The Life and Times of Captain N

Sarah Robertson is associate editor of the Canadian Book Review Annual.

Set in the Niagara frontier in the latter years of the American
revolutionary war, Douglas Glover’s third novel is told by three main
characters: Captain Hendrick Nellis, a Tory and “redeemer” of whites
abducted by Indians; his son, Oskar, a Rebel sympathizer and would-be
historian, who becomes a reluctant convert to the Loyalist cause; and
Mary Hunsacker, a German immigrant girl who is kidnapped by the
Mississauga Indians and who embraces their ways, eventually becoming a
medicine woman.

Through these constantly shifting narrative voices, Glover brilliantly
captures the chaos of the period. This historical novel teems with
20th-century ontological anxieties. As a recorder of history, Oskar
regularly obsesses about the efficacy of language as a vehicle for
truth. Far from the rationalist universe promised by the Rebels, the war
imposes on its survivors a radical dislocation of self in which white
and Native identities are confused and dreams become no less rational
than conscious life.

Glover’s energetic and strikingly visual prose does harrowing justice
to the pervasive but wholly nongratuitous scenes of remorseless violence
and torture. What prevents the reader from being smothered by the
book’s essential nihilism is the formidable intelligence that
underlies every page.