★★★★★ An angry love story

Northwest Passage

Kenneth Roberts

OK, confession. The title "angry love story" is not really accurate. Northwest Passage is a book that contains a lot of anger and also a love story, but they are mostly separate.

Kenneth Roberts was, I believe, my father's favorite author. Thus I read Northwest Passage as a high school student. I liked it, and subsequently read all of Roberts novels that I could get my hands on. There were two things that teenage me liked about Northwest Passage -- the anger and the love story. Northwest Passage is not the only Roberts novel that contains a love story, but it is definitely the sweetest.

The anger, though, that is a constant. Roberts books are full of railing against the corrupt idiots who, in Roberts perception, are most of humanity. Also, they are not difficult to identify -- anyone in history who has ever expressed an opinion or taken an action that Roberts disapproved is one. (I am sure this is unfair to him, but as a one-sentence summary of the impression he left on me, it is accurate.) To a high-school student this was entertaining. I suspect I would now be less amused.

One thing I will say in Roberts favor is that he is willing to champion the causes of heroes who have been abandoned by history. General Benedict Arnold, for instance, is a hero of several Roberts novels. (But not Northwest Passage.) His novel Oliver Wiswell is about an American loyalist -- that is, one of the Americans' who fought on England's side in the American Revolution. They lost that war, and of course their historical credit is low in the USA (but better in Canada, where many of them eventually ended up), while our heroes are the folks who defeated them -- the "Founding Fathers".

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