The Tenderness of Wolves - Stef Penny

Like most right-thinking people, I have a bit of a fear of prize-winning novels. Despite feeling a weird sort of moral obligation to read them, I frequently find them boring, turgid, overwritten and without a sufficiently strong story to support the weight of all those words. If any of you have been living in fear of “The Tenderness of Wolves”, you can stop now. Despite winning the Costa Book of the Year 2006, it’s a very readable detective story and actually a real page-turner. In fact, I found it so enjoyable that I began to wonder why this counts as literary fiction while, say, the Inspector Morse novels don’t. So far, I’ve no answer to that.

At the start of a Canadian winter, a middle aged settler, Mrs Ross gets up one day to find that her neighbour, Laurent Jammet has been murdered and scalped during the night, and her teenage son has also gone missing. Pretty soon the gossips are suggesting that the two events are related. Some officials from The Hudson’s Bay Company (like a sort of Canadian equivalent of the Eat India Company) are sent to investigate and they get to work trampling on the feelings of the locals and busting some heads. As winter approaches, Mrs Ross chooses to set off through the snow in search of her son, in the hope of clearing his name.

I note that the Hudson Bay Trading Company is not only real, but is still trading. A wonder that it hasn’t sued Ms Penny as the story doesn’t show it a particularly good light. Mind you, I doubt that any of the unpleasant things the company and its representatives do aren’t historically accurate.

Anyway, if you’re planning to read this book for yourself, then stop reading this blog because I couldn’t work out how to discuss the book further without giving away some of the ending.

My overall impression is one of bleakness. Firstly we have the beautifully described Canadian winter, complete with frostbite, snow blindness and having to defrost the ink before you can write letters. Bleaker still, though, is that every single character seems to be an outsider. Everyone is isolated and alone in the world:

• Mrs Ross carries the burden of her past as an asylum inmate and laudanum addict. By the time the story takes place her marriage has deteriorated to the point where her husband does not look at her or speak to her. I imagine them both looking as miserable as the couple in this famous picture. Mrs Ross’s son, Francis has also stopped speaking to her for reasons of his own...
• Francis Ross cannot tell anyone about his romantic involvement with the murder victim, because it’s the 1840s and he’d probably be jailed or thrown in the loony bin. Nevertheless, his father guesses and becomes moodier than ever.
• Donald Moody is deeply neurotic and convinced of his own inferiority. He has come from Scotland to work for the Company but hates the cold, the hardship, and the rough men who spend all winter drunk because there is nothing else to do. His motivation in aiding Mrs Ross is not so much a desire for justice, but to cover his arse out of fear that he will be deemed to have screwed up and his career will be over. He wastes a good deal of time mooning over the beautiful Susannah Knox before realising that it her clever, challenging sister, Maria he wants. Unfortunately, this realisation comes a bit late in the day, and Donald is shot by the villain before he can tell Maria about it.
• Maria Knox is now doomed to die alone and be eaten by her cats, thanks to Donald’s death. Eclipsed by her prettier younger sister she has become a forbidding intellectual type and up to now, men have bolted at the sight of her.
• Mr Knox has thrown away his status as local magistrate by allowing the half-Indian prisoner, William Parker, to escape. Knox couldn’t allow the Company investigators to beat up a prisoner, but he brings shame on his family and barely escapes jail himself for doing the right thing. He loses his position and with it his sense of purpose. All of this leaves him a broken man at the novel’s end.

And so it goes on! We are each of us ultimately alone in a world without mercy according to the mind behind this novel. It’s probably true, but in the interest of preserving sanity, I’m not going to think about it anymore.