The Old American and Peter Loon
Categories: Rediscoveries , Staff Picks , Fiction
I’ve been reading some old historical fiction lately since a friend encouraged me to try Kenneth Roberts’ novels of the American frontier and Revolution, which were written in the 1930s.
It’s taking me back to childhood, when that kind of sturdy, old-fashioned American adventure story was what I found on my parents’ and grandparents’ bookshelves.
Nowadays I’m seeing more books with courtiers and courtesans and queens on the covers than eighteenth-century American frontiersmen. But in recent years, there have been some American historical novels as transporting as any bestselling time travel romance. Very different from those earnest childhood tales, though.
Here are two splendid ones: The Old American, by Ernest Hebert, and Peter Loon, by Van Reid.
The Old American is based on the known facts about Nathan Blake, a New Hampshire settler who was taken by Algonquin Indians during an attack in 1746 and served as a slave to them in Quebec for three years. The star of this story isn’t Blake, though, but his (wholly fictional) captor, Caucus-Meteor.
Caucus-Meteor, the son of a rebellious Wampanoag chief, was a prisoner of war himself for years in America and in Europe. His skills as an interpreter, his heritage as the son of a king, and the force of his own extraordinary personality have made him in his old age the leader of a band of Indian outcasts and refugees from several unsettled and decimated tribes.
Caucus-Meteor is accompanying a French and Indian raiding party as interpreter when he comes across Blake’s cabin and later impulsively captures him. He believes that Blake will complicate his life in interesting ways, and thinks it is good for a king and an old man to be humbled and surprised at times.
The interaction of these two very different men and their cultures is deeply fascinating and often moving, not the typical American frontier tale at all. This subtle, surprising, and thought-provoking novel is highly recommended for fans of historical fiction.
Then, for something completely different, there’s Van Reid’s Peter Loon. It’s another New England story, set in the Maine Territory of Massachusetts after the Revolution, when a second war, between the settlers and the wealthy holders of land grants, threatened the new states.
On the night of his father’s death, Peter is awakened by his mother and told to go look for his long-lost Uncle Obed, really an old suitor of hers. Peter sets off on the quest and immediately plunges into adventure. He makes the acquaintance of men on both sides of the growing conflict, plus an assortment of pretty girls, and is caught in the middle just as he begins to realize how complicated the issues involved are.
Deliberately old-fashioned in its telling, this Dickensian story of an innocent young man awakened to the wider world is a delightful addition to a classic genre. It also tells a little-known chapter in American history.
