Customer Reviews

Voyageurs

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

 

 

Voyageurs is set during the time of the War of 1812 on the then hotly contested border between Canada and America. Mark Greenhow is a young English Quaker whose sister Rachel left to minister in Canada and ended up marrying outside the faith and thus being disowned by her religion, if not her family. When Mark's family receives a letter from her husband (a fur trapper agent named Alan Mackenzie) that Rachel was lost in the wilderness after wandering off desolate at the loss of their first child, he decides to go to Canada and search for her. In simple terms, the book is the story of his quest to do so: his journey to Canada, his joining Mackenzie and Loic (half Indian half European) to travel far into the wild border area, and his return, all of this set against the backdrop of gathering war among Canada, America, and the Native Americans who may fight on either side.

The book, of course, is not so simple. Structurally, it is a story within a story within a story as the major narrative is supposed to be Mark's journal "discovered" by the modern day author who has had it published. The main story it is told as a long flashback as an older, wiser Mark reflects in his journal on his long-ago journey. While this technique allows for more sophisticated language and references, and also for occasional bits of actual wisdom, in general it doesn't add much to the work as a whole. The use of footnotes, some quite lengthy, slows the book down quite a bit in places and though several of the notes are small gems of tone and characterization, in general the payoff is not worth the interruption or the extra complication.

Elphinstone does a better job of complicating matters via setting and especially through the choice of religion. It is made clear early on that Mark is conflicted at times with his religions pacifism, and even before he leaves for Canada we learn of several times where he mentally or actually failed to hold up to the standard of peace set by his community. His journey, set as it is in a time of war, will further confuse him, forcing him to choose again and again whether to hold steady to the Quaker path. In the end, he must decide just who he is. This conflict, as mentioned, is set up early in the book, and is a constant source of tension throughout. It is also nicely paralleled by other elements in the book: the physical setting, a border in the midst of deciding what it is or who it belongs to; two countries deciding what their relationship will be; a multitude of cultures deciding how they will interact, a number of characters of mixed race; a number of characters who must decide to what and to whom their loyalties lie, etc. This sense of identity conflict is perhaps the best part of the book.

If it isn't the best part, the detailed setting surely is. Elphinstone does a masterful job of detailing life during this time and in this place and Mark's trips from settlement to settlement and camp to camp are languorous descriptions of the natural surroundings and the cultural ways of life of trappers, settlers, and Native Americans. I have to admit that at times I found the detail a bit too overdone, not in any given section but overall. Whereas each section was wonderfully written and each area wonderfully evoked, the book did slow down by the middle to latter part and I found myself having to resist the temptation to skim. The book probably would have been better served losing 50-100 pages.

The very end is a bit anti-climatic but the resolution regarding Rachel was, without giving anything away, nicely and originally handled, avoiding cliche, sentimentalism, or predictability.

A leaner book, one that cut down a bit on some of the description and cut out or cut severely the older Mark sections (not to mention the journal's "discoverer") and the book would have rated a strong four. With the somewhat extraneous structure and the sometimes slow pacing, it drops down, though still recommended for its detail, its thematic structure, and the voice of its main character.

In a magazine some actor whose name I can't remember or spell raved about this book. It deals with Mark Greenhow and a letter that arrives from Canada to his home in England. It is about his missionary sister Rachel whom has married out of the Quaker order, has lost a baby, and has wandered off by herself on a small island on Lake Huron. Red eyed and shaken Mark's parent's want to know what happened and who is this man who wrote the letter, who now says that he tried to search for Rachel but had to return to his post at the North West Company.The discriptions and research in this book are bang on, right down to the fact that it is improper to tell stories around the camp fire in summer about Nanubushu - the great Indian spirit or Manitou.My favourite parts are when Mark is on the boat coming over to Canada the year is 1810 and he is wet and cold huddled under his blanket when he throws it off to holler over the side of the boat at his sister Rachel as to why and yet again she drags him into her bad news. Mark gets to learn how to paddle in a Voyageurs canoe and get used to the traders and trappers. There are footnotes at the bottom of some of the pages explaining certain things that went on and at times you have to remind yourself that this story is fiction. Canada is gearing up for war with the States and as Quakers it is hard to pass up arms when eveyone around you isn't. As they (Quakers) have vowed never to bear arms against any man this proves difficult to explain to the average gun carrying Joe.Mark is a believable character and one I'll miss till I read the book again.Yes, Mark meets the man - Rachel's husband but at times Mark is having such an adventure that you forget why he came to Canada in the first place. As to the rest well order it from Amazon and find out you won't be disappointed.

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 peoples already dealing with the broken promises of treaties with the white man; Mark's ongoing moral dilemma of traveling and living with Alan who clearly lives by a code of conduct virtually anathema to the rules of the Society of Friends.

The ending comes, in a sense, as an anti-climax. While Rachel's life is resolved in a satisfying, realistic and almost fatalistic fashion, there are readers that will be disappointed by the fact that there is no story book romanticism or heart-rending emotion in Elphinstone's resolution of Mark's exhausting search. She has caught us completely unawares at the end of the novel leaving Mark's journal to simply come to a halt with a series of blank pages. Elphinstone has demonstrated very clearly that, while any individual's life may be described in whole or in part and may even reach a completion of sorts, the conflicts, tensions, issues and events around us usually unfold without any particular reference to us as individuals and will probably continue after we leave the scene - regardless of the form that departure might take!

Two thumbs up for a unique story about the fur trade in colonial Canada!

The other reviewers do a pretty good job of describing the book's characters, events and conflicts. And it is, as they describe it and I concur, an interesting story. The operative words I wish to address in their reviews and in the book itself - are "detailed description" and "slow". And these are both true in the context in which they describe the book. However...

What struck me as I read the book (and what interests me in history) is this question, "What did it (the land and man's interactions with it) look like at that moment of time?" Well, yeah, it was big, empty and largely unpeopled. But Elphinstone does a really good job at describing what this area really, really looked like at the beginning of the 19th century and why. If you were Mark this is what you'd see, who you would or would not meet, what you must do to travel, eat, stay warm. Slow?- if you are looking for swashbuckling adventure - yes. I'd prefer to say that it provides an explicit vision of what this spot of frontier looked like- the kind of description that paints a vivid picture in your brain in which the characters can play out their story.

"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.

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.

Mark Greenhow is a young Quaker man who has lived in a small sheep-herding community in the Lake District of England all his life. He has no reason to think he will ever hear the call of adventure. But then, his family receives a letter from Canada. Mark's younger sister, Rachel, who left home to become a missionary to the Indians, has gone missing into the wilderness. Now Mark must travel to a strange and unimaginably wild land to try to find her. In the process he finds something unexpected--himself.

This is the story told in Margaret Elphinstone's interesting historical novel Voyageurs. Taking a storyline as familiar as The Searchers, Elphinstone makes it fresh with a fascinating setting and a strong and memorable central character. Instead of the Old West, Voyageurs takes us on a journey along the Canadian-U.S. border during the outbreak of the War of 1812, when a harsh and wild land was populated by British and American fur traders, French voyageurs (boatmen), and Indians. Mark is a devout Quaker and pacifist, but he's also a stubborn and red-blooded young man who's never really been tested. In the course of the story, he meets both exciting physical dangers and excruciating moral dilemmas. It's really enjoyable to see him learn and grow. The reader is a witness to the ways in which Mark changes and, just as importantly, the ways in which he remains constant.

Mark is the sole narrator of the story, which leads to some slow passages in which he simply listens to another character expound, sometimes for pages, to fill him in on background information. I wonder if adding another couple of points of view might have made for a more satisfying story structure.

Which brings me to the one major downside of the novel. Voyageurs pretends that the narrative is a "memoir" written years later. I found the device to be both unnecessary and distracting. Despite gimmicks such as intrusive footnotes, the book clearly isn't a memoir that someone found in an old attic; it's a first-person narrative and what's wrong with that? More seriously for the novel, the device injects an emotional distance into the narrative that robs it of much of the excitement and immediacy it might have had.