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The Tenderness of Wolves
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By Stef Penney
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1 review
Ten-year anniversary edition of this bestselling book, with exclusive extra content.
1867, Canada: as winter tightens its grip on the isolated settlement of Dove River, a man is brutally murdered and a 17-year old boy disappears. Tracks leaving the dead man’s cabin head north towards the forest and the tundra beyond.
One-by-one various searchers set out from Dove River, pursuing the tracks across a desolate landscape home only to wild animals, madmen and fugitives, variously seeking a murderer, a son, two sisters missing for 17 years, a Native American culture, and a fortune in stolen furs before the snows settle and cover the tracks of the past for good.
In this modern classic, Stef Penney deftly weaves adventure, suspense, revelation and humour into a panoramic historical romance, an exhilarating thriller, and keen murder mystery that vividly conjures up the sights and smells of Canada’s frontier country.
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St Just Monday Morning Reading Group 26th August 2019.
The tenderness of wolves. Stef Penney.
There were quite a lot of opinions expressed about this book. Readers thought that it was better on a second read-through; that it took a long time to get started; that the subplots, and who was chasing whom, were confusing; that the pace was possibly too slow; and that the narrative contained too many elements.
Comparisons were made with Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, with Michael Punke's The Revenant, and with Patrick Gale's A Place Called Winter. We spent some time discussing the depiction of the Canadian landscape in this book, and the group's experiences of bad weather, none of which, we decided, were anything at all like northern Canada. We also talked about the sorts of clothing which they were likely to have had, and how they compared with modern weatherproof garments. Several readers had seen the Guardian's review of this book, in which we are told that, to our surprise, Stef Penney did all her research in the British Library and had never set foot in Canada at all.
We agreed that the book is very well written and interesting; we discussed the relationships in the narrative, and the character of Mrs Ross as a strong woman, the survivor of an abusive relationship in the asylum, who goes on to find her son. The Hudson Bay Company was compared with the East India Company with reference to empire-building and exploitation. The loss of the supposed Native American written tablet, which is lost at the crisis of the book, we thought was a 'McGuffin' – a plot device which is important to the narrative but insignificant in itself.
We found the book hard to categorise. It was at the same time a 'Western', though not in location; a romance, a thriller, and a detective story. The 'searching' element in the book might have meant people searching for themselves, we thought. The title provoked some debate – some readers saw this as an irrelevance (and were disappointed to find no real wolves in it), while others thought that possibly the 'wolf' was Parker, the mixed-race tracker, or that the wolves referred to people.
We found a lot to talk about from this book and a lot to admire, but the final opinion was that it would have been a more powerful book had it been more sharply focussed and slightly shorter.
