The Rifles: Volume Six of Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes - Softcover

William T. Vollmann is the author of ten novels, including Europe Central, which won the National Book Award.  He has also written four collections of stories, including The Atlas, which won the PEN Center USA West Award for Fiction, a memoir, and six works of nonfiction, including Rising Up and Rising Down and Imperial, both of which were finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers Award and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  His journalism and fiction have been published in The New Yorker, Harpers, Esquire, Granta, and many other publications.

Volume Six of Vollmann's vast, timeless epic Seven Dreams, this third novel (after Fathers and Crows, 1992) in the series takes up as its primary theme the lost 1845 expedition of Sir John Franklin to the Arctic in search of the Northwest Passage. As with any of this yarnspinner's weavings, however, temporal boundaries have been overcome; along with a close account of Franklin and his command suffering through several winters in the frozen North, slowly and painfully poisoned by lead in their canned provisions and finally locked in ice so that they had to abandon their ships and starve on a hopeless trek to civilization, are tales of forced Inuit relocations in the 1950's and the historical erosion of Inuit culture--starting with the introduction of rifles by early explorers and ending with rampant gasoline sniffing and other abuses in substandard settlements provided by the Canadian government. Through his own liaison, Captain Subzero, a modern-day reincarnation of Franklin, becomes linked with the ghost of the explorer's Inuit mistress from an earlier expedition--a bond that gives him license to view Franklin's ill-fated journey firsthand. Subzero exists in another form as well, as the author's alter-ego, and part of the chronicle involves a harrowing description of Vollmann's 12 days on ice, at an abandoned weather station far north of the Arctic Circle, where poor judgment and inferior equipment nearly brought him to a literal reenactment of Franklin's fate. Bleak icy vistas vie with evidence of human desolation at every turn in this restless, chilling saga--less monumental than its predecessors, perhaps, but every bit as challenging. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.