A brother's sacred, deadly duty

Every few years, in the service of boosting or gutting public education, someone interviews high school seniors to demonstrate how little Americans know about their own history. Typically, from these studies we learn that Ben Franklin invented lightning or that Noah Webster saved the stars and stripes by collecting them two-by-two on the Arc de Triumph.

Into this dark climate dares come a marvelous historical novel called "Voyageurs." Margaret Elphinstone garnered rave reviews in England last year, but in the American market, her book is a perfect storm for commercial disaster, a combination of conditions and subjects that could sink even the best writer: It's really long; it's set against the most obscure conflict in American history, the War of 1812; it takes place mostly in Canada; and it's narrated by an earnest Quaker.

Abandon ship!

Fortunately, the British publisher, Canongate, is relatively new to the American market or it might not have had the optimism to release "Voyageurs" here, and we would have missed this rich and moving novel.

Elphinstone presents the story as a manuscript found in the attic of her house during remodeling in 2003. The author of these faded pages was a Englishman named Mark Greenhow, who begins, "I would be content even now were it not for my sister Rachel." And so we're drawn into this tale of reflection and adventure, back to 1809, when Mark and his parents received anxious, infrequent letters about Rachel's missionary work in the most remote forests of Canada.

She was traveling with a devout aunt to spread the Light among the natives, but she fell under the spell of a slick fur trader named Alan McKenzie. When she married him, their Quaker society back home in England disowned her in abstentia, as she knew they would. But the next letter brings even more dire news: After losing her first baby, Rachel wandered into the Canadian wilderness and was never seen again.

For Mark, this disaster culminates a lifelong burden of looking after his strong-willed sister. "She was never one to worry about the way back," he writes. "I knew, though, from early on, that it was my place to worry about it for her. Rachel expected that of me, and so did my parents; indeed, it is what I expected of myself."

A letter from Rachel's husband, Alan, confirms that the case is hopeless, but Mark resolves to make the journey from England to Quebec and then on to the Great Lakes. As he moves into this territory, he also ventures into the thickly grown complexity of sibling affection and resentment.

"I was hugely, furiously angry with Rachel," he realizes one morning, shivering in a damp blanket. "All her life she'd asked me for things. All her life I'd taken what she dealt out. All her life I'd had to accommodate her, to live with her, rescue her, listen to her...." Then he must admit, "But I could never help admiring Rachel too."

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