Nick Tooke, The Ballad of Samuel Hewitt

The plot-heavy, spoiler-free review bit

It begins with a dream, does Nick Tooke's debut novel The Ballad of Samuel Hewitt, the book's titular character edging up a foul, damp staircase and knowing in advance that at the top, he'll once again find a crucified raven asking for water.

Set in the cash-starved 1930s, mostly in BC but dipping as well into Washington and Oregon, The Ballad of Samuel Hewitt narrates a brief period of time where 17-year-old Samuel becomes a man. When the novel opens, his mother has left his father (a WWI veteran and schoolteacher whose school was closed because of the Depression) for the richest man in town. When a moving van arrives to claim his mother's last belongings, which means almost all the furniture and nice things, Samuel enlists his Indigenous 19-year-old best friend Charleyboy in a vengeful scheme to leave Ashcroft in a blaze of glory and guilt.

From there, as the book's back cover explains, the young men wander a world where casually unspeakable violence is never far away, until they connect with a travelling circus, where they find themselves caught once again in a web of allegiances and animosities, many of them driven by race and racism.

In the aftermath of the inevitable catastrophe, the question becomes how Samuel's story will develop, and for me, that's where the book gets genuinely interesting. The book's final chapters are beautifully written, and somehow both unpredictable but inevitable. The plot up to then is winding, almost picaresque, certainly episodic no matter how interwoven they might be, but suddenly it's animated by a momentum and a gravity that together carry you rapidly toward ... well, I did promise not to give you any spoilers.

Once Samuel breaks suddenly into his hard-earned maturity, his perspective shifts quite radically from his action-centred, damn-the-torpedos earlier days. Alone in the woods, not far from starvation, Samuel finds himself in a new relationship with the world and its beings: "he came to an inchoate understanding that his life was but a single note in a ballad as old as the planet and that every living thing--every cricket, every river, every bristling stalk of grass--was inseparable from the song" (p.157). Samuel's imagined ballad of the world, of course, doesn't overlap precisely with the ballad of Samuel Hewitt, and it's in this tension that the book sweeps toward its rich, satisfying resolution.

In terms of style, it feels a bit Sisters Brothers, a bit Cormac McCarthy, a bit Zane Grey: very appropriately Western, in other words, which was great. Even though I went to school with Nick (he was a grade ahead of me), I had to keep reminding myself that this was as new a book as it is. Only once was there a nod to the present, and even there, though I've kept puzzling over why Tooke included the reference, I'm still baffled about what it's doing in the novel:

"Along the lower slopes, beside the lake, he rode among orderly grids of apple and cherry orchards, as well as open pastureland and land as yet untended, still littered with black sage and rabbitbrush that in seventy years' time would be parcelled out and planted edge to edge with grapevine" (p.174).

The novel's set in 1934, so why gesture at 2004? But it's an irrelevant wondering, so who cares, really.

I enjoyed this novel a great deal, though not as much as Ginny Ratsoy writing in BC Review. Ratsoy found the place-based writing to be especially compelling, but except for the wonderfully immersive Ashcroft sections, I wasn't quite as convinced about that.

Tooke's interview with Open Book was useful, and I think it clarified for me why I appreciated its ending so much. It's not that I wanted the early sections to be different, though they could've been; it's fine that young Samuel Hewitt is a not atypical character in a Western. The wounded, healed, redemption-adjacent Samuel Hewitt, though, is something else altogether, and that's very special.

Judging from how Tooke describes his revision process in that interview, my sense is simply that he reconsidered his novel's ending so very deeply that for me, The Ballad of Samuel Hewitt moves in its final sections away from Zane Grey and toward Thomas Wolfe (both of whom died within the five years after this book's setting, in 1939 and 1938 respectively, though Wolfe was almost 30 years younger). I mean this as a compliment, I should say, and I say that as someone who has blogged three times about Grey here, though not for eleven years (good GOD, I'm old).

It's a terrible shame that this book was published in the depths of COVID, COVID's impact on publicity being so very unfair to such a great many writers, because I don't know why it couldn't have done at least Guy Vanderhaeghe numbers. Still, I was struck that the book's reviewers tended to spend so much time on the plot. As a few of the characters say, Samuel Hewitt's life is like a ballad, and I get that, but I wish they'd had more to say about the ending.

But then again, I'm not saying more about the ending either, but we're five years after its publication, so this post can't function as marketing.

Some worries, because of course, so spoilers

Charleyboy: I needed him to be less willing to follow the younger Samuel, and I needed his story to travel a different arc. He was essential to Samuel, and Charleyboy is the one who has always dreamed of working in a circus, so once they're working in a circus, the novel's on a particular path. When they're yanked off that path, and us with them, I got frustrated. The closing sections, the ones which come after the circus, are in my opinion the strongest sections of the novel, but that's no excuse for truncating Charleyboy's presence in the novel.

As I've said about other novels at Book Addiction HQ, including Gail Anderson-Dargatz' The Spawning Grounds, a settler writer needs to be very careful with how they handle Indigenous characters and stories. I'm hardly alone in this, and in some ways this tendency toward caution kind of defines Canadian fiction, or at least distinguishes it from British fiction about the same kinds of characters.

The blurb refers to Charleyboy as "[Samuel's] Shuswap friend," and indeed the Shuswap Nation Tribal Council is headquartered at Ashcroft, so that's fine, and writers can't be prevented from imagining the lives and dreams and histories of people unlike themselves. The convention in Canada, though, and it's a convention I respect, is generally to look for something like a sensitivity reader, and I don't see evidence of that here. The publisher may well have supported that, and it may well have happened off-stage, so to speak, in a context where the reader didn't want it mentioned in the acknowledgements section, but it's an absence. And given the somewhat stereotypical elements of Charleyboy's family life, along with his eventual disappearance from the novel, I found myself wishing more and more that Tooke had found a way to make Charleyboy's place in this novel richer than it was.

I had some worries, as I say, even though they're evidence-free and I'll be happy to correct anything I've gotten wrong here.

This was a very good read, though, and I'll cheerfully recommend it to other readers. If my father still read Westerns, I'd give it to him, and maybe I will anyway!

* Those three posts about Zane Grey are about the books The Vanishing American, Ken Ward in the Jungle, and Roping Lions in the Grand Canyon. Each one of those is ... a product of its time, shall we say, so yeah, if you ever read him, you'll find intensely outdated attitudes in amongst the redeeming qualities and everything else. The sometimes ruthless Wikipedia opens their bio of him this way: "Pearl Zane Grey (January 31, 1872 – October 23, 1939) was an American author and dentist."