A Breed Apart
Description
$3.95
ISBN 0-7710-3266-8
Author
Publisher
Year
Contributor
Gerald Noonan was Associate Professor of English at Wilfred Laurier University in Waterloo, and co-editor of A Public and Private Voice.
Review
The background is historical and traditional — the fur trade and voyageurs, Natives, and lone outposts in the great northwest — but the writing makes it better, more exciting. Tony German’s prose is superbly crafted for its purpose. Like the Native canoe or the voyageur’s canot du nord, it is crisp and fast when it counts, effortlessly floating or lingering where needed.
In the process, the historical gets a contemporary tilt; the events are seen from the point of view of a Scottish-Cree half-breed, Duncan Cameron, who has a modern-day directness about racial reality and equality.
The story begins with Duncan’s first trip into the north country of the Hudson Bay watershed. He is 16; since the age of six he has been schooled and apprenticed as a gentleman’s son in Montreal, where he hardened to the taunts of “half-breed.” Now he is returning to his Cree mother and the trading-post home where he grew up. His strict Scottish father, however, must treat him as a regular employee, and thus he lives with the other junior staff at the post, home but away-from-home.
When he becomes enamoured of Nancy Spence, the young woman at the rival Hudson’s Bay post, a mile across the barrens, Duncan Cameron develops another split in his emotions and loyalty. And when events force a sudden dilemma between supporting the opposing interests of the fur-trading rivals (the Nor’Westers and the Hudson’s Bay Company) and feeling compassion for the life and welfare of good-hearted people caught in the conflict, Duncan hesitates. Then a companion is killed, and the young Cameron has to undertake a new life and a new post on his own further north.
His reabsorption of his Native heritage, the plight of innocent loved ones, the vengeance of renegade whites, and his own struggle for revenge all come to fruition upon his return to Montreal after two years away. Both the development and the denouement of the story have deft, unexpected, and almost always satisfying plot shifts.
Tony German recreates the sights and sounds of Montreal as the fall brigades, in the first years of the nineteenth century, sweep into the city. He recreates the world of dogsleds and teepees in the windswept north. And he connects both worlds with vigorous sweeping prose.
The volume is aimed primarily at the teen market, I would think, but makes excellent reading for most ages. German is the author of a series of three Tom Penny historical-adventure novels.