Guy Vanderhaeghe is a bold and daring man.
In his newest novel, A Good Man, the veteran Saskatchewan author took on the challenge of putting words to two of the great personalities of the history of the West: Sitting Bull, the Sioux chief who led his people to defeat Custer at the Battle of Little Bighorn, and James M. Walsh, a major with the North West Mounted Police, who was sympathetic towards aboriginal people of the West and ensured Sitting Bull and the Sioux kept the peace while they were in Canada.
Even though Sitting Bull and Walsh play secondary characters in this novel nominated for the 2011 Scotiabank Giller prize, it was an ambitious undertaking as both Walsh and Sitting Bull are strong, potent personalities who, if handled poorly, could have derailed A Good Man.
But they didn’t, as the soft-spoken and thoughtful Vanderhaeghe, the author of The Englishman’s Boy and Crossing Open Ground, has a deep-rooted connection to the people and places of the West that allowed him to give a voice to these two men, presenting them as complex, intriguing and authentic individuals.
“All writing is an act of imagination,” said Vanderhaeghe, who also has an MA in history from the University of Saskatchewan. “When I write, I use an old method-acting thing. I do my best to inhabit the personalities of the people I’m writing about and to attempt to write from what I imagine their perspective was and to give them a voice.”
A Good Man shares the story of Wesley Case, who leaves the NWMP to become a rancher in Montana despite his father’s expectation that he return east and become a politician.
The 1876 Battle of Little Bighorn, the subsequent flight of the Sioux to the Cypress Hills of southwestern Saskatchewan and the fallout from the Battle of Ridgeway as part of the Fenian Raid on Eastern Canada in 1866 serve as a backdrop to Case’s story.
And despite the political overtones, A Good Man is a love story populated by a cast of remarkable but damaged characters who, in their own way, are all seeking peace and freedom and the comfort both bring.
Case, a kind, sensitive man, harbours a shameful secret, while the independent Ada Tarr fights against the confines the pioneer West puts on widows. Michael Dunne, a violent, dangerous bastard of a man who has no compunction to kill to achieve his goals, dreams of security and marital bliss, which makes it surprisingly easy to feel sympathetic towards him.
“Dunne was probably my favourite character to write. I don’t know if that says something about me,” Vanderhaeghe said with a laugh. “But there’s the old adage, the villain is always the hero of his own story, so I try to inhabit the villain’s perspective also.
“We all see the world from our own perspective and it is very hard to test that perspective to know if you are correct or wrong or misreading that situation.
“And Dunne is one of these individuals. He is oblivious to any point of view but his own, but as far as he is concerned his view of things of people is complete.”
With A Good Man, Vanderhaeghe has once again proven that he is one of Canada’s pre-eminent authors. The story is often ragged, dismal, even dusty, cold, harsh and violent; in all, reminiscent of the landscapes and the period – the 1870s – that saw the end of aboriginal culture as it was.
“It is remarkable to think that in this period, within a decade, everything changed and one way of life was radically altered. I’m speaking of aboriginal people, and it was subsumed by a new white European agricultural and later, industrial (way of life).
“We talk about rapidity of change and it is true we live in an era in which things move in lighting speed, but if you think back to the 1870s, it seems to me the radical change that occurred in that decade was almost equal to our own.”
An engaging chronicle of that change is only one reason to read A Good Man; others include its characters, descriptions and how Vanderhaeghe weaves together distant points in history that remind readers across Canada and the U.S. that our history from east to west is inextricably linked.
But the history does not overburden the story, which, like in Vanderhaeghe’s other novels, is rich and highly imaginative.
“I can safely say that I stick pretty closely to the broad outline (of history), but I allow myself the liberty of interpretation or motivation that a historian wouldn’t do without solid evidence. In the historical novel, the noun is more important than the adjective and as much as I am entranced by history and how much it interests me, I think I understand that I’m not writing a thesis,” he said.
And it is that approach that allows him to be bold and daring, and to pull it off so nicely.
A Good Man, published by McClelland & Stewart, retails for $32.99.
