‘If these walls could talk” – surely a contender for the most heard cliché on certain history and/or real estate programmes. Yet many houses, especially very old ones, though constructed of ordinary, familiar materials, and containing expected rooms, do somehow acquire an emotional patina. But could this alluring idea be taken much further? What, for instance, could one house deep in a New England forest “say” about the 400 years or so of its existence and the characters, not all of them human, who have passed through or made it their home? Daniel Mason’s remarkable new novel takes up this challenge.
In its first incarnation, the house is a small, primitive cabin built by a young couple who have fled the restrictions and recriminations of a Puritan colony, pursued by “solemn men” who stuff “greasy pinches of tobacco into their pipes”. Later, it belongs to respected English soldier, Charles Osgood, who abandons a successful military career for a new life in America as an orchardist – thanks to the wondrous apple, faintly streaked with russet and tasting of lemon blossoms and syrup, that he discovers growing near the now ruined house. After Charles dies, his twin daughters, Alice and Mary, locked in a relationship for which co-dependence is an inadequate description, continue his work and cling to their home for another 40 years. How their lives conclude is a strange tale indeed.
And there are other inhabitants and visitors. Particularly touching, and superbly handled, is the tenure of Victorian painter William Teale, who rejoices in the detail and variety of the surrounding landscape and whose life is transformed by his secret, and finally hopeless, love for another man.
The delineation of his brief friendship with the nurse who, in his old age, comes to give him “temporary assistance in matters of everyday life”, is subtle and tender. Other humans make their mark – a dangerous fraudster, a sensationalist crime reporter who discovers a hidden grave, a desperately misunderstood son. Then there’s a panther, wonderfully known then as a catamount, bent on destruction, and even a Darwinian beetle bent on finding a mate.
All this could, of course, sound far too clever for its own good – a mere chronology of tall tales linked to an ageing building. Not in the hands of this author. Mason is interested in, and delighted by, so much – the turns and secrets and terrors of history (and its continued grip on the present), the cycles of nature and its fragility, the infinite variety of human emotion. Without any sense of stylistic strain or imposition, each person who lives in or enters the house is given their own distinct idiom and their own world view. There is, too, the surprise of poems and ballads along the way, and illustrations. And Mason is astonishingly good at writing about the risky business of nature and place. The artist gets some of the best lines: “I have become a connoisseur of ice these days; the sleet like hissing sand, the white that coats the roads like baker’s dustings, the crystalline mesh, thin as spun sugar, that shatters with the passing of my hand.”
This novel is exhilarating, inventive and rich; it grabs the reader’s attention immediately and never lets go. But it is also beautifully paced and often very moving. It possesses a rare completeness of vision and intention. Among Mason’s many prestigious awards, for novels and short stories, is a shortlisting for the Pulitzer Prize. North Woods more than deserves every accolade that comes its way.
North Woods by Daniel Mason (John Murray, $37.99)
