Coming of age in North America

The Last Crossing

By Guy Vanderhaeghe

Grove, 393 pp., paperback, $14

Voyageurs

By Margaret Elphinstone

Canongate, 466 pp., $24

Though he probably wasn't the first to make the observation, the late American writer John Gardner used to say that there are only two basic story plots: a stranger comes to town, or somebody embarks on a journey.

Work a few specifically detailed variations on those ingredients, combine them, and you have the formula for two of this year's most hearty and satisfying novels: romances of endurance and self-discovery set in the still essentially untamed North American and Canadian western wildernesses during the 19th century.

Saskatchewan author Guy Vanderhaeghe (a two-time winner of a major Canadian literary prize) offers the ambitious tale of a perilous quest undertaken at the behest of wealthy Victorian industrialist Henry Gaunt. Gaunt's youngest (and favorite) son, Simon, has been reported disappeared while on a mission to convert the "savages" of Montana and northwestern Canada to Christianity.

Gaunt entrusts Simon's fate to his elder brothers: Simon's twin, Charles, a struggling painter whose artistic temperament disgusts his pragmatic father, and Addison, a semi-disgraced former soldier (involved quite materially in a brutal massacre of Irish civilians) and a perverse embodiment of masculine energy and swagger.

The brothers' contrasting natures are quickly established as the heart of the narrative. But the incompatible pair are surrounded by and enmeshed with the agendas of those who become their fellow travelers. Scots-Indian halfbreed woodsman Jerry Potts (a real historical character), hired as the Gaunt party's guide, is distracted by guilt over his Blackfoot brothers' genocidal aggression toward their enemies the Crows. Journalist-for-hire Caleb Ayto slavishly records Addison's irrational insistence on exercising "his taste for outdoor life and adventure" (instead of seeking Simon). Gritty Lucy Stoveall, the expedition's cook and its only woman member, plots to avenge her younger sister Madge's rape and murder by itinerant whiskey peddlers. And wounded Civil War veteran turned horsetrader Custis Straw, who's immediately and permanently smitten with Lucy, devotes his dwindling energies to protecting her (as does Charles, who also loves Lucy).

Vanderhaeghe tells their several stories in a constantly shifting narrative that employs multiple narrators and detailed flashbacks to Charles's troubled earlier relationship with the angelic Simon, Addison's deservedly checkered past, Lucy's dreadful early marriage and hard life, and Simon's wilderness misadventures, suffered as a consequence of his allegiance to his mad mentor Rev. Obadiah Witherspoon (a fundamentalist who has persuaded himself that the indigenous northwest Indians are descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel).

Vanderhaeghe's agreeably crowded tale recalls the vivid western American fiction of such unjustly neglected genre masters as Vardis Fisher, A.B. Guthrie Jr., Mari Sandoz, and H. L. Davis. The work of an earlier great exemplar -- James Fenimore Cooper -- is evoked in a rich new novel from his lineal descendant Scottish writer Margaret Elphinstone, whose critically praised earlier novels include "Islanders" and "The Sea Road."

Elphinstone's "Voyageurs" begins with an "Editor's Preface" in which the author claims the story about to unfold is a memoir, discovered in a farmhouse in northern England in 2003, nearly two centuries after it was penned by Quaker farmer Mark Greenhow.

The ensuing narrative, bolstered with (arguably too many) "footnote" addenda and reflective commentary developed years after Greenhow's experiences, is an essentially linear one, which begins when he arrives in North America in 1812. Mark has traveled thence to search for his impulsive sister Rachel, who had married a non-Quaker (Scotsman Alan Mackenzie), consequently been dismissed from the Society of Friends, and fled to the New World, where the heartbreak of a stillborn child drove her inland, on a mission of her own making.

Joining voyageurs who transport furs across the vast Canadian expanse, Mark does catch up to his elusive brother-in-law (an employee of the North-West fur trading company and, very likely, a freelance spy), becomes involved in the burgeoning War of 1812 (begun as an international quarrel over trading rights), and finds his pacifist ideals sorely tested and unexpectedly altered.

Mark's arduous passage -- to the western Great Lakes, then beyond, into the northern United States -- is both initiation into a conventional manhood and a journey toward understanding that the world is a far more complicated and dangerous place than the Society of Friends had obliged him to believe.

The articulation of such ambiguities through Mark's appealingly innocent, hopeful voice is the greatest achievement of an artfully woven fiction also graced by totally convincing re-creations of the furnishings, folkways, and attitudes of a vanished and partially understood past.

Nothing compares with the bracing experience of becoming absorbed in the lives and conflicts of a bygone age, re-created by a novelist who has done the homework and imagined the remote past as a living presence.

Bruce Allen is a frequent reviewer of contemporary and classic fiction who lives in Kittery, Maine.