Guy Vanderhaeghe’s ‘A Good Man’ is enlightening end to trilogy
World History Archive/ALAMY -
Beginning of the Battle of Little Big Horn River, Montana, on June 25, 1876. From painting by Sioux India.
Vanderhaeghe knows his way around this tense psychological territory (“The Last Crossing” featured a similarly tyrannical father), but what’s surprising here is the element of romantic comedy. Case’s struggle to manage 1,000 acres in Northern Montana gradually gives way to a charming love story — a touch of Jane Austen with Mr. Darcy in a cowboy hat. Despite Case’s determination to smother his remorse in hard work, an unlikely woman in town catches his eye and manages to melt his priggish attitude. If you know the work of the Seattle writer Ivan Doig, you’ll recognize this blend of romance and rectitude set against the crushing labor of ranch life.
That courtship gives the novel its warmth, but “The Good Man” never loses its lightning and thunder. For one thing, there’s a creepy villain slithering through these pages: Michael Dunne, an aggrieved man with a photographic memory, a diagnostic interest in human nature and an unstoppable drive to get what he wants. “He likens himself to water,” Vanderhaeghe writes. “It finds a way around every obstacle because it is patient.” From the Civil War to the Indian attacks to the Irish skirmishes, Dunne finds a way to turn every conflict to his deadly advantage. When Case inadvertently crosses him, nothing will satisfy his thirst for revenge.
(Atlantic Monthly Press) - ’A Good Man: A Novel’ by Guy Vanderhaeghe (Atlantic Monthly. 464 pp. $24.95)
Case, meanwhile, is not as eager to withdraw from politics as he claims. By offering to serve as an informal liaison between Canadian and U.S. officers dealing with the Sioux, he keeps himself at the flash point between the two nations. His Canadian contact is the historical figure Maj. James Morrow Walsh, a North-West Mounted Police officer who befriended Sitting Bull and played a critical role in the country’s Indian relations. Indeed, there are moments when Case’s front-row seat on history seems too improbable, as though he’s both Forrest Gump and George Kennan, offering strategic advice to the Americans, Maj. Walsh and Sitting Bull. And these two larger-than-life figures of the late 19th century come close to wresting the novel away from Vanderhaeghe’s fictional hero. Sitting Bull, exhausted and harried, burdened by responsibility for his ragged people, moves through these pages with melancholy eminence. And Walsh, a man of rash passions and indissoluble loyalties, becomes the novel’s tragic “good man” — disgusted by both countries’ treatment of the Indians, but unable, ultimately, to protect them from either government’s genocidal pragmatism.
Admittedly, there’s a certain slackening in this final novel of the trilogy, a bulging of the waistline that wasn’t noticeable 15 years ago. Vanderhaeghe has an omnivorous appetite for diversions and tangents that might exhaust some readers, but for that broad storytelling magic that lets you sink into the past and the lives of rich characters, he’s still one of the very best.
Charles is The Post’s fiction editor. You can follow him on Twitter @RonCharles.
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