Helen Birtwistle
posted 20 April 2007

Stef Penney’s debut novel was greeted with quiet but enthusiastic reviews from the literary press when it was released last September. When it was announced in February that she had scooped the Costa book of the year, a flurry of attention greeted the novel, not, as one would expect, because of its new found status as a literary tour de force, but because its author reportedly once suffered from agoraphobia. Following a plethora of in-depth interviews detailing which therapy the author favoured and the inevitable strain of air and train travel, another controversy arose. Penney had never visited the backdrop to her novel, the desolate interior of northern Canada. Does lack of direct experience, the reviewers seemed to argue, make for a less credible novel?

Penney’s later inclusion on the Orange longlist also raised a few eyebrows from award purists and reportedly sponsors, bemused that the judging panel should overturn a tradition that different awards rarely, if ever, share the same titles. Considered in light of the chair of judges Muriel Gray’s plea however; that female writers ‘dream bigger dreams’, ‘take risks’ and use their imagination, The Tenderness of Wolves stands tall as a work of considerable ambition. In defending their choices, this year’s Orange prize judges answered their critics by energetically stating that their one and only criterion was excellence. But as Gray went on to criticise contemporary female fiction writers’ tendency to focus on the domestic confines of everyday life, it is noteworthy that almost all writing on Penney’s work seems to illustrate a concurrent trend amongst the literary editors of the mainstream press, who have salaciously leapt on any hint of ‘real-life’ detail that might proffer some insight in to the recesses of Penney’s imagination.

Penney’s novel is set in 1867, and opens in Caulfield, a small and recent settlement in the depths of northern Canada. Mrs Ross, the novel’s main protagonist, has found the murdered body of a local tracker, the mysterious ‘frenchie’, Laurent Jammet. Having informed the local magistrate, a band of lieutenants from the Hudson Bay Company (the sole trading entity and authority of much of the region prior to 1860) are called upon to investigate, and arrive at the settlement to untangle what is the first murder ever to blight the community. As the company men visit and interview Caulfield’s inhabitants, Mrs Ross becomes concerned that her young son, the aloof loner Francis, is nowhere to be found. A confidante of the murdered tracker, Francis becomes a sought after witness, and suspicions arise when he fails to return. Concerned that her son is implicated in the investigation, Mrs Ross embarks upon an arduous journey to find him, her companion an American Indian called Parker, who is also a murder suspect.

The Tenderness of Wolves is first then the story of a mother’s quest to find her errant son and second, an unravelling of the mystery surrounding the murdered Jammet. But against the stark backdrop of the Canadian outback, plot and sub-plot forestall an epic adventure that sees Penney marry murder mystery, with western, with studied, historical novel on the whole very successfully. Moving chapter by chapter, from first to third person narrative, the weight of the novel lies with the character of Mrs Ross, who, we are told ‘is not popular in the town, for she gives the impression of looking down her nose at people, although by all accounts (and he has heard some pretty hair-raising gossip) she has nothing to be conceited about.’ Although it is in Mrs Ross that we find most in the way of emotional and moral development as, it is through the supporting characters, told in the third person, that Penney’s research endeavours finds fruition.

Having reportedly spent over two years researching the social, political and cultural history of North America, Penney is adept at communicating historical and social interest via her secondary characters. She is clearly fascinated by the impact of European settlement on American Indians, and it is the learned maverick Sturrock, for example, who allows Penney to explore the possibility of finding a Native American written tradition, and satisfy what is clearly a fleeting interest in philology. Similarly, the intertwined nature of the murder plot enables the writer to scrutinise and lay bare the underbelly of power within the Hudson Bay Company, guardians of order and stability in 19th century Canada and beyond.

While in many cases Penney’s obvious fascination with her material bolsters the narrative, however, there are other occasions when fancy obstructs her story. When a trail leads a group of characters to a Norwegian religious settlement and focus shifts to a dissatisfied and yearning widower for example, we are left with little sense of the episode’s purpose within the overall structure of the book. The under-developed relationships between the Ross family, and a revelation regarding Francis’ relation to the murdered trailer Jammet is also a little cumbersome and clumsily done, heightening the sense that Penney has at times sacrificed the more complex emotional and social aspects of her novel to the conventions of the forms she is so eager to flit between. At times the shift from murder mystery to western action to unrealised love story can appear just too onerous and self-conscious a task.

But even whilst this hotch potch of trajectories can make for a jumbled tale, there is no doubt that in Mrs Ross, Penney has created a character of great subtlety and imagination, whose presence, whether relayed by herself or others, is enough to make the story a compelling and satisfying work. Penney weaves together a fractured and kaleidoscopic past that the reader is never quite able to piece together; we are given mnemonic flashes of significant past events that provide an unusual knowingness and insight in to the main character.

Penney’s flitting between past and present, like her use of first and third person also often adds significant depth to the book. Mrs Ross in particular is revealed layer by layer, as pieces of her personal history are divulged throughout the narrative. We see the young Mrs Ross lose her mother, who was committed to an asylum, and then make the journey with her husband across her home country Scotland and then to Canada, adopting a young child to ease the pain of an earlier infant death, and finally in the search for her missing son. As Mrs Ross journeys through forest, snow storms, across mountains and river, two of Penney’s most notable accomplishments, the developing character of Mrs Ross and the conjuring of so unforgiving a landscape, meet, mirroring the other more and more. As she travels further and further in to the depths of northern Canada, alongside Parker, we the readers are given a palpable sense of Mrs Ross’ swelling personal freedom, a freedom that had somehow been lost along the way.

It is also of course this achievement, the conjuring of so robust and developed a character, that seems to have inspired the search for a real-life ‘Mrs Ross’ in the shape of Stef Penney herself. Judging by the reviews offered by some journalists and critics, it is incomprehensible that an author should be able to create a strong character, without there being a direct reflection of herself, and an illness or vulnerability through which to identify her. But to focus either on illness or on the novelist herself is to miss completely what makes Penney’s book an able and deserving contender in both the Costa and the Orange prizes. Whilst flawed, Penney’s book is the ambitious and imaginative undertaking that Muriel Gray suggests is so important a task for female writers.