From Publishers Weekly
Set in the 1800s during the exploration of the Northwest Passage, this is the sixth volume in Vollman's epic fictional history about European conquest and settlement in North America. Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
In an endnote to the latest installment in a projected seven-volume series, Vollmann states, "I have mixed my colors... from the palate of times." The Rifles addresses three historical topics in one hallucinatory narrative: the disastrous Franklin expedition to the North Pole in the 1840s, the Canadian government's forced relocation of Inuit families in the 1950s, and the devastating effects of Western technology on indigenous peoples. Captain Subzero, the book's narrator, journeys to Northern Canada in the 1990s, where he encounters the gasoline-sniffing descendants of a once-proud hunting race. Obsessed with Franklin, he retreats to a remote island outpost to experience cold and starvation firsthand. Huddled in his useless high-tech sleeping bag, Subzero "becomes" Franklin in a long fever dream that comprises most of the book. The text is augmented by maps, drawings, bibliographical notes, and a "consumer's report" on the equipment used. The Rifles is the best of the "Seven Dreams" series and one of Vollmann's most enjoyable books.- Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los AngelesCopyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Long, dense, and complicated, The Rifles is the sixth volume in Vollmann's series of novels chronicling the history of North America. This time, he deals with the Arctic, moving back and forth in time between the present day and the nineteenth century, when Sir John Franklin, a British explorer, sailed in search of a Northwest Passage. Having made three previous Arctic voyages, the aging Franklin is confident of the success of his fourth expedition. However, his ships are icebound for several years, and the enterprise ends in disaster. Meanwhile, in the 1990s, a white man known as Captain Subzero becomes obsessed with Reepah, an Indian woman living in the Northwest Territories town of Resolute, where a number of Inuit families had been forcibly moved some 40 years before. As the two strands of the novel unwind, it becomes apparent that Captain Subzero is a reincarnation of Sir John Franklin and that Franklin is also in some way Subzero. Vollmann's most compelling sections deal with Franklin's ill-fated expedition and the growing hopelessness of his men as they face starvation and death. The shifts in time, the characters that appear in one century and reappear in another, the nature of the landscape, and Vollmann's imaginative powers suffuse the book with a dreamlike quality; moreover, with maps and other illustrations, four different glossaries, and a long list of sources, the book is challenging to read. Even so, the prolific Vollmann, with four books in 1992 and two in 1993 (one of which, Thirteen Stories and Thirteen Epitaths , is a Booklist Editor's Choice title for 1993) is widely popular. Mary Ellen Quinn


From Kirkus Reviews
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.

FROM OUR EDITORS

Sixth in a series of critically acclaimed historical novels examining the clash of Native Americans & their European colonizers. "The Seven Dreams sequence is likely to become one of the masterpieces of the century."--Madison Smartt Bell, Chicago Tribune.

ANNOTATION

The latest installment of Vollmann's seven-part epic chronicling the clash of Europeans and Native Americans in the New World. Volume six focuses on the white explorers of the mid-1800s, desperately dreaming of forging a Northwest passage.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The Rifles establishes more firmly than ever before that William Vollmann is, in the words of the The Washington Post, "the most prodigiously talented and historically important American novelist under thirty-five." This work, the sixth in Vollmann's projected seven-novel cycle examining the clash of native Americans and their European colonizers, is at once a gripping tale of adventure, a contemporary love story, and a chronicle of the ongoing destruction of Inuit lifeways. It is one hundred and fifty years ago. Our continent has been mapped east, west, and south, but the white explorers who hope to discover the Northwest Passage have found only ice and death. Sir John Franklin - cheerful, determined, and dangerously rigid - sets out to complete the Passage with hundreds of men and supplies for three years. This is the third Arctic expedition he has commanded; on both of the others he has defied the warnings of the Inuit and Indians he's encountered along the way. This time he's not coming back. By 1990, Franklin and his mapmakers have conquered. In the prefabricated towns of the Canadian North, teenagers are sniffing gasoline, and the Inuit families who were forcibly relocated by the government in the 1950s are starving and have lost their sense of purpose. Reepah, a young Inuk woman in hopeless circumstances, is seduced and left pregnant by a white man who, terrified by his own self, prepares to assume Franklin's fate. Written with the same stylistic daring and gritty realism which has characterized all of his work, The Rifles weaves together these stories form the past and the present with Vollmann's own travels. Most dramatic of all is his eerie account of a midwinter solo trip to the North Magnetic Pole, which he put himself through at considerable personal risk in order to relive, through imagination, the last days of the Franklin expedition.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

The Rifles is the ``sixth dream'' in Vollmann's staggeringly ambitious Seven Dreams sequence, which promised to be an imaginative charting of the European conquest and settling of North America. And it is the third dream to be published (Vollmann is breaking chronological order), following The Ice-Shirt and Fathers and Crows , which detailed the Viking arrival in Newfoundland at the end of the first millenium and the French foray into the St. Lawrence River region in the middle of the second, respectively . The Rifles jumps to about 1850 and chronicles, in a highly impressionistic manner (though, like all Vollmann's work, it is prodigiously researched and gracefully written), Sir John Franklin's ill-fated expedition in search of the Northwest Passage. By now, more than 2000 pages into the Dreams project, an evolving structure is becoming evident. Whereas in the previous two books, contemporary references were kept to a minimum, in this volume the authorial present, in the guise of Captain Subzero, is a strong structural element. In fact, the central imaginative conceit is that Subzero/Vollmann (the author's own trip to the Arctic Circle is detailed in the endnotes) becomes a spiritual ``twin'' of Franklin, even sharing the same Inuk woman. Readers wishing for a dramatic re-creation of Franklin's expedition will be disappointed, for Vollmann is more interested in the cultural clash between Europeans and Arctic natives, and the rough fates of both. The elliptical, frenetically snapshot style grows tiresome at times, and one has the sense that Vollmann is desperately at work on historical material that is yielding little that is new, making his own increased presence a necessity. (Feb.)

Library Journal