Oct. 12, 2011 - Issue #834: Protest in the riot

Prevue

GUY VANDERHAEGHE

GUY VANDERHAEGHE

Although Guy Vanderhaeghe's A Good Man concludes a loose western trilogy of sprawling historical novels, he'd never intended to write them as a linked series. When he first began to develop The Englishman's Boy, he saw it as a standalone novel but research in the era continued to pique his interest, and led him toward a second, The Last Crossing, and now a conclusive third look at the era.

"I had no idea that I would continue on with this location or this period. And then, some ideas started percolating for The Last Crossing," he says from his Saskatoon home. "Then I thought that the final marking point of what I think of as a period of great transition in the West, that meant the end of one way of life for Native Peoples, and European domination—that could be marked by Sitting Bull's arrival in Canada, and finally, his return to the United States."

Which is exactly where A Good Man positions itself, on the final years of the 1870s/early 1880s on the rural spread of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Montana. As with Vanderhaeghe's previous works, it unshakeably grounds itself in historical detail and period research, refusing to dwell on the western genre's fanciful '50s and '60s television re-imaginings—he calls those portrayals "mythic." Vanderhaeghe notes that his preference for rooting his writing in actual history, even if a lot of the legwork never ends up on the actual pages, has its own payoff.

"I think [history] gives me a background to ground my characters in," he says. "A lot of the research I do never appears in the books, but it allows me to feel a certain comfort in writing about the period, and it gives me, I think, the detail to particularize my characters' stories, and make them more intimate in some way. Y'know, if you're writing contemporary fiction, the reader who's reading your book has a picture in their minds about what's the world that the characters are inhabiting. I think that becomes slightly more difficult when you move into historical fiction, because people don't meet the daily details of life in that period in their own lives. So I think that's one of the reasons I try very hard to understand the period, and by that I mean not just the sort of clothes people wore, but to a certain extent, how they viewed the world and how they thought about it."
 

Mon, Oct 17 (7 pm)
A Good Man Reading
By Guy Vanderhaeghe
McClelland & Stewart, 480 pp
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