The Tenderness of Wolves

Date: 25 February 2008 20:44:59

So, at last, a book I've managed to get all the way through, the first time this year! (Auntie Doris is putting me to shame, she's just blogged her tenth book of the year!). The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney is the 2006 Costa Book Award winner, and we were just discussing in our book club tonight how very often if something has won a prize we end up with high expectations and then get disappointed (I've pretty much given up reading Booker Prize winners altogether now, as the few I've read I haven't enjoyed), but all of us absolutely loved this book. It's based in the Canadian north in the 1860s, and is initially based in a small settlement made up mainly of Scottish settlers. A man is found murdered in the settlement, a 17 year old disappears at the same time, and it is the story of his mother who goes to find him to clear his name, and the various different hunts for the murderer (who is not revealed until the very end). Interwoven into the story are a number of sub-stories about life and relationships in the community and the people both from there and from the Hudson Bay Company who are involved in the investigation as the murdered man was an animal trapper who did business with the Company. It's told from a number of different characters' points of view, although it is only the boy's mother who is narrated in the first person, so it means that just as soon as you are forming a judgment about a particular character, you then see things from their perspective and the reasons for doing what they have done. One of the things I really liked about it was that the descriptions of the Canadian wilderness was so expansive it was like being there myself - throughout the book I had a very strong sense of the hugeness, the bleakness, the hardships of life there. And what makes it really amazing is that the author suffered for many years from agoraphobia, had never been to Canada, and researched the details for the book in the British Library (but according to one article I read, it took her two years just to get on a bus to go to the British Library). For a book to describe so vividly and so beautifully such an expansive, unforgiving landscape, and yet be written by someone who hardly dared leave her own home, is just remarkable.

We were a bit divided in our book club as to the fact that the book ends with a number of questions unanswered. It's not like a Dickens, where the book ends and you know that the villain has had his come-uppance, and the starry-eyed lovers finally get married, and the penniless but kind-hearted landlord makes good, and all that sort of thing. With nearly all of the characters we still wanted to know what happened next, and it's just left hanging. But I really liked that - much as I love Dickens, and find reading his books rather satisfying once I get into them, it's much more real-life that things aren't always resolved, we don't always know what happens next, so for me it made this book even more real. A couple of others didn't like this aspect so much - they felt they had so many questions, they wanted at least some of them resolving!

I'd definitely recommend it though - well worth a read. I couldn't put it down (I read just over half on the train to York on Saturday, and finished the rest of it this morning on the train back. So you could read it cover to cover in less than 7 hours).