to it. It was, in fact, more British uniform than fuggin' Irish whiskey.

"'I don't like him,' Tompkins whispered, seeing some kind of advantage in not liking him. This would become more insistent as time went by, and the days of winter came meaner and shorter."

If you've read Robert Pike's Tall Trees, Tough Men, you'll recognize the details of life in a North Woods logging camp: the haul roads slicked with ice; the horse teams dwarfed by multi-ton loads; the incomprehensible stamina of men who, day after day, month after month, wielded axes and saws in slaying North America's great forest. Richards adds in the excruciating details - the frozen mittens, the ax dropped and lost in deep snow, the choking smoke from a faulty woodstove - that bring this lost epoch to life.

As the excerpt suggests, though, Friends of Meager Fortune is about much more than old-time horse logging. It's about our seemingly bottomless ability to be petty and small with one another, about how quick we are to believe rumors and aspersions, no matter how absurd, if they serve to confirm our preexisting beliefs and prejudices, about our human tendency to suspect the worst about one another, and in so doing, help insure that the worst comes to pass. It's an exceeding dark novel.

And a stupendous one. You don't need to care a whit about history or logging to enjoy Friends of Meager Fortune, but if you do care about either, you're likely to consider this among the favorite novels you've ever read.

That's how the momentum builds in this excellent novel, so stick with it even though it seems slow at the start. My grandfather worked in the woods in the 1920's beginning at the age of 14 and he would tell me stories about his time as a teamster hauling logs off a mountain in southern Maine. He always made it clear how much he loved working with the horses and how noble and hardworking they could be. Since those days I've had some experience working in the woods myself and with horses, at times. Well, this novel definitely is, as described by a review in Northern Woodlands Magazine that led me to read it in the first place, the greatest horse logging novel ever written. It is the best I've ever read, at least, and not just for the horse logging but for all of the threads the author weaves so expertly throughout it. He surprised me a couple of times with his plot twists! I don't want to spoil the read for anyone but it takes a good writer to get this old curmudgeon to choke up but that's just what happened when I reached the part of the story where one of the great characters in the book, the one-armed teamster Richardson, was about to step off with his team and his record load of logs. You could see what was coming and I welled up thinking about the great hearted Butch, the sled horse, and his equine companions as they faced an almost certain fate. Men and women weren't the only heroes and heroines in this book and I recommend it highly!