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Reviews
I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company: A Novel of Lewis and Clark
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by Brian Hall
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Viking, New York, 2003. 431 pages. $25.95 cloth, $14.00 paper.
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The True Account: A Novel of the Lewis and Clark and Kinneson Expeditions
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by Howard Frank Mosher
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Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 2003. 352 pages. $24.00 cloth, $13.00 paper.
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Reviewed by Michael McGregor
Portland State University, Portland, Oregon
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| Many historians consider the term historical fiction an oxymoron. If a piece of writing is historically accurate, they say, there can be nothing fictional about it. And if something is fiction, you should not try to pass it off as somehow more authentic by misusing the word historical. Despite their skepticism, however, more and more fiction writers have been rummaging through the historical files in recent years, looking for what novelist Thomas Mallon calls "a place to get away." They are searching for someplace where the imagination has room to expand, a place and time far from a contemporary world that we know too much about and in which we can access anywhere or anyone through e-mail, CNN, or the Internet. |
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Given the relatively virgin nature of the land Lewis and Clark traversed two hundred years ago and what was sure to be a nationwide commemoration of their journey's bicentennial, it was inevitable that some novelist would attempt a fictional re-creation of the pair's grand adventure. Among those who have are Brian Hall and Howard Frank Mosher. Their approaches are as different as can be, but together they illustrate the opportunities and dangers inherent in blending history with fiction. |
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Of the two, Hall is more concerned about historians looking over his shoulder. His book is a mostly faithful rendering of the Lewis and Clark Expedition and its aftermath, from Lewis's first meetings with Thomas Jefferson through the deaths of the expedition's best-known figures (Lewis, Clark, Sacagawea, Charbonneau, and York). It includes a lengthy author's note with an impressive list of books he has consulted and what comes close to being an apology for whatever liberties he has taken with the historical record. |
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Hall's text is so faithful to what we already know (he used Stephen Ambrose's Undaunted Courage as a guide) and so stuffed with historically accurate information — painstaking descriptions of Native American rituals, meticulous lists of supplies, and detailed catalogues of day-to-day movements — that one begins to wonder what he has cribbed from his historical sources and what he has made up. One wonders, too, why he did not just write a historical account of the journey, using his talent for description and his eye for detail to liven things up. |
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The tediousness of his approach aside, Hall rewards intrepid readers with occasional gems. Halfway through the book, he takes us inside Lewis's mind on the day he discovered the Missouri River's Great Falls while exploring alone. The passage blends excited discovery with vanity, self-doubt, and a heightened awareness of expectations to give us a Lewis more human and complex than in strictly factual accounts. Unfortunately, the passage lasts just four pages before Hall's obsession with prosaic details takes over again. |
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The most intriguing, and ultimately disappointing, choice Hall makes is to tell some of his story in the voices of Sacagawea and Charbonneau. In the Sacagawea passages he does fairly well with the high-wire act of trying to give a Native American view of people and events. Cumbersome phrases like "strange-eaters" and "shed-fur trees" make the reading slow at first but also thought-provoking. Eventually, however, these passages become as tedious as others in the book. Sacagawea's thinking progresses little, making her seem overly simple, and her earthiness is overdone, suggesting an odd preoccupation with bodily functions. |
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The Charbonneau sections are even more vexing, though much shorter. For some reason, Hall has his Charbonneau think in broken patois, even though the real Charbonneau spoke (and presumably thought) in fluent French. |
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In "The Historical Novelist's Burden of Truth," an essay that is essential reading for anyone interested in the intersection of history and fiction, Thomas Mallon has written that "nouns always trump adjectives, and in the phrase 'historical fiction,' it is important to remember which of the two words is which." While Hall has ignored this advice to his peril, Mosher has taken it to heart. |
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Mosher's book is a novel in every way — one that just happens to include Lewis and Clark. His main inspiration, in fact, is less historical than literary: not the journals left by the Corps of Discovery but the western world's first novel, Don Quixote, seasoned with a dose of Homer's Odyssey. His protagonist is Private True Teague Kinneson, a loopily erudite, fantasizing smoker of hemp who wears a chain-mail vest and sports a copper plate over the part of his head he hit while helping Ethan Allen take Fort Ticonderoga. Kinneson's nephew, Ti, narrates the book. |
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Ti plays Sancho Panza to his uncle's Quixote on an adventure that begins when the deluded and restless Kinneson leaves the family farm to ask Thomas Jefferson to commission him to search out the Northwest Passage. When Jefferson turns him down, Kinneson decides to go west anyway, taking along both his nephew and a quixotic penchant for seeing things as he imagines them to be. |
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Along the way, they run into Lewis and Clark, of course, but also two colorful bandit brothers (Big and Bigger), a fifteen-foot alligator named Monsieur Ponchatrain, the Sacagawea-like Little Warrior Woman, and an outlandish Spanish "Force of Terror" intent on keeping any American from successfully crossing the Louisiana Purchase. Mosher struggles dutifully to describe newly discovered flora and fauna without using their now-common names and touches on the persistent threat of danger Lewis and Clark faced, but in general he keeps his storytelling light, humorous, and focused on character. |
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Midway through the book, Mosher's hero says to his nephew, "What faculty was it that inspired Tom Jefferson and Lewis to launch their expedition in the first place? It was the imagination. They imagined what might be here in the West. . . . The greatest achievements in the history of the world have all sprung from the imagination" (pp. 159–60). |
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In the end, it is Mosher's willingness to unleash his imagination that makes his book succeed where Hall's more meticulous but stilted effort fails. Those historians who look askance at anything called "historical fiction" will not be satisfied with either. Those who read history books for history and turn to novels to indulge their imaginations will find Mosher's adventure story pleasing. |
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