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In the preface, Quinn indicates that the chapters that follow will each be rendered in the style of the writer most suited to the subject: Corneille, Longfellow, Virgil, you name it. Fortunately, this overly precious approach gets tossed right after the overly precious first two and a half pages; from there on out it's pretty much all Quinn all the time. Each chapter follows a similar formula: Quinn gives us his take on the guy in question, follows him from shortly before the beginning of his involvement with the New World to his death, and then speculates on what the poor fellow's ghost might make of the whole business. And the pages just fly by, for Quinn's collection of wonderful anecdotes is the size of a continent and his narrative is often simply a matter of stringing them together. You could rip the book into its component paragraphs, draw a fistful out of a hat, and be hard pressed to find a single one that isn't fascinating in and of itself.
Of course, Quinn could no doubt manage to wring gripping prose out of the history of amendments to the North Dakota state tax code. For one thing, he's relentlessly witty, peppering his tales with running jokes (on one page he quotes Governor Subercase of Acadia lamenting to his superiors that he's had to sell his furniture to be able to afford to maintain the garrison, and then in telling of the surrender years later mentions that "Subercase himself was allowed to take six cannon with him, but these in fact he quickly sold to the British to be able to pay off his remaining debts before leaving, and perhaps to buy back a few of his chairs") and adding humorous flourishes to even the most mundane incident. (Regarding the interrogation of a captured messenger: "He inquired of the British emissary, now his hostage as well, where the British commander had his headquarters. If Subercase only knew, he could make certain that it was spared cannon fire. The French were going to win this contest, but they certainly wanted to win it fairly. Subercase would feel personally almost dishonored if a stray cannonball happened to wipe out the whole British general staff.") Indeed, Quinn's favorite means of characterization is to quote the jokes that circulated about each subject at the time; each time a new name pops up, a variation on the phrase "it was said about him that..." is almost sure to follow. (On Philip II of Spain: "One historian [...] tried to make his portrait more persuasive by finding some redeeming traits in Philip; he could find but two: his genuine affection for his daughters and his instinctive dislike of the paintings of El Greco." On Benjamin Franklin: "Someone once said that the dark night of the soul Franklin would treat as a problem in street lighting, and the slough of despond as an instance of improper drainage." For more examples, look at practically any page you like.)
But Quinn isn't just a yukster. The way he lays out the conflicts that drive his narrative is simply masterful: as he sets the scene, he uses the techniques of a top-notch storyteller to fill us in on who the major players are and make us care about what happens to them without getting bogged down in extraneous detail. He doesn't just say, "Then Jesuit missionaries arrived in Huronia..." but rather explains whom the Jesuits were affiliated with, what their methods were, how their outlook on Christianity contrasted with that of the Puritans — in short, gives us enough information about the Jesuits that their arrival in Huronia becomes meaningful — yet at the same time avoids sidetracking his narrative by delving into the finer points of Jesuit theology. And I haven't even touched on the way he evokes the experience of being there, of scraping out a life and a society on a new continent, of the palimpsest of culture clash. The short of it: it's great stuff. Read it!
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