The Reckoning of Boston Jim.

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

Mulligan situates her first novel in British Columbia’s Cariboo region during the 1860s gold rush. Her success results in no small measure from her three fully realized characters, Boston Jim, the “Dora woman,” and Eugene Augustus Hume, who are perfectly believable in that time and place, as individuals as well as in the interstices where their lives meet. Jim is a Vancouver Island trapper blessed (or cursed) with a prodigious memory. Nothing that he sees or hears, nothing that is done to him, is forgotten.

When he loses the tobacco pouch where he keeps his money, Jim is amazed that it is found and returned by a woman living alone, waiting faithfully for the return of her husband-to-be, the fatuous, self-centred Hume. Jim, who has known little but hardship and violence, is dumbfounded when “the Dora woman,” as he calls her, returns the purse and refuses the marten pelt he offers her in thanks. “It had never happened,” Jim thinks. “Not to him, not to anyone he had heard of. Money belonged to the one who held it. If it is found it is not returned, not voluntarily. It made no sense.”

And because it made no sense to Jim, he resolves within himself to even the score, to present Dora with something that will set things straight. When he learns that Hume has set off to the Cariboo to join the gold rush, Jim resolves to follow him and return him to the woman. This will be his payment to her. And this becomes the novel’s storyline, as Mulligan follows Jim and Hume on their separate treks until, finally, their trails come together in a tragic denouement. Dora is in many ways the antithesis of Jim. All her memories are spoken, while his are kept carefully within. Mulligan’s dialogue is convincing, regardless of who is speaking. The piece of B.C. history she describes is alive with colour and sound. All in all, this is a remarkable novel. We will hear more from this writer.