Book description
Will Jameson has a temperament of iron, standing up to men twice his
age when he takes over the Jameson lumber company after his father's
death. His younger brother Owen is sensitive, literary and fanciful.
But when Will dies suddenly and Owen's beloved Lula rejects him,
Owen's deeper character comes to light: joining the army in the hope
of getting himself killed, instead Owen returns home a decorated war
hero.
Then he falls in love with the beautiful, childlike Camellia - the
wife of Will's old friend Reggie Glidden - and soon Owen and Camellia
find themselves watched on all sides, caught in the teeth of an entire
town's gossip and hypocrisy. Inexorably, they are pulled into a chain
of events that will end with death, disappearance and a sensational
trial.
The Friends of Meager Fortune is a transfixing love story and
a devastating portrait of a society - but it is also a brilliant
commemoration of the passing of a world, that of the lumberjacks who
felled the trees by hand and dragged them down mountainsides with
horses. Owen Jameson begins what will become the greatest cut in New
Brunswick history, his men setting up camp on the notoriously
dangerous Good Friday Mountain. The teamsters spend months in pitiless
ice and snow, daily pitting themselves against nature and risking
their lives for scant reward, in the last moments before the coming of
mechanization that will make them obsolete. This heroic, brutal life
is all Meager Fortune, the camp keeper, knows. A good and innocent
man, he shows unexpected resolution in the face of the betrayals of
the more worldly men around him.
Rich with all the passion, ambition and almost mythic vision that
defines David Adams Richards' work, The Friends of Meager
Fortune is a profound and important book about the hands and the
heart; about true greatness and true weakness; about the
relentlessness of fate and the evil that men and women do. Wise,
stark, and without a false word in it, it cements David Adams
Richards' claim to be the finest novelist at work in Canada today.
David Adams Richards is the author of
River of the Brokenhearted
,
Mercy Among the Children
, which won the 2000 Giller Prize and was nominated for the Governor
General's Award and the Trillium Award, and
The Bay of Love and Sorrows
, which has been made into a feature film, amongst other titles.
