Book Review: “North Woods” by Daniel Mason
House: Songs and Stories
I once worked for an outfit called the Canadian Institute of Historical Microreproductions (who later changed their name to the less wordy Canadiana.org, before getting absorbed into another institution in 2018 or thereabouts.) One of the things I did, and one of the things that I’m most proud of, is that I worked on an educational website for high school history classes called Canada in the Making. Throughout my writing and editing of content for that site, I was given access to a database of historical records that had been scanned from old microfilm into digital files. Some of my finds were quite startling to me — I would uncover journals hundreds of years old with moth-eaten pages that were rendered unreadable in some cases. But I also found intact documents going back to Canada’s earliest settlements in the early 1600s that were pristine and probably fascinating to read (Canada was first settled by the French, whose language I have not learned). Reading Pulitzer Prize-finalist Daniel Mason’s North Woods was a little like discovering those artifacts. That’s because part of the book presents a series of fictitious historical documents going back to about 1760. Mason is a writer of quality of the sort that you might be mistaken that these documents, which help tell the history of a house and property located in western Massachusetts, are real. The rest of the book is a series of interconnected short stories told in chapters featuring various inhabitants of the land and the home. Suffice it to say, North Woods is the kind of book that you’ve probably never read before. It is a masterpiece in that it teaches you how to read it. But you might need a little help.
Normally, when I encounter a book that is strange and unusual, I advise potential readers reading these reviews to stop eyeballing Medium and just read the darn novel without knowing anything about it to preserve a sense of adventure, I suppose. However, with North Woods, I would advise the opposite. It pays to have this book spoiled for you because it starts out being a fairly difficult read. The first part of the book, set in the eighteenth century and starting with the French and Indian War, is written in the style of documents of the era, so it can be a little hard to understand Old English if you’re not used to it. While the novel does get easier to read as it goes on, knowing what it’s about can help you make heads or tails of it a little better. Thus, I would encourage would-be readers to read as many reviews as they can of this book before starting. Otherwise, you might get a little frustrated by it and not be sure how it makes sense at the outset. Now, I consider myself — and I don’t want to sound like I’m conceited here — to be of above-average intelligence. I’m not a genius, but let’s say I graduated from a very tough undergraduate university program with high honours. Even I had trouble with this book at the beginning. So going to other online reviews and seeing what this book is all about may be helpful. North Woods is the sort of novel that you can’t spoil anyway as each character is introduced only for a short period — a chapter or two at most.
So, you’re probably wondering about the contents of the book — beyond alternating between regular exposition and archival documents, which range from everything from pamphlets to song lyrics of the day. North Woods is essentially the biography of a house or a piece of property, kind of like what Phil Jenkins did in non-fiction with An Acre of Time, which is the history of a parcel of land in downtown Ottawa, Canada. Inhabitants include a solider named Charles Osgoode who has a fetish for a type of apple that grows well on the plot’s soil, his daughters Alice and Mary — who have a sibling rivalry so intense it leads to murder, a mountain lion who makes the house its home when it is briefly abandoned, a woman whose son has been diagnosed with schizophrenia and frequently disappears from home, and a visiting true crime columnist who has been tipped off on a very grisly murder that has happened on the property. Now, having given you that synopsis, I would like to say that this is a book that is probably going to take a run at some major literary awards because it is so unique in structure. As well, Mason easily gives each of his characters a distinct voice — they all have different cadences from one another. That’s the true success of this read: you’ll never stop believing that any of this novel could have been real or at the very least seem authentic. (The only jarring note on this front happens when Mason refers to Canada at times when the country was still known as British North America.) North Woods is a clever novel as much as it is an initially baffling one — but it ultimately winds up being a great read. It’s not for the readerly faint of heart, and some may be lost in this book. But if you’re up for a challenge and like to flex your brain a bit when you read, you’ll find North Woods to be propulsive and thrilling. It gets better and more understandable as it ties its loose ends together and moves from the antiquated world into the modern world of the 21st century.
In the end, North Woods is a fascinating piece of alternate history, if you can consider this book as existing within that genre. (It is literary fiction first and foremost, though.) I was quite taken by this book. Even though some of this is deadly serious, I found parts to be rather humourous — which broadens the scope of the writing. I also thought this read was interesting in that it is a retelling of the Garden of Eden story, complete with a Cain and Abel-type allusion at one point. This is the story about the fall of mankind and how history has a habit of repeating itself through wars and bloody conflicts. Mason has done something rather remarkable: craft a narrative that will have you guessing as to the authenticity of the narrative. For that reason, North Woods comes highly recommended by me. It certainly takes me back to the days I was working on that educational website and spending my idyllic days poring over documents that teenagers could learn from. This is worthy of more than a look. This is an experience.
Daniel Mason’s North Woods will be published by Random House on September 19, 2023.
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