#56 - The Friends Of Meager Fortune

I am completely fascinated by the subject matter of The Friends of Meager Fortune, David Adams Richards's latest novel. It's about New Brunswick loggers right before their industry evolves from man to machine powered. The story revolves around Jameson family, who own one of the three logging companies in town, the two sons, Will and Owen, are being raised by their widowed mother Mary. Early on in the story, great tragedy that happens is foretold by a prophecy Mary receives that the Jameson dynasty would be destroyed by the rash actions of the second son (Owen) despite the great reputation of the first (Will).

The story of Will's life and subsequent death, along with how his brother Owen, who is ill-fit to run the business but has good intentions, makes up the bulk of the first part of the story. Backdrop to this is the cut itself, the time that teams of honest, hard working spend atop Good Friday Mountain, the most dangerous cut in the in the history of area's logging. Then, there's a love triangle between Reggie, Will's best friend and the company's Push (a sort of camp manager for the loggers), his wife Camellia and Owen that comprises the impetus for a lot of what propels people into action within the story.

There are problems with the novel though. And despite how much I wanted to like it, and how much I did like it, I found it slightly verbose. There's an element of foretelling that starts to get frustrating after a while, when you've heard the same details about the same characters repeated ad nasueum, which serves no purpose to the underlying story. The telling and re-telling has an almost magical element, kind of like how great stories develop in terms of an oral tradition. But it just didn't quite work for me.

The story itself is epic and tragic, the stuff of great literature, and it's a tale that deserves to be told. I'm fascinated by the idea of lumberjacks, especially those on the verge of extinction and what that does, by its nature, to the idea of a story. But on the whole, this novel is too dense for its own good, and could use a bit of lightening up to get it moving faster because it's a great tale.

After I finished reading the book, I spent a night out with my father-in-law, who was a lumberjack in New Brunswick just as industrialization was changing the industry forever. I liked reading it for this personal aspect; it gave me a level of understanding about what his life might have been like. He was just fourteen when he went into the bush and when he came out, just like the characters in the novel, the entire world had changed.