The Englishman's Boy
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3.7 • 10 Ratings
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
The first book in Guy Vanderhaeghe's Frontier trilogy
A brilliantly linked narrative that juxtaposes Hollywood in the 1920s with one of the bloodiest, most violent events of the nineteenth-century Canadian West: the Cypress Hills Massacre.
Harry Vincent has arrived in Hollywood from Saskatchewan and landed a job at a movie studio. His big opportunity comes when studio owner Damon Ira Chance enlists him to find the elusive Shorty McAdoo. When Harry finally locates the old-time Western actor, he gradually uncovers a story that will become the basis for Chance’s film.
In counterpoint to the hard-edged realm of Hollywood is the haunting story of a young drifter, known simply as “the Englishman’s boy,” whose fate is ultimately a tragic one. In May of 1873, he joins a group of wolf hunters heading north into Canada. It is a journey through an unforgiving land that climaxes in a brutal encounter with the Assiniboine Indians in the Cypress Hills.
Vanderhaeghe’s rendering of the stark, dramatic beauty of the western landscape and of Hollywood in its most extravagant era provides a vivid background of scenes of action, adventure, and intrigue. Strongly evocative of time and place, The Englishman’s Boy is an unforgettable novel about power, greed, and the pull of dreams by one of Canada’s most acclaimed novelists.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Having won the Governor General's Award in Canada, this novel comes garlanded with praise, and it's easy to see what the fuss is about. Vanderhaeghe (Man Descending) has a strong narrative sense and a muscular, urgent style. The novel's premise is a good one: a renegade Canadian cowboy, involved in an 1873 Indian massacre as a teenager, 50 years later becomes Shorty McAdoo, a grizzled bit player in pioneer Hollywood, where he catches the imagination of a movie mogul who wants to build an inspiring Western around him--a movie that will deliberately ignore McAdoo's dark secret, which has filled his life with dour guilt. The book proceeds along two tracks. One tells the story of how Shorty became involved with a posse chasing some Indian horse thieves up into Canadian territory, and the grim vengeance that was enacted. The other chronicles the later doings in Hollywood, as told by young screenwriter Harry Vincent. In both stories there is a crisis of conscience; both are driven by ruthless central figures; and there are ironies aplenty. But the tale of the old West is infinitely more gripping and real than the '20s Hollywood material, which is overfamiliar (and in any case sounds echoes of Nathanael West's much more powerful Day of the Locust). The posse leader Hardwick is a figure of genuine menace, but Damon Ira Chance, who runs Harry's studio and sends him off to get Shorty's story, is more elusive, an improbable recluse who goes off into erudite, quasi-Fascist rants about the iron American spirit and the power of the movies. The final confrontation at the premiere of McAdoo's film seems inevitable only in a fictional way; it's nothing like the fierce terror of the massacre and its aftermath. Then, too, the novel is framed by two chapters of facile Indian mysticism that seem foreign to the rest of the tale. Vanderhaeghe is a fine writer, and his work is often fresh and surprising; but on this occasion, all the elements do not quite cohere as they should have.
Customer Reviews
The Englishmans Boy
This was a masterfully written book, researched thoroughly, that shed much insight onto two very different eras in our history-namely the Wild West of the 1860's and Hollywood in the 1920's. Vanderhaeghe cleverly writes about the activities of a group of wolfers and then intertwines this narrative with a story sixty years later about a screenwriter who interviews one of the wolfers, now an elderly man, in the hopes of being able to write a screenplay about his life fighting Indians, among other things.
boring..... annoying
not a fun read.
The Englishman's Boy
A wonderful use of language which turns words into images.