“The River Horsemen” by David Williams

“A poem is never finished,” Paul Valery once wrote, “it is only abandoned.” In that disquieting confession the poet announced what has become a standard dictum of the novelist’s craft in our time. For if we take “abandoned” to mean the novelist’s recognition that the wheel he has been turning has not stopped, but is only poised momentarily while his passengers catch their breath and he beats a hurried exit, we have come close to grasping the central issue of modern literature: how to end? Perhaps this question has troubled and inspired more striking inventions than any other single contemporary aesthetic consideration.

Closure is at once the necessity and the ultimate artifice in the modern novel, in the radical sense in which artifice means fabrication. It has led to finales which are less conclusions than they are endings, some experimental, some cute, and others merely spurious. We have had airplane endings, freeze frames, multiple conclusions, and even reprintings of the first page—the novel as ouroboros. In his new novel, The River Horsemen, David Williams has worked his own variation on this contemporary theme. Beneath the final chapter heading, “Wednesday,” Williams has printed a blank page: the reader is invited to complete the work himself.

This ingenious device borders on the stagey, but reflects one of Williams’ central concerns. The River Horsemen deals with what we know and how we know it. And the novelist is at pains throughout the work to demonstrate that the motives for acts are not only mysterious from the point of view of observers, they are often beyond the comprehension of the participants themselves. Thus he has created a novel of revelations in which the culminating gesture functions as an invitation for the reader to synthesize what he knows. It is a flourish worthy of some of our most intriguing post-modern writers.

In most other respects The River Horsemen does not quarry the contemporary or post-modern aesthetic. It is a fairly typical American narrative in some senses: the story of four men who for different but parallel motives journey together singlemindedly toward a predetermined geographical destination which, as the narrative unfolds, becomes a metaphor for a state of consciousness. We enter the world of Huck Finn and Deliverance, both of which Williams draws upon to evoke themes about man’s behaviour when reduced to the elemental. In The River Horsemen the men are two Indians, a boy, and a fallen evangelist, and the destination is Saskatoon. The journey takes place on the Saskatchewan River, in a canoe, and each man travels with his own goal in mind-for one it is to visit his dying mother, for another to track down a departed lover. The story is told from the points of view of the participants in a manner recalling Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. It concerns the interplay between the men, and the unfolding of their inner workings — intellectual and emotional.

As the novel progresses we come to know the four — Nick Sobchuck, Jack Cann, Manybirds, and Fine Day. Each is driven by personal loves and, we discover, lusts. When they do not dovetail with those of the others, each is capable of deceit and betrayal. Yet each is also capable of cooperation, even of caring, and this makes their story interesting and moving. Williams exercises tight control over his characters, using speech patterns, imagery, and syntax to develop their motives and explore their compulsions. Very early on we know these men, and it is to the skill of the novelist as observer of men and creator of language that we owe this awareness.

The old Indian, Fine Day, provides some of the best instances of the novelist’s skills in this regard. At one point Williams depicts the old man about to make a journey on a tractor, a machine he has never driven before:

Then I have to ride Horse off alone. Alone is not so bad, though, much safer than any People around. And then I can hardly believe that this is really me. Horse obeys me, the Sun beams warmly on my back, and the wind brings smells of grass and trees to me, so that I move through one great yellow lake of light. My heart sparkles.. . I can’t bear such happiness.

Here we have evoked the native consciousness in all its elemental beauty, with all its primitive power.

And much of The River Horsemen is a celebration of the primitive. Williams likes delving into the dark recesses of consciousness, glories in tapping the well-springs of lust, greed, pride — much of which he discovers in, and equates with, native habits of thought and the intuitions of the simple and deranged. Thus a large part of his novel is devoted to bringing to the surface the primitive images that compel each of his questers on this journey to the locus of life’s darker side. In each instance this is a woman, and one suspects that in The River Horsemen the journey is not toward woman so much as it is toward Woman, that original, final, and ultimately mysterious giver and taker of men’s lives.

Such portents clutter the novel. The hometown of the four questers is named Love. When the four are at the point of exhaustion a man called Wesley Porter provides them with sustenance by dividing among them his meal of fish and bread. A virtual compendium of Old and New Testament characters cross the path of the wayfarers whose names are surprisingly not variations of Matthew Mark Luke and John. And then there is the river: its symbolic resonances are exploited brilliantly and exhaustingly.

The novel is burdened with heavy intimations of Birth and Death and the giver of each, the Feminine Principle in the guise of the River. Indeed, from the time that the four men, each pointedly reminiscent of psychological types, board their canoe on the river, one senses that no water-going craft has borne a more ponderously weighted symbolic load since the ill-fated Pequod in Melville’s Moby Dick. At times the overt symbolism becomes a straining after effects — such as when the fallen evangelist, in the throes of a drinking bout, thrice denies his identity to his fellow carousers. One waits for the ominous hooting of a night owl, the prairie equivalent of Peter’s crowing cock.

Such contrivances, which cumulatively suggest that The River Horsemen is more a novel to be studied with The Golden Bough, From Ritual to Romance, The Myth of the Eternal Return, and other tomes at hand rather than merely to be read, mar the novel’s achievement. Mystification supplants mystery. And the loss can be measured in terms of the story these characters promised to make. When we come to that inviting, concluding carte blanche it reflects more the unfulfilled promise of a fascinating story than it does the enigmas and unknowables of life, which Williams has set out to explore for and with us.

Wayne Tefs is a Winnipeg critic and an editor at Turnstone Press.