Customer Reviews

Land God Gave to Cain

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I forced myself to read to the end of this indifferent slow-paced book because I'm particularly interested in Labrador, one of the most remote parts of Canada. The plot is pretty hackneyed -- Ian Ferguson, a young English engineer, learns his paralysed father (and amateur radio ham) has died. It turns out the father had been following the travails of an expedition looking for gold in distant Labrador, thousands of miles across the Atlantic, and had picked up radio signals indicating the explorers' plane had crashed. As we learn later on, Ferguson's father (Ian's grandfather) had been murdered when looking for the very same gold seam decades earlier. The grandfather was shot dead by a French-Canadian called Laroche, who happens to be the grandfather of one of the Canadians and the only survivor of the plane crash. he reluctantly agrees to accompany the younger Ferguson into the centre of Labrador to find out what happened to the expedition. For me this was a plot contrivance far too far and I fought my way through to the end of the book, not really caring about the characters. At the start of the book Innes explains that he spend a lot of time in Labrador making sure he got the details right. Unfortunately, no one told him that the plot is just as important.