2020-07-05
A sprawling historical novel about one woman's life on the Canadian frontier.
Gutteridge’s novel centers on Lily Corcoran, whom readers meet as a young girl in 1845 in Ontario’sMoore Township. There, White settlers are still in the process of felling trees and displacing First Nations inhabitants in order to build farms, homesteads, and towns. As a young girl, Lily hears from an old First Nations elder that the world is rapidly changing: “Two days walk south of here and they say you’ll come to roads chopped through the bush, and White Mens drives his wagons on roads made of dead trees, and Chatham is bigger than ten Ojibwa villages.” Readers with some knowledge of 19th-century history will know some of the events that await young Lily,whose father calls her “Lady Fairchild,” and Gutteridge’s narrative proceeds at a steady pace to unfold that history. It follows Lily through many adventures, including her sometimes-fractious relationships with men (including three husbands), a world war, and countless smaller changes as her life moves through the early part of the 20th century. Even in Lily’s early childhood, she deals with her mother’s melancholia, the violence of slave hunters, and the dawning of her own young womanhood. She later lives with her fiercely independent Aunt Bridie, and over the course of hundreds of pages, readers meet her beloved husband Tom Marshall and her two boys, Robbie and Brad, and they experience touching interludes with her semiofficial foster son, Eddie. Her later years are buffeted by tragedies, but she retains the bright spirit of the young girl in the very first chapter. Long-haul, multigenerational historical fiction such as this is often a victim of skewed perspective, as authors, deeply ensconced in often years of research, often overestimate how much detail their readers will want to endure. Gutteridge’s narrative is prodigiously researched (and includes a bibliography), but he never overloads his audience; instead, he seamlessly works the historical grounding into what is, first and foremost, an intensely personal story. The book’s large and varied cast is uniformly well drawn, but Lily towers over the rest; from her earliest scenes, she’s by far the most compelling figure in the narrative. Gutteridge believably and effectively captures her youthful exuberance, as well as her resilience, even in the face of a heartbreaking tragedy in the book’s final pages. He combines his character study with beautifully evocative prose; at one point, for instance, after sunset, “Lily was sure she could hear the River tuning up for its nightsong”; at another, a character’s skin is described as having “the pallor and touch of gray-white mushrooms too long in the rain.” Overall, the author does an excellent job of giving his narrative the feel of a life as it is lived. Readers of such books as Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove(1985) or Anna Waldo’s Sacajawea(1978) will see a similar kind of storytelling here; it’s a difficult feat to manage, but Gutteridge does so.
A long but intensely involving tale of a tempestuous life.
