The Life and Times of Captain N.

By (author) Douglas Glover
Categories: Historical fiction, Fiction and Related items
Publisher: Goose Lane Editions
Paperback : 9780864922977, 185 pages, April 2001

Description

Douglas Glover’s acclaimed novel The Life and Times of Captain N. is now available in a GLE Library edition. Originally published by McClelland & Stewart, the novel was acclaimed by the most respected critics in Canada and the US, and compelled The Toronto Star’s Philip Marchand to call Glover "one of the most important Canadian writers of his generation. " Set on the Niagara frontier in the final days of the American Revolution, The Life and Times of Captain N. sees the revolutionary new world order from the standpoint of the losers. Hendrick Nellis, a Tory guerrilla, has also been a redeemer of whites abducted by Indians. His son Oskar finds himself sometimes allied with the Indians, sometimes at war with them. Hendrick kidnaps Oskar for King George’s army, and Oskar, haunted by dreams and by books, is the teller of the tale. The book he intends to write is sketched out in his letters to George Washington and in the signs tattooed on his skin as mementos of his personal Indian wars. The Life and Times of Captain N. trespasses into the no-man’s-land where the delirium of combat drives races, genders, languages, and ideas into a primeval frenzy. Master of the psyche’s primitive depths, Douglas Glover draws the reader into a violent and erotic emotional whirlpool. Some of the incidents in The Life and Times of Captain N. are based on the lives of the real Hendrick Nellis and his family, and, says Glover, "I have no doubt their descendents and relatives on both sides of the border will find much to complain of. "

Reviews

Hendrick Nellis is a Tory guerrilla at the Niagara frontier at the end of the American Revolution; he is also a redeemer of whites abducted by Indians. He kidnaps his own son, Oskar, for King George's army, and it is Oskar, haunted by dreams, who tells this ambivalent tale of war and redemption.

The violent, erotic, and partly true story of The Life and Times of Captain N. trespasses into the psychic no-man's-land where the delirium of combat drives human nature into a primal frenzy.

"I have not read a book as beautiful as The Life and Times of Captain N. since I read Nabokov's Pale Fire. ... The Life and Times of Captain N., entirely comprehensive in terms of plot, becomes a kind of poem which reflects upon dreaming, history, headaches, and masks. . The writing is vigorous and beautiful but also precise and plot-driven (story on story)."

"I have not read a book as beautiful as The Life and Times of Captain N. since I read Nabokov's Pale Fire. ... The Life and Times of Captain N., entirely comprehensive in terms of plot, becomes a kind of poem which reflects upon dreaming, history, headaches, and masks. . The writing is vigorous and beautiful but also precise and plot-driven (story on story)."

- Shane Neilson