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Revision as of 13:42, 26 August 2020
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'''Winner [[Costa Book Awards]] 2006'''
Following the Highland Clearances in the nineteenth century, Angus Ross and his wife left Scotland to emigrate to Canada and settled in Dove River on the edge of the outback. Their lives were hard but not particularly eventful until the day in 1867 when Mrs Ross discovered the body of a neighbour. Laurent Jammet had been brutally murdered. Worse was to come for Mrs Ross. On that same day her seventeen-year-old adopted son , Frances disappears and the local community suspects him of being the murderer. Even Angus Ross is unwilling to find out what has happened to his son.
William Parker is part English and part Native American. In the absence of Francis , he too is suspected of the murder and 'questioned' by a representative of The Hudson Bay Company who mete out justice in the area. Released, he and Mrs Ross set out to follow Francis and to find Laurent Jammet's murderer, despite the fact that they're heading into the outback and winter is tightening its grip.
Sometimes a book takes your breath away because it comes so close to perfection. ''The Tenderness of Wolves'' is dominated by the desolate landscape and punishing climate of Northern Canada. It's so vividly drawn that I felt physically cold and terrified by the conditions the travellers faced. I imagined that the author had perhaps lived there and wrote from experience but Stef Penney had never been to Canada before writing the book. She suffered from agoraphobia and the journey would have been impossible for her. All her research was done in the British Library. Perhaps this meant that she was able to convey the extremes with clarity and without allowing the mundane to intrude, but it's certainly an amazing achievement.
There's food for thought too about the way that the native tribes were treated, particularly by The Hudson Bay Company and the contempt in which the idea that there might have been a written Native American culture was held. The research here was obviously meticulous, but that's true of the whole book. Some books are well-researched, but you feel that every bit of research has been ploughed back into the book. With this book there's a sense that the author has told only a fraction of what she knows, that's she's a storyteller with knowledge rather than a researcher with a book in mind.
It's not a quick read, despite the compelling story lines storylines and that's because the writing is so assured, so witty that it was a constant temptation to reread passages for the pleasure that the words gave. Let me give you an example. A neighbour marches into Mrs Ross' kitchen and doesn't quite accuse Francis (who has a foreign look about him) of the murder, but Mrs Ross can imagine that she will do so elsewhere:
''She considers herself a well-travelled woman, and from each place she has been to, she has brought away a prejudice as a souvenir.''
This book wasn't written; it was crafted and in years to come it will be thought of as a classic. I don't often say that people must read books - but I think this should be one of those rare occasions. It is superb. We also have a review of Penney's [[Under a Pole Star by Stef Penney|Under a Pole Star]].
If you enjoy this type of book then you might also like [[The Shadow of the Wind]] by Carlos Ruiz Zafon or Diane Setterfield's [[The Thirteenth Tale]].
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