Fathers and Crows

With the same panoramic vision and mythic sensibility he brought to The Ice-Shirt, William T. Vollmann continues his hugely original fictional history of the clash of Indians and Europeans in the New World. It is 400 years ago, and the ?Black Gowns,? French Jesuit priests, are beginning their descent into the forests of Canada, eagerly seeking to convert the Huron--and courting martyrdom at the hands of the rival Iroquois. Through the eyes of these vastly different peoples--particularly through those of the grimly pious Father Jean de Brebeuf and the Indian prophetess Born Underwater--Vollmann reconstructs America?s past as tragedy, nightmare, and bloody spectacle. In the process, he does nothing less than reinvent the American novel as well.

With the same panoramic vision and mythic sensibility he brought to The Ice-Shirt, Vollmann continues his hugely original fictional history of the clash of Indians and Europeans in the New World. Through the eyes of vastly different peoples, Vollmann reconstructs America's tragic past.

With the same panoramic vision and mythic sensibility he brought to The Ice-Shirt, Vollmann continues his hugely original fictional history of the clash of Indians and ...

Publishers Weekly

Ready or not, we have an Ovid in our midst. In the second installment in his Seven Dream series, the 32-year-old Vollmann shows every sign of being equal to his self-appointed task of creating a ``symbolic history'' of the European settlement of North America. Following upon The Ice-Shirt (1990), which told of Leif Eriksson's Eric the Red's ``discovery'' of what is now British Columbia around A.D. 1000, Fathers and Crows chronicles the exploits of the French and the missionary Jesuits in Canada from the 16th to the 18th centuries. For all the book's historical trappings (six glossaries, a detailed chronology and 50 pages of source notes), it is less an historical novel than a novel about history. ``History is like a string that the cat has swallowed,'' says the cynical narrator, William the Blind: ``drawing events and eventsstet `events and events' from the poor creature's throat, one is surprised at how much must be disgorged.'' Indeed, Vollmann includes enough horrific descriptions of colonial North America--the impossible winters, the outbreaks of smallpox and scurvy (``Flesh blossomed in men's mouths like fungus''), the crude and heartless conflicts--to make the books of Francis Parkman seem like unctuous travel guides. Vollmann negotiates politically treacherous issues of dominant culture vs. native tradition with a skeptic's aplomb; swayed neither by notions of European individualism nor by those of Indian community, he has created an open text that invites all comers. Powerful as his performance is, however, the novel's breadth of time and incident and detail does not clarify so much as overwhelm. The character of History remains as irrational as the black-tentacled Indian force at the bottom of the Fleuve St.-Laurent. Still, Vollmann's ambition is without parallel, and clearly he has set in place another solid block of his audacious project. (Aug.)

Known as a bit of a "dark horse" of contemporary literature, William T. Vollman has garnered acclaim from readers and critics alike for the boldness and raw originality of his works, which often combine fictional and journalistic techniques. "Whether Dostoyevskifying the detective novel or offering boundless books-of-Genesis, Vollmann has had an ability to conjure tomes in a range of genres that is increasingly Faustian," observes The Village Voice.