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Shadows Gathering
The noonday sun mercilessly scorched the nodding wheat field of Black Bill Jones’s farm. Occasionally a welcome little gypsy breeze lazed across the field rolling the grain heads before it in long flowing waves, but for the most part the men just had to sweat it out in the still, hot air…
An epic tale of love, murder, and war, Richard Pope’s Shadows Gathering offers a haunting glimpse into rural Canada during the tumultuous days of World War I.
With stunning detail, readers are transported back and forth between a logging camp in 1909, where a tragic accident with far-reaching consequences takes place, and the daily lives, loves, and hopes, of an isolated village’s inhabitants in 1914.
A richly imagined cast of characters including Poles, Germans, Blacks, Irish Catholics, and English Protestants contributes to a rich social fabric that is racked by war, love, and a violent crime that haunts them all.
Follow the rise and fall of a tenacious community as dreams of patriotism wither in the brutal reality of war, a poignant romance comes to its inevitable conclusion, and a group of common villagers are forced to endure the inevitable devastation war leaves in its wake.
An epic tale of love, murder, and war, Richard Pope’s Shadows Gathering offers a haunting glimpse into rural Canada during the tumultuous days of World War I.
With stunning detail, readers are transported back and forth between a logging camp in 1909, where a tragic accident with far-reaching consequences takes place, and the daily lives, loves, and hopes, of an isolated village’s inhabitants in 1914.
A richly imagined cast of characters including Poles, Germans, Blacks, Irish Catholics, and English Protestants contributes to a rich social fabric that is racked by war, love, and a violent crime that haunts them all.
Follow the rise and fall of a tenacious community as dreams of patriotism wither in the brutal reality of war, a poignant romance comes to its inevitable conclusion, and a group of common villagers are forced to endure the inevitable devastation war leaves in its wake.
329 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 22, 2014
3 people want to read
About the author
Richard Pope
25 books5 followersRichard Pope is a birder and life-long naturalist who taught Russian literature, culture and history before retiring. He writes historical fiction about the fur trade, the voyageurs, and the First World War.
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April 2, 2015
In his debut novel, Pope combines a murder/rape mystery in a Canadian small town on the eve of the Great War with the shock and devastation that the far-away conflict inflicted on communities across the Atlantic.
With a perfectly tuned ear for the vernacular, and a love for the historical record, the author introduces us to sights, scents, eccentricities, fears and dangers faced by farming communities in Canada at the turn of the 20th century when the vagaries of weather could spell feast or famine, death or dismemberment. There are plenty of off-beat characters in the small town of Fox's Creek, where allegiances and enmities run deep and through generations. Young Billy and Anna are the star-crossed lovers, parted when Billy volunteers with three other local boys to head off to war. On the eve of his departure, a murder-rape takes place scarring the lovers and placing doubt in the minds of the town folk. Billy's and his buddies' war escapade follow on the heels of this incident and is told in a rapid epistolatory format, culminating in the inevitable tragedy that most Canadian families had to endure at this time. This revelation by me may sound spoiler-like, but not to have ended the novel where Pope did would have rendered it a fairy tale.
I enjoyed the cast of characters from Black Alex, to Slow Bob, to Simple Jack, to Chicken Jimmy, whose names alone reveal their quirkiness. The murder and rape scenes are well drawn to conceal the identities of the perpetrators, and the journalistic reporting that peppers the novel is humorous for it betrays the subjectivity and prejudice that were acceptable at the time - we have come a long ways in objective reporting it appears despite all the bashing the press gets these days. The letters, that comprise the bulk of the last part of the book, illustrate the varying levels of education in the population at the time.
I did not enjoy the intrusive and controlling omniscient narrator who had to ensure that every character was in their place in every scene, and who made it a point to keep us abreast of each character’s thoughts. A limited third person view of some of the key cast members would have worked better to my liking. That said, as this is a historian writing a novel, and because he is trying to capture a whole town and its inhabitants and their interactions - no mean feat - I let go of my irritation on the basis that crowd-herding and tight stage management were par for the course in this tome. If he was trying to emulate an early 20th century writing style to blend with his story, then Pope has succeeded.
Pope's novel left me pondering several facts of a forgotten life: insular communities are only the tips of icebergs under which seething passions form the lurking menace below the water level; the world was a smaller place a hundred years ago, such that the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace was the biggest event hitherto witnessed by our four volunteer soldiers; men went into depression when they were rejected for military service on health or age grounds, despite their 'luckier' colleagues ending up dead in rat infested trenches; when communities sent their young to war, their lives back home hung suspended on the outcome; joining the armed forces suddenly made impoverished farmers rich; war is a game devised by old men to be waged by young men, and both lose in the end. The irony is that while some of these conditions have changed today, some still remain the same.
With a perfectly tuned ear for the vernacular, and a love for the historical record, the author introduces us to sights, scents, eccentricities, fears and dangers faced by farming communities in Canada at the turn of the 20th century when the vagaries of weather could spell feast or famine, death or dismemberment. There are plenty of off-beat characters in the small town of Fox's Creek, where allegiances and enmities run deep and through generations. Young Billy and Anna are the star-crossed lovers, parted when Billy volunteers with three other local boys to head off to war. On the eve of his departure, a murder-rape takes place scarring the lovers and placing doubt in the minds of the town folk. Billy's and his buddies' war escapade follow on the heels of this incident and is told in a rapid epistolatory format, culminating in the inevitable tragedy that most Canadian families had to endure at this time. This revelation by me may sound spoiler-like, but not to have ended the novel where Pope did would have rendered it a fairy tale.
I enjoyed the cast of characters from Black Alex, to Slow Bob, to Simple Jack, to Chicken Jimmy, whose names alone reveal their quirkiness. The murder and rape scenes are well drawn to conceal the identities of the perpetrators, and the journalistic reporting that peppers the novel is humorous for it betrays the subjectivity and prejudice that were acceptable at the time - we have come a long ways in objective reporting it appears despite all the bashing the press gets these days. The letters, that comprise the bulk of the last part of the book, illustrate the varying levels of education in the population at the time.
I did not enjoy the intrusive and controlling omniscient narrator who had to ensure that every character was in their place in every scene, and who made it a point to keep us abreast of each character’s thoughts. A limited third person view of some of the key cast members would have worked better to my liking. That said, as this is a historian writing a novel, and because he is trying to capture a whole town and its inhabitants and their interactions - no mean feat - I let go of my irritation on the basis that crowd-herding and tight stage management were par for the course in this tome. If he was trying to emulate an early 20th century writing style to blend with his story, then Pope has succeeded.
Pope's novel left me pondering several facts of a forgotten life: insular communities are only the tips of icebergs under which seething passions form the lurking menace below the water level; the world was a smaller place a hundred years ago, such that the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace was the biggest event hitherto witnessed by our four volunteer soldiers; men went into depression when they were rejected for military service on health or age grounds, despite their 'luckier' colleagues ending up dead in rat infested trenches; when communities sent their young to war, their lives back home hung suspended on the outcome; joining the armed forces suddenly made impoverished farmers rich; war is a game devised by old men to be waged by young men, and both lose in the end. The irony is that while some of these conditions have changed today, some still remain the same.
Displaying 1 of 1 review