North Woods – Daniel Mason
Expectation: A straightforward historical fiction journey through a remote area of New England.
Reality: A dark, but accessible fairytale filled with ghosts — both literal and figurative — that excels at making the reader care about the dozen or so characters we meet. It was one of the more creative novels I read this year.
My Take:
Simply put, “North Woods” surprised me in the best of ways. I expected a straightforward historical fiction journey through a remote area of New England, but what Daniel Mason delivered was far more cerebral – and much, much darker.
I never could have guessed that a novel that started, expectedly, with a Puritan wife fleeing an oppressive community would end with a congregation of ghosts tethered to the property in a benevolent limbo watching the property bend to the whims of its current inhabitants.
The best analogy is that it’s akin to a fairytale. Each chapter provides a cautionary story about embracing the various faults of human nature — greed, desire, jealousy and ambition to name a few — but its quirky structure and various POVs, each punctuated with a small postscript, made this less depressing than it could’ve been.
When reading other novels that try this narrative approach — the leveraging of a location to propel a plot — I’ve been disappointed. What John Boyne with “A Traveler at the Gates of Wisdom,” Hernan Diaz with “Trust” and Brandon Taylor with “The Late Americans,” missed was that a revolving door of characters is not enough to sustain interest, you still need the reader to care about them.
And, that’s where Mason excelled. From an apple grower and his spinster daughters to a lovelorn landscape artist and pulp novelist, each of the 10 or so people we meet (not to mention the occasional animal) gives us a glimpse into the psyche of a person who puts down their guard in a safe space.
Sometimes it turns out okay for our characters, but frequently it does not. The energy from this unfinished or unresolved business is the thread that connects the stories across centuries, providing the reader with a quasi-mystery full of ghosts — both literal and figurative.
Even with an approachable storytelling angle, this won’t be to everyone’s tastes. As with all high concept novels, there’s a fair amount of pretentiousness in the delivery, and Mason didn’t do a great job of acknowledging how much time passed between chapters.
A few additional gripes: One of the more interesting concepts — whether or not the land was cursed or our characters all simply had bad luck — was only alluded to but never explored as a reason for why the people stick around (think American Horror Story “Murder House”). There was also little to no acknowledgment of the Indigenous history of the land; the story starts, essentially, at settler colonialism.
If you’re willing to give this a try — and you should — I highly recommend the audiobook excellently narrated by a full cast, including Michael Crouch, Jayne Entswistle, Billie Fulford-Brown, Arthur Morey, George Newbern, Simon Vance, and my personal favorite Kirsten Potter.
Mark Bramhall, takes on the largest share of the story as the narrator, and he offers the listener a smooth and folksy tenor that works in both the seventeenth and twenty first centuries, but Jason Culp reading “Murder Most Cold” and Mark Deakins, reading “Letters to E.N.” steal the show here providing the most amusing and emotional narrations, respectively.
Rating (story): 4/5 stars
Rating (narration): 5/5 stars
Format: Audiobook (library loan)
Dates read: November 26 – November 30, 2023
Multi-tasking: Not recommended. The connective threads between stories are rather subtle, and if you aren’t paying close attention you’ll miss crucial details that will make later chapters feel incomplete.
