Talent, but sterner stuff required
Mark Archer
FATHERS AND CROWS by William T. Vollman Deutsch, £1Z99, pp. 1008 Somewhere around the fourth or fifth volume of Tristram Shandy Sterne suggests the reader should sit down on his book and take a rest before continuing. As adept as he is at the authorial quip, it is not an invitation William Vollman ever extends in his more than 1,000 page, four-inch thick imaginative reconstruction of the conquest of Canada by French traders and Jesuits in the 17th century.
Vollman abounds in talent, as one realised from his earlier novels, You Bright and Risen Angels and Thirteen Stories, which won him rave reviews as well as a Spectator new writing award. But his gift is essentially impressionistic. He takes snap- shots of cultures colliding and lets the colours run together into beautifully haunt- ing images. In this new novel, the worlds of the Jesuits and the Huron and Iroquois Indians, caught in the relationship between the priest, Jean de Brebeuf, and Born Underwater, the rape-child of an Indian mother and French father, establish a gradual kinship in their cruelty, their Pro- foundly symbolic view of the world and their elevation of martyrdom to the ultimate spiritual goal. But Vollman is no pastoral apologist. Canada's problem with its own identity, be seems to suggest, originated both with its Indian and its European settlers. Spiritual outcasts, whether bound by shamanism or Ignatius Loyola, cannot create a nation. The puzzle of Canadian selfhood is symbol- ised by the ambivalent totem figure of Tekakwitha, the first convert Indian to seek martyrdom, who weaves her way through- out the book. But Vollman's ideas work best through poetic images rather than through argument. For men whose destiny is to be adrift, for example, plumbing the depths of a new continent can be as hazardous as negotiating a monopoly from the old civilisation left behind: Now the lead was cast into the murky Palace depths, and Poutrincourt stood watching Imbert's squat figure vanish into shimmering whitish-green corridors like coral-holes. He descended with impunity among the bright)' coloured schools of Courtiers; he sank swiftly down torchlit halls ...
Now, did the Roy smile when he signed the document?
He smiled, yes ...
But did he smile out of the side of his mouth? whispered Imbert, approaching the sea-floor at last.
For all its virtues, however, an epic (and Fathers and Crows is merely the second of a projected seven-volume meditation on the history of North America) must consist of more than startlingly brilliant images and hauntingly rhythmic prose. Fathers and Crows is a drunkenly ambitious work, bred out of Hemingway by the grand tradition of the American Long Poem. But its fate is probably to be studied in schools and admired on the bookshelf rather than taken down with relish by the general reader.
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