The Lighthouse Road
By Peter Geye 
(Unbridled)

“The Lighthouse Road,” a novel about orphans and immigrants making lives for themselves in northern Minnesota from the 1890s through the 1920s, will extend Peter Geye’s reputation as a chronicler of life along Lake Superior and as a master craftsman of man vs. nature tales. (His first novel, “Safe From the Sea,” featuring a gripping account of a Lake Superior shipwreck, a la the Edmund Fitzgerald.)

But the pleasures of “The Lighthouse Road” go far beyond grade-A regionalism. It’s a fine example of you-were-there historical fiction. It’s also something of a seminar in masculinity, with the reader seeing how a man’s youthful choices and accidents formed him. And Geye also has breathed life into two marvelous, closely observed female characters, depicted with compassion in both the small pleasures and larger tragedies of their lives.

In alternating chapters, Geye tells the stories of Thea Eide, a pretty, quiet, religious Norwegian teen who immigrates to Minnesota in the 1890s, and her son Odd, who would become a “herring choker” and boat builder in tiny Gunflint, Minn.

Odd’s a legitimate Norse name, but he and his mother are both odd, too. In their humble ways, both are holy fools. Thea leans on her Bible for comfort and direction as she struggles to learn English and master the work of cooking in a logging camp. Odd is not the least bit religious but resembles a North Woods Zen aspirant in the peace he finds in his fishing and working routines. In a time of his life filled with sorrow, not coincidentally in the big city of Duluth, he reads the Bible his boss has given him every night, “not because he was becoming a believer but because any story was better than the one he was living.”

Their lives intersect fatefully, lovingly, tragically, with Hosea Grimm, Gunflint’s apothecary, doctor and surgeon, who becomes a paternal figure to both of them, particularly Odd; and Rebekah, Grimm’s putative daughter, who wants to be as close as a sister to Thea and will become Odd’s lover.

When not compounding medicines or delivering babies, Grimm is a bootlegger, part owner of a brothel and engaged in an even filthier business. But he also has made a better life possible for the other three. It’s a credit to Geye’s character-building that he has created a man so complex that both good and evil live so strongly within him. Perhaps that’s the kind of man that thrived in such a harsh setting.

Blending research and imagination, Geye makes that time and place an equally fascinating element in the novel. On her voyage from the “arctic desert” of her Norway home, Thea sees a tree line for the first time, mistaking it for “a lowering storm.” A teenage boy dispatched on a daring winter mission to fetch two giant Ovcharka sheepdogs is dressed completely in fur from animals he’s killed or trapped: moose, marten, fox, lynx, black bear. Grimm, daunted yet determined to perform emergency eye surgery on a badly injured youth, pores over medical and anatomy manuals, trades telegrams with a doctor friend and administers another dose of ether before plunging in.

In one of the novel’s important threads, Odd painstakingly crafts his own boat, built on an 18-foot one-piece keel, carved from a white pine log. “The thought of his own life at the mercy of his workmanship filled him with doubt.” But everyone who sees the finished boat marvels at the simple beauty of what Odd has made.

Anyone who reads Geye’s novel is likely to have the same reaction to it. (MCT)