The Expeditions, by Karl Iagnemma (Dial Press, 2008)                                        (read June 2009)

A first novel set in mid-nineteenth century, about a minister in Massachusetts, Rev. William Edward Stone, whose son, Elisha, ran away three years earlier and whose wife has just died. He receives a letter addressed to his wife and recognizes the handwriting as that of his son, who is in Detroit planning to leave on a surveying expedition to the unexplored northern peninsula of Michigan. Rev. Stone decides to go find his son and tell him about his mother’s death.

Reverend Stone is obviously a sick man, probably dying. I thought he had a severe toothache, because he was always taking little brown tablets from a tin of “McTeague’s Patent Toothache Medication. But I finally realized that they must have been some kind of drug. Toward the end of the story he ruminates: “Where did he find calm? In a tin of tablets. His backdoor entrance to ecstasy. His sinner’s version of grace.” (p. 197)

Although Rev. Stone is obviously pastor of a church of some Protestant denomination, he carries on an unlikely conversation about purgatory with a girl, Adele Crawley, who claims to be a “spiritualist medium.” (p. 65) He also invites a man he met on his journey into a saloon for a “dram,” although Reverend Stone himself drinks a glass of cider. (p. 99) He also, at Jonah Crawley’s invitation, goes to a seance where Adele, the spiritualist medium, invites him to converse with his departed wife. Although he knows this is “foolishness and blasphemy,” he is drawn into the conversation, and Adele reports that Reverend Stone’s deceased wife and his son do not blame him. He says, “There is no reason for her to blame me,” and she goes on to say that his son “forgives you your selfishness. He knows it was borne from love.” (p. 104) Adele also conjures up news about his son, Elisha, who she says “is in some sort of danger, from other men. ... a white man ... not a Native.” (p. 105) At the end of his life, Reverend Stone wishes he could bring his son to Adele, so she could conjure up Elisha’s mother to “speak a single sentence to her son.” (p. 301)

Elisha, meanwhile, is off in the wilderness with an unlikely trio of companions: Mr. Silas Brush, the explorer scientist, who hopes to discover valuable minerals, like iron ore; Professor Tiffin, a scholar of native culture, who hopes to prove some kind of kinship between ancient Christians and native-Americans; and Susette Morel, a married Chippewa woman hired as a guide, since her husband, who had apparently promised to be their guide, was away somewhere. It seems to me extremely unlikely that three men would follow a female guide into the wilderness, but of course by making the guide female the author sets up the possibility of sexual tension and temptations.

Sure enough, 16-year-old Elisha is smitten with her, and at the end of Part 2, Chapter 3, she seduces, or is seduced by, him after they’d all be drinking some whiskey found in an abandoned cabin. Susette is improbable on several counts; she apparently has a French mother and can read and speak English and French, and when the four of them find some books in the abandoned cabin, she and Professor Tiffin read aloud Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, alternating parts. The next morning after the seduction, Susette disappears, leaving them without a guide.

The author’s description of Elisha and the others on the expedition seems reasonable, but his description of Elisha’s father, Reverend Stone, and what he does and apparently thinks, seems pretty far off the mark to me. When he finds himself in Detroit, asking everyone he sees about his son, I can accept that he might drop into a tavern on a rainy Saturday night and have a glass of cider. There may not have been any more respectable establishments open. It’s much harder to believe his readiness to sit down and gamble at cards with a stranger, to the point of losing nearly ten dollars and leaving him with a total of three dollars and eighteen cents. And the stranger turns out to be a Bible-quoting “Millerite,” who says softly, after taking Reverend Stone’s money, “I shall pray for you.” (p. 130) Not very likely.

It’s not clear to me what Reverend Stone’s denomination is, but it’s definitely not Baptist, since he talked about “severe competition from Baptists.” (p. 133)

What does Reverend Stone believe? It’s not easy to discern from the words and feelings attributed to him by the author. When he was in the Detroit “meetinghouse,” on the morning after his disastrous night at cards, “He began the next hymn feeling weightless: like sunlight, like music. He was filled with grace – the understanding pierced him, so that he momentarily lost the music’s rhythm. ... Reverend Stone proceeded up the aisle as if in a waking dream. I am near it, he marveled. I am within it. Bright husky chords surrounded him.” (pp. 132-133) An even murkier description of Reverend Stone’s notion of faith appears near the end of his life, when is thinking that he should speak to his son about his faith. (p. 364)

He describes his youthful “talent for prayer” like this: “Praying, his thoughts would slow to a crawl, the physical world falling away; then he would feel himself rising into calm joy. He felt humbled, bodiless.” (p. 197)

A converted Ojibway Indian described his conversion this way: “Presently I saw a light like a small torch. It appeared to come through the pine tree. My heart trembled. the light came upon my head and spread all through me. How happy I felt. I was as light as a feather. I called in English, ‘Glory to Jesus!’ I felt as strong as a lion yet as humble as a poor Indian boy.” (p. 199).

I can’t decide if Reverend Stone is just naive or incredibly stupid. He attends church, afterward meets with the pastor, and begs/borrows a substantial sum of money from him because he lost most of his money gambling in a saloon. Then what does he do but go back to the saloon with his pocket full of gold coins, pays for a cider with a gold half-eagle, in full sight of others at the bar. One of them, with a strong Irish accent, hit him up for a whiskey. Afterwards Reverend Stone, still wandering the city (“On a whim he started east, toward the river.”), is mugged by the Irish guy and another man, beaten, robbed, and left in the gutter. (pp. 140-141) Not a very believable scenario.

Back in his boardinghouse room, Reverend Stone is visited by Jonah Cauley, who brings him a map of the Michigan north country and in return asks Reverend Stone to perform a marriage ceremony for Cauley and Adele, whom he says is not his daughter but his “betrothed” – and she is pregnant. Reverend Stone at first refuses, because of his sin of “lying with a woman before matrimony,” but then after hearing Crawley’s story of how he met Adele and all she had done for him, and after Crawley gives him an “old Chickasaw remedy” for his cough, he relents and marries them.

Reverend Stone asked Crawley if he loved Adele, then, “Do you love her as deeply as you love the Lord?” When Crawley said yes, but it’s a different sort of love, Reverend Stone responds, “It is, yes. It has a certain texture, and warmth. And with it a sense of fragility. A fear that it might someday ... disappear.” (p. 168) Not sure I know what this means. Is he saying something about his own faith?

In Part Three of the book, we’re back with the expedition into the north country. Susette Morel returns to the party, with the explanation that she got lost in the woods. Although Elisha, at least, does not believe her, they welcome her back and keep going on the expedition. However, she confides in Elisha that, yes she lied about getting lost in the woods, but she also tells him that the “image stones” that Professor Tiffin is seeking to prove the ancient unity of the races do not exist; it was all a lie that her husband had told the professor to get the job of guiding the expedition. Furthermore, Susette said she wanted Elisha to help her fake her death, and lie to her husband about it, so she could start a new life, because her husband abused her and would track her down if he knew she was still alive.

The two expeditions continue. Susette leads the three explorers to the hill where the “image stones” were supposed to be found, and then she takes her half-pay and splits, after another liaison with Elisha. Of course, Professor Tiffin does not find the image stones he is looking for, with pictorial proof of ancient ties to the Hebrews of the Old Testament; all he finds are a lot of small flints ... until suddenly, several days later, he comes up with a stone tablet “the size of a Bible” which he claims he dug up under an ornamented bear skull on the hill. The tablet was “sheared flat on its face and etched with faint symbols,” which the professor referred to as an “artifact of the ancient Christians (!)” and interpreted as telling the story of a journey by a “band of Israelites” across the Atlantic to this place in northern Michigan. (pp. 259-260) The tablet turns out to be fake; Elisha had seen it in the professor’s hotel room in Sault Ste. Marie. But what is really absurd, apart from the professor’s confusing ancient Israelites with Christians, is the idea that he could have transported this heavy stone in and out of canoes and tramping through the wilderness, all without the slightest knowledge or suspicion of others in the party! That requires a greater suspension of disbelief than I can muster.

Meanwhile, the other expedition, with Susette’s husband leading Reverend Stone to try to find his son, proceeds slowly. On their way Reverend Stone talks to Morel about the doctrine of the Trinity and other theological mysteries, which seems absurd to me. Reverend Stone is too sick and frail to be of much help paddling the canoe, so Ignace Morel stops at an Indian settlement and hires a couple of young braves to help them.

The author’s description of Reverend Stone’s thinking is simply unbelievable. For example, while considering Ignace Morel’s character, with his searching for “comfort and pleasure in every aspect of life,” the minister reflects that this was a “difficult philosophy to refute. Hellfire and damnation were a preacher’s best strategies.” (p. 237) The implication is that Christianity has nothing good to say about comfort and pleasure but for some reason it must be opposed, so that’s why ministers preach hellfire and damnation. This does not reveal any insight into the thinking of ministers of the Gospel or into the Gospel itself. The author appears to be clueless.

He says to Ignace Morel, regarding Susette whom he never met but believes was drowned: “We grieve her absence but must take comfort in her new life with Christ.” (p. 291) And, “Let us pray together, Monsieur Morel, for the soul of your beloved wife. Together we shall pray for her soul’s peaceful rest.” (p. 295) Strange words from a Protestant minister.

The plot gets sillier and sillier. Led by his Indian guide, Reverend Stone finds his son and they are reunited in a scene that seems plausible to me. But Professor Tiffin, already denounced by Elisha as a fraud because he buried and then uncovered a fake image stone, is continuing his excavations and even announces that he needs four more days at it. Meanwhile, just before his father stumbles out of the woods, Elisha goes into Mr. Brush’s tent and reads his journal, discovering that Mr. Brush is a fraud too; he has described all the land as basically worthless, although Elisha remembers him being excited about the iron ore deposits.

When he sees his father, Elisha tried to apologize, but his father hushes him in words reminiscent of the parable of the Prodigal Son (“You were lost and now are found .... You were dead and now are alive.”) (pp. 279-280) But when Elisha asks his father why he came, Reverend Stone answers, “Another wise man told me that the spring of all human activity is the unease that accompanies desire. I felt uneasy.” (p. 280) Say, what?

Ignace Morel approaches Mr. Brush and asks where he wife is, and is told that she had vanished from camp six days earlier and that they had found “evidence of her clothing but nothing more.” Elisha agrees with this explanation and offers the Indian “my sincerest condolences.” Morel says he does not believe either of them; he runs to the edge of the clearing, picks up a rifle and disappears into the forest. Nevertheless, he reappears the next morning and, without another word, leaves with Reverend Stone and Elisha. Elisha had some harsh words with Professor Tiffin and Mr. Brush, called them both frauds, and demanded his “full wages for this summer’s work, vowing petulantly that he would “never speak your names, ever again.” (p. 285) He packs supplies for both his father and himself, and while Professor Tiffin and Mr. Brush “stood before their tents, stonily observing the scene,” he led the way into the forest, trailed by his father and Ignace Morel, apparently forgetting all about his full wages for the summer’s work. Again, this kind of plot development seems absurd to me.

Iagnemma can write; some of his descriptions are especially good, such as his description of the steamboat’s departure from Detroit on Lake Huron:

Rain stung his face and neck. He clutched his hat and hurried beneath an awning, braced himself against a pair of stanchions. The ship pitched, riding a swell down and then up in a twisting lurch. Reverend Stone thought he might be sick. The awning snapped like a carriage whip. It seemed impossible that they were sailing on a mere lake. (p. 196)

But then he also launches some clunkers: “A flicker passed through Morel’s eyes, like a wave beneath a lake’s surface.” What does that mean? I guess he thought it sounds good. After Elisha struggled with Ignace Morel and threw himself in the river, he was about to go under when his toe scraped a rock. “He surfaced, choking, probing the stony riverbank. At last he gained purchase and steadied himself against the current.” (p. 298) Later, when he tried to climb a tree going after a porcupine, “He scrabbled at the trunk but could not gain purchase on the slippery bark.” (p. 309) Apparently he thinks to “gain purchase” is an authentic 19th century way of speaking, and maybe it is, but it sure sounds strange.

There is a father-son relationship issue throughout the book. At the end, after he buries his father, the author writes, “His entire life, Elisha realized, he had tried to not fail his father, and the struggle had exhausted him; though perhaps that struggle was a form of love.” (p. 308)

But the characters, for the most part, never do come alive as real people. The plot, overall, is a good one, but it is poorly developed and many of its twists and turns are so unlikely that it caused me to lost interest. The author obviously did a lot of research, and his presentation of mid-nineteenth century science and technology is no doubt accurate, but the art of working it all seamlessly into a riveting story has eluded him. It was only mildly interesting to me, a C+ at best.