Product Description

Set in the second half of the nineteenth century, in the American and Canadian West and in Victorian England, The Last Crossing is a sweeping tale of interwoven lives and stories

Charles and Addington Gaunt must find their brother Simon, who has gone missing in the wilds of the American West. Charles, a disillusioned artist, and Addington, a disgraced military captain, enlist the services of a guide to lead them on their journey across a difficult and unknown landscape. This is the enigmatic Jerry Potts, half Blackfoot, half Scottish, who suffers his own painful past. The party grows to include Caleb Ayto, a sycophantic American journalist, and Lucy Stoveall, a wise and beautiful woman who travels in the hope of avenging her sister’s vicious murder. Later, the group is joined by Custis Straw, a Civil War veteran searching for salvation, and Custis’s friend and protector Aloysius Dooley, a saloon-keeper. This unlikely posse becomes entangled in an unfolding drama that forces each person to come to terms with his own demons.

The Last Crossing contains many haunting scenes – among them, a bear hunt at dawn, the meeting of a Métis caravan, the discovery of an Indian village decimated by smallpox, a sharpshooter’s devastating annihilation of his prey, a young boy’s last memory of his mother. Vanderhaeghe links the hallowed colleges of Oxford and the pleasure houses of London to the treacherous Montana plains; and the rough trading posts of the Canadian wilderness to the heart of Indian folklore. At the novel’s centre is an unusual and moving love story.

The Last Crossing is Guy Vanderhaeghe’s most powerful novel to date. It is a novel of harshness and redemption, an epic masterpiece, rich with unforgettable characters and vividly described events, that solidifies his place as one of Canada’s premier storytellers.


From the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #747260 in Books
• Published on: 2004-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 400 pages

Amazon.ca Canadian Essential
Set on the Canadian and American frontier borderlands at the end of the 19th century, Guy Vanderhaeghe's Last Crossing is both an old-fashioned Western tale of adventure and character and a thoroughly modern, multi-voiced story of cultural conflict. Vanderhaeghe's powerful storytelling and his complete mastery of voice and place made The Last Crossing an instant classic from the moment of its publication.

Amazon.ca
Set in the late 19th century, The Last Crossing, Guy Vanderhaeghe's first novel since his acclaimed Englishman's Boy, is the story of three well-off English brothers: twins Simon and Charles Gaunt and their elder sibling, Addington, a former soldier and an arrogant scoundrel. At the behest of their dictatorial father, Charles and Addington travel the prairies of the U.S. and Canada in search of sensitive Simon, who has disappeared. Much of the novel concerns their journeys--bottles of port and claret rattling in their wagons--through Indian country with a cast of intricately drawn, fully realized characters. The small troupe is led through the whiskey-coloured light by Jerry Potts, a half-breed with one foot firmly in each world. The heart of the plot involves the love that Charles, a painter, feels for Lucy Stoveall, a simple but lovely country woman who accompanies them, secretly intent on avenging her sister's murder. However, the most intriguing character in this marvelous collection of all-too-human personalities is Custis Straw, a Bible-reading, heavy-drinking Civil War veteran who hides his tremendous dignity behind a bumbling facade, and who also loves Lucy.

Vanderhaeghe's rich language reveals a genuine feel for the prairies and their rough settlements: "a boom town draws rogues like a jam jar draws wasps," he writes, and describes "miles of wet plain patched with apple green, new penny copper, glints of silver." Though this is a Western in the traditional sense, Vanderhaeghe never sinks into parody. Rather, he uses the Western motif to reveal a number of profound universal truths about personal honour, and human failings and strengths. His humane character depictions reach emotional depths found in few novels today. --Mark Frutkin

Books in Canada
Six years since his highly acclaimed award-winning novel, The Englishman's Boy, Guy Vanderhaeghe's The Last Crossing hits the presses and readers are running to their bookstores in eager anticipation of a long-awaited reading experience. A self-professed "Big Sky Guy," Vanderhaeghe hails from Saskatchewan where his numerous fans proudly claim him as a voice that speaks legitimately for the collective experience of the prairie and where, far away from the "fast-lane," they will patiently wait until the author is ready to present his newest work to them. And if the proverb, "everything comes to those who wait," ever had any truth to it, it is now—for this book has everything to reward their patience.
Polyvocal and embracing several genres, Vanderhaeghe's novel is fictional and non-fictional. His aim is to let the prevalent themes and events he describes recapitulate the history of the pioneer days on the prairies. The Last Crossing is truly Vanderhaeghe's masterpiece. The story is richly and often humorously told within settings that move between late nineteenth-century England and the Canadian and American frontier. Layer upon layer of interwoven themes and allusions along with a multifarious cast of colorful characters, each of whom is believable and unforgettable, deepen the reading experience, and while readers will turn the pages with eager anticipation, they will also want to go back and revisit what they've just read. The variety of voices, settings and action evokes an almost inebriated response from the reader whose imagination is sparked to overflowing by such abundance.
The quest motif pervades the novel—everyone is on a journey. Vanderhaeghe deftly melds romance and realism—historical details are accurately placed (and assiduously researched) in a way that lends credibility to the element of romance that such journeys evoke. The relationship between fathers and sons, a persistent theme in Vanderhaeghe's earlier novels, frames the action from beginning to end, and anchors the rapidly changing plotline. Leaving England and their stern and aging father, Henry Gaunt, Charles, a portrait artist, travels through the wilderness frontier with his older brother, Addington, a disgraced military captain with a mean streak, in search of their brother, Simon. Despite his absence throughout most of the novel, Simon Gaunt is the most fascinating of all the characters. As an absence presente he swells to embody the qualities all of Vanderhaeghe's characters (and indeed the reader) yearn for. Charles's memories of his close bond with his twin brother underscore a sensitive and openly affectionate nature that, paradoxically, lends him a determination and strength that is enviable to all. The importance of finding Simon becomes the most compelling aspect of the plotline.
Vanderhaeghe is a meticulously careful writer, not superfluously showy—descriptive passages are written with painstaking care without a hint of pretense. His prose is modest yet wonderfully authentic, giving formidable weight to the tale and to the characters that inhabit it.
Taking on the attitude of radically differing characters, ranging from the crusty Civil War veteran Custis Straw, to the only female in this unlikely group, Lucy Stoveall, he works like a "method actor. . . stepping entirely into one character and then into another." In fact, the highly visual quality of this book could lead to the writing of another a filmscript just as his previous novel, The Englishman's Boy, has.
This quasi-historical book is dedicated "to all those local historians who keep the particulars of our past alive" and so Vanderhaeghe blurs literary boundaries by telling both a 'story' and a 'history'. He even takes it upon himself to right a wrong that has bothered him for a long time. He explains his motivation for including the character of Jerry Potts, whose story he read about in the Fort McLeod newspaper: "Potts at least in some way, has been present in my mind since I was 10 years old." Thus, Vanderhaege gives full due to a man he feels is likely the single biggest reason why this part of Canada stayed Canadian. Jerry Potts, half-white, half-native, and torn between two worlds, "kn[ew] that to live divided [was] dangerous, a confusion that sicken[ed] the spirit." He was an extraordinary scout for the Europeans, and a brave and accomplished man for his Blackfoot family. If he had not led the North West Mounted Police to where the American whiskey traders were gathered, Southern Alberta, Saskatchewan and British Columbia would likely have been made part of the U.S. The novel ends with a dramatic account of the last Indian battle in the Canadian NorthWest at Fort Whoop-Up, one of the most notorious whiskey posts in the plains regions, that took place around 1870 and features Potts's part in it.
Despite the toughness and isolation of the characters—each lives in his "respective darkness"—an unusual triangular love story emerges. Bound by parallel quests to do something for the sake of a sibling, Charles and Lucy Stoveall meet. Lucy wants to avenge her sister's vicious murder. Ultimately, Charles falls passionately in love with Lucy despite their obvious social differences—differences of which she is acutely aware despite her felt passion for Charles: "I understood how the signposts of each of our solitary roads can hardly be read by the other because they are so unlike." His opportunity to "surrender" to her takes on greater significance in the context of the novel's central theme of "crossing over" expressed in the title. Charles is haunted by a question Simon posed to him when they were at college: "Do you not desire to love and be loved, Charles?" He adds "I think you shall never be a great painter until you surrender to love." In an unexpected plot twist, Charles is later given similar advice by Custis Straw, who tells him that he must take the opportunity presented to him and "cross to the other side": "One thing I'll say is this. If ever I caught sight of the Promised Land, I'd make my way over to it, [or] die trying. . . If you want Lucy Stoveall, cross over. Don't keep her waiting on the other side of the bank." Eventually, all of the thematic threads of the novel are tied into this larger one.
If Vanderhaeghe leaves us with his own words of wisdom, and I believe he does, it is to resurrect and expand our "faith" in all of its multiple forms—from Lucy Stoveall's dreams and rituals, to Jerry Potts's mystical native spirituality, to the freedom envisioned in stories of the Wild West, and finally to Simon's rebirth in a new world. Crossing to the other side is to avoid the "dangerously deadening" choice of living without commitment. Vanderhaeghe's ability to hold in his imagination all of these characters and all of this vast narrative with its complexity of tensions and intensity of meaning, is testament to the creative genius of this writer and his passionate commitment to his craft.
Cindy MacKenzie (Books in Canada)

Customer Reviews

A western about the Canadian west!
I just wanted to throw my two cents in and say what a wonderful book this is. I wont go back over all the plot as that has been done enough here, but "The Last Crossing" does for the Canadian Frontier what "Lonesome Dove" did for the american western, that is reinvent it! This is a book all Canadians should read! I am not a big fan of westerns but this book transcends the genre.

the Last Crossing
The book was chosen by CBC Radio's Canada Reads programme as THE book Canadians should read (2003). Hmm. I was impressed by Vanderhaege's previous novel, the Englishman's Boy, so I decided to see for myself.

The book takes place mainly in Canada's North West territory, circa 1880. It is the story of a diverse group of individuals: British, American, Metis, Cree and Blackfoot, whose lives briefly intersect. Simon Gaunt is lost in the wilderness and his twin brother Charles and elder brother Addington set off to try to find him. They provision their expedition in Fort Benton, Montana. Jerry Potts, a Scot/Blackfoot frontiersman, Mrs. Stovall, and Curtis Straw, a horse trader, are the other main characters. The story follows the motley band as it treks through the prairie from Fort Benton to Fort Edmonton.

The main characters alternate as narrators. As a result we understand the true inner motivations of, and the misinterpretations of events by, the characters. We understand the deceptions between the characters. What is not said is often as important as what is said. In my view this is a very good technique. These characters are very well developed.

I particularly like the portrait of Potts, the frontiersman, who is caught between two cultures. His character is based on a real person. To the Europeans he is a near savage. In fact he is a hero who knows what needs to be done and does it. He is a man of integrity who does things not because of a reward but because that is what must be done. These unsung heroes slip into our past unnoticed but are in fact the real heroes. It is only through works of "fiction" that we can see their importance.

Not that this is a story without action! There is a murder, which remains a mystery throughout the novel. There are several violent confrontations which are part of the infamous whisky trade of Fort Whoop-Up. One comes across a ghost camp where an Indian band has been wiped out by small pox. There is a dramatic battle between two Indian tribes. There is also an excellent account of the civil war battle in the Wideness. I thought these actions sequences were particularly well written.

This novel is an excellent portrayal of human beings from whatever age who must confront the uncertainty and ambiguity of existence. I would highly recommend it.

Great Canadian Novel
I tried to read the Englishman's Boy but couldn't, so I was hesitant to read the Last Crossing at my wife's behest. Hesitantly I began. But soon I was right in to it.
I enjoyed it! A great summer read.