From Kirkus Reviews
Idiosyncratic, inspired, and convoluted as ever, Vollmann offers the second installment in his seven-part series (Seven Dreams), moving from the Vikings and Vinland of The Ice-Shirt (1990) to the French and their impact on native populations in and around Quebec in the first half of the 17th century. Taking the Iroquois Saint Catherine Tekakwitha (1656-80) as a point of departure, Vollmann launches himself into a turbulent mytho-historico-geographical ``Stream of Time''--which in this case swirls and eddies first around the adventures of Samuel de Champlain, his comings and goings in New France, and his indefatigable efforts to map the unfamiliar territory for his own edification as much as for posterity. Always suspicious of the ``savages,'' meticulous in protecting the property of those chartered to reap the beaver harvest and other riches of the region while eager to gain his share, courageous and feared to the end, Champlain emerges as a man frequently at odds with circumstance but oddly worthy of his legendary status. The man of action gives way to men of the cloth in the latter half, as the Jesuits outmaneuver all opposition on a zealous mission of God to convert the Huron Nation or die trying. Advancing beyond the tentative fringes of French settlement along the St. Lawrence River, they seem to be the black-gowned harbingers of death when one plague after another decimates Huron villages. Happy to baptize the dead and the dying, they are resisted by shamans who have no power to halt either them or their diseases, but the ferocious Iroquois, traditional Huron enemies, are on hand to deliver the coup de grace. Jesuit martyrs are among the victims as the Huron cease to exist as a people but- -like Vollmann's restless dream-vision of North America--they are unstoppable. Vast and vivid as Canada itself, mingling the cold, deep waters of history with the present, and quixotic and ironic to its core. An immensely rewarding saga. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

ANNOTATION

With the same panoramic vision and mythic sensibility he brought to The Ice-Shirt, Vollmann continues his hugely original fictional history of the clash of Indians and Europeans in the New World. Through the eyes of vastly different peoples, Vollmann reconstructs America's tragic past.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Ready or not, we have an Ovid in our midst. In the second installment in his Seven Dream series, the 32-year-old Vollmann shows every sign of being equal to his self-appointed task of creating a ``symbolic history'' of the European settlement of North America. Following upon The Ice-Shirt (1990), which told of Leif Eriksson's Eric the Red's ``discovery'' of what is now British Columbia around A.D. 1000, Fathers and Crows chronicles the exploits of the French and the missionary Jesuits in Canada from the 16th to the 18th centuries. For all the book's historical trappings (six glossaries, a detailed chronology and 50 pages of source notes), it is less an historical novel than a novel about history. ``History is like a string that the cat has swallowed,'' says the cynical narrator, William the Blind: ``drawing events and eventsstet `events and events' from the poor creature's throat, one is surprised at how much must be disgorged.'' Indeed, Vollmann includes enough horrific descriptions of colonial North America--the impossible winters, the outbreaks of smallpox and scurvy (``Flesh blossomed in men's mouths like fungus''), the crude and heartless conflicts--to make the books of Francis Parkman seem like unctuous travel guides. Vollmann negotiates politically treacherous issues of dominant culture vs. native tradition with a skeptic's aplomb; swayed neither by notions of European individualism nor by those of Indian community, he has created an open text that invites all comers. Powerful as his performance is, however, the novel's breadth of time and incident and detail does not clarify so much as overwhelm. The character of History remains as irrational as the black-tentacled Indian force at the bottom of the Fleuve St.-Laurent. Still, Vollmann's ambition is without parallel, and clearly he has set in place another solid block of his audacious project. (Aug.)

Kirkus Reviews

Idiosyncratic, inspired, and convoluted as ever, Vollmann offers the second installment in his seven-part series (Seven Dreams), moving from the Vikings and Vinland of The Ice-Shirt (1990) to the French and their impact on native populations in and around Quebec in the first half of the 17th century. Taking the Iroquois Saint Catherine Tekakwitha (1656-80) as a point of departure, Vollmann launches himself into a turbulent mytho-historico-geographical "Stream of Time"—which in this case swirls and eddies first around the adventures of Samuel de Champlain, his comings and goings in New France, and his indefatigable efforts to map the unfamiliar territory for his own edification as much as for posterity. Always suspicious of the "savages," meticulous in protecting the property of those chartered to reap the beaver harvest and other riches of the region while eager to gain his share, courageous and feared to the end, Champlain emerges as a man frequently at odds with circumstance but oddly worthy of his legendary status. The man of action gives way to men of the cloth in the latter half, as the Jesuits outmaneuver all opposition on a zealous mission of God to convert the Huron Nation or die trying. Advancing beyond the tentative fringes of French settlement along the St. Lawrence River, they seem to be the black-gowned harbingers of death when one plague after another decimates Huron villages. Happy to baptize the dead and the dying, they are resisted by shamans who have no power to halt either them or their diseases, but the ferocious Iroquois, traditional Huron enemies, are on hand to deliver the coup de grace. Jesuit martyrs are among the victims as the Huron cease to exist as apeople but—like Vollmann's restless dream-vision of North America—they are unstoppable. Vast and vivid as Canada itself, mingling the cold, deep waters of history with the present, and quixotic and ironic to its core. An immensely rewarding saga.