Reviews for The Last Crossing [With Headphones]

The average rating for The Last Crossing [With Headphones] based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-08-09 00:00:00 John Flood I found this a highly satisfying tale of the cultural clash and personal transformations that occur when two brothers from Victorian England go on a quest to the mountain West of the U.S. and Canada to find their missing brother, who disappeared on a mission to convert the Indians in the Montana territory of 1871. For a tragicomedy at the turning point of the taming of the frontier, this does not attain the heights of McMurtry's "Lonesome Dove", but it taps the same vein of pleasure. The ensemble of colorful characters was marvelous for me. We have Charles Gaunt, a London portrait painter who reflects back on the story in this book when he comes across a news story about the death of a famous Indian guide, the "half breed" Jerry Potts. Decades before, his dreamy, impracticable twin brother Simon dropped out of Oxford under the sway of a kooky minister who believes the American Indians are the lost tribe of Israel who need the enlightened with the word of God. One of the opening scenes flashes on Simon getting caught in a blizzard in the West and improvising a shelter within the body of his horse and encountering an Indian we are told is "two spirited". With no news of Simon, the rich patriarch of the Gaunt family orders Charles and his macho, snobbish brother Addington to mount an expedition to try to find Simon and bring him back. From the start, Addington want to use the quest as an adventure to prove himself as a man, whereas Charles finds something missing in his aristocratic life in the open intersection of cultures and classes in the West. Above all, this tale is about the pathway of brothers, bound to each other by blood and legacy and traditions of British imperial dominance of the world, but like children they find divergent games and roles to play at on this stage. Other key characters include: Jerry Potts, the competent guide who suffers from being split between the cultures of the whites and the Indians and suffers from abandonment by his Crow wife and son for guiding a raid on her tribe; Lucy Stoveall, a feisty woman who joins their party seeking vengeance for the murder of her sister by itinerant trappers; and Custis Straw, a Civil War veteran who now prefers the company of women over violent men. Each is brought vividly to life, and I loved each of them as they rise to the challenges of changing circumstance and are forced to transform their initial purposes. There is a great love triangle in the story, side journeys, harrowing escapes from danger, and periods of comic relief. You will be taxed to figure out for yourself how much this is an absurdist satire and how much an old fashioned saga of romance and heroism. The balance made a nice treat for me. I leave you with a couple of quotes to convey some of the flavor of this Canadian author's writing. In the first, a journalist who seems to worship the cut of Addington's jib is closing his drunken discussion on the power of the pen relative to the sword in civilization with an example of his attack on hiring an Indian to serve at an Indian Affairs trading post: "Some years ago I wrote a small but influential pamphlet. The title was 'A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing.' " He allows us a moment to express our awe, as if he had said, "I once wrote a small poem, the title of which was Paradise Lost. ... "I maintained then and I have done so to this very day, that the army must deal with the Indians, not civilians. No nonsense from our red friends then. Let the logic of lead persuade them to mend their ways." I raise my glass, propose my toast. "To the power of the press. To influence bought for a penny a line. To the milk of Anglo-Saxon civilization which floats the cream." In a final example, Charles' party has trekked into the regions of the future Alberta and come across of group of Metis hauling buffalo meat to Ft. Edmonton (an emergent culture with part French and part Cree/Ojibwe heritage): To my mind, the Metis closely resemble a tribe of wandering gypsies. …Stirred by what I have seen, I remark to Lucy, "How fine it would be, my dear, if we could only live as those people do! A Metis man and woman, free of the constraints and prohibitions of civilized behavior!" Lucy turns a steady gaze upon me, brown eyes liquid, lustrous in the morning light. She studies me as Mr. Darwin must have studies his specimens, searching for the one clue that would be the key to understanding. I know she has remarked the unfortunate words I have employed'constrains, prohibitions, civilization; now she understands I think precisely in those terms. Leaning over, she brushes the corner of my mouth forgivingly with her lips. Nothing more is said. My essential self has been revealed.

Review # 2 was written on 2007-12-05 00:00:00 Jedi Vm This book has everything you need to make a historical novel suck. And not just moderate, forgivable sucking, but full-on golf ball through a garden hose suckage. Painstaking, ubiquitous research that adds nothing; language so stilted it topples off the page; unbelievable characters doing ludicrous things, but doing them -- importantly -- in period costume; overwrought British-accent narrative musings stretching to find some justifying meaning in the assinine shit-chimp plot. Also, a glowing cover blurb from Annie Proulx. What the fuck? My mind rejects it as true non-sense.