White River Crossing Review by Ian McGuire – Colonial Greed Drives Doomed Gold Rush | imaginary

IIt was Ian McGuire’s second novel, The North Water, longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2016 and later adapted for television, that established his reputation for brutal historical noir. Professor of American Literature at the University of Manchester, McGuire specializes in the late nineteenth-century realist tradition. At its best, his work combines the brutal violence of Cormac McCarthy with a melancholy lyricism reminiscent of the Welsh poet R. S. Thomas.

Both The North Water, set on a whaling ship sent from Hull to Baffin Bay in 1859, and The Abstainer, inspired by the hanging of three Irish rebels in Manchester a decade later, examined the horrific side of Victorian imperialism, and the harsh worlds where “human life alone is not much to talk about”. In White River Crossing, McGuire travels across the Atlantic and back another 100 years to the Prince of Wales’s Castle, a remote Hudson’s Bay Company trading post in what is now northern Manitoba. Established by royal charter in 1670 and granting the sole right to trade and commerce across some 1.5 million square kilometers of territory, the British Enterprise was established to exploit the local fur trade, but investors also hoped for other lucrative discoveries, particularly silver and gold.

It is the frozen winter of 1766 when a rough peddler brings a piece of rock to Magnus Norton, the castle’s master worker. The rock is “drawn with a pair of thin, branching yellow lines like twin rivers,” the peddler says, evidence of goldfields in the barren lands 600 miles north. Norton can barely contain his greed. He sent his deputy, John Shaw, and two other company men to search for and claim the treasure, along with two Dean couples, known to white paymasters as North Indians, to serve as hunters, guides, and cooks. He is careful not to inform the company of his mission. He allowed the other men at the fort to believe that the mission was for copper ore. Norton is approaching retirement and his health is deteriorating. He is already a rich man, and intends to return to England richer.

Although the novel switches between the perspectives of all seven members of the group, it is mostly given to book writer Thomas Hearne to tell the story of the arduous and ill-fated expedition. Struck by grief and loss of faith, Hearn, a one-time ordained man, shut himself up within austere self-restraints. By contrast, Shaw is a man of brutal appetites, who regards the land and its people as chattel property, which he exploits as he pleases. As they travel north, the group encounters other communities, and when Nabaiah, the younger of Dean’s mentors, loses his wife to a rival in a wrestling match, Shaw intervenes and wins her back. Deaf to Hearn’s warnings, Shaw insists on spending a night with her as his reward. The consequences of his blatant arrogance will undo all of this.

Like The North Water, with which it shares much DNA, White River Crossing moves with a propulsive lick, its bloody flesh stained with cruelty and violence. McGuire doesn’t let us look away: the clumsy amputation of a gangrenous arm is described in almost sensual detail, while the desolate beauty of the vast landscape is recalled with sharp precision, the “blue peaks of the frost-covered hills” vividly alive as “heaps of marrow bones and shattered antlers.”

However, inside the heads of his characters, McGuire moves with less confidence. The backstories provide context but little complexity or depth. Hearn is convincing enough as a man remade again, broken by horror, but Shaw, like Drax in The North Water, is a frustrating one-dimensional villain and Abel Walker, the company’s third man, is mostly overlooked. As for my mentors, whose perspective might have given this story a very different look, they are quickly swallowed up by the plot.

In the introduction to the novel, no doubt to pre-empt criticisms of cultural appropriation, McGuire emphasizes the paucity of Dean’s first-hand histories and defends his choice in the novel to “emphasize commonality over cultural or historical difference.” The decision is misleading. When he abandons these imagined commonalities and gives his original characters room to see the world entirely on their own terms, he succeeds most powerfully: the scene in which the shaman uses his powers to exorcise an evil spirit from the body of a sick child is one of the most surprising—and moving—scenes in the novel. In emphasizing commonalities, in neatly eliminating profound cultural differences, McGuire underplays the power of Dean’s four pieces of evidence to shift the narrative and poses the very question he sought to avoid about whether it is really their story that he is telling.