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The tenderness of wolves

Shelf life: Looking at secular books

THE TENDERNESS OF WOLVES
By Stef Penney
Quercus. 450 pages. £7.99
ISBN 1 84724 067 4

‘Book of the year’ is quite an accolade, and for a first time novelist it is an award which will mean an ongoing contract, a place in the best seller charts and a display in Waterstone’s window. The recipe? Well, take a lot of snow, mix in a 19th-century fur-trading post, some pretty tough women and a sprinkling of Native Americans, then carefully stir in a murder. Stef Penney has taken some dramatic ingredients for her first novel The Tenderness of Wolves and formed an ambitiously complex mystery out of them.

The story is mainly narrated by Mrs Ross, who discovers the body of an eccentric neighbour and then realises that her adopted son is missing. With a Native American tracker, who happens also to be a murder suspect, she sets out into the wilderness, following her son’s trail. All around, other plot lines surface: two sisters disappeared years ago, a carved bone may be the evidence for a written native language, a husband is lost, a mad woman is seduced, people fall in love, a greedy corporation distorts justice. A book with so many threads and characters could easily feel overcrowded, but Penney skilfully weaves them into the narrative sideways on, as it were. They are stories told and retold by the characters, and most do not happen in the present time of the search for Francis Ross. Some act as red herrings, some as interesting sidelines, some give depth to character and setting. And, through it all, the hunt for the killer carries on, drawing the reader in.

Social isolation

The bleak and inhospitable setting of the north of Canada is vividly realised and emphasises the social isolation of nearly all the characters. They seem to live in their own private consciousnesses, hardly communicating with each other, close to desperation (and close to stereotype — but that’s another issue). Of course, happy people are much harder to write about, and I think this angst is really appealing to many. The romantic notion of the individual against the complacent, unthinking world is still alive and kicking, but deeply dangerous. Christians can enjoy the drama of this kind of novel, but must hold onto their heads and resist the proud individualism embodied here. If you want a far more sophisticated and wise treatment of isolation, read Anne Tyler’s Digging to America, but don’t expect a whirlwind of a plot!

Sarah Allen