I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company: A novel of Lewis and Clark by Brian Hall, Viking, 拢25.95, ISBN 0670031895 Reviewed by Roy Herbert
THE title of Brian Hall鈥檚 book is a quotation from a letter written by Meriwether Lewis to William Clark aimed at persuading him to join an expedition to the Pacific coast of America and back, starting from St Louis in 1804. The party was a large one and well equipped intellectually as well as physically, including members trained in the sciences. They travelled mostly by river, met hostile and friendly Indians, faced harsh conditions and nearly perished from starvation, but returned, with only one man having died, in 1806. Their maps and diaries provided invaluable information and a classic story of exploration.
Whether Hall鈥檚 novel about the adventure has done the explorers a favour is debatable. It鈥檚 a strange work, opening with a stream of consciousness from an Indian child involved in some savage action. This is hard to follow, made more puzzling by Indian names not being distinguished as such. 鈥淲here was camas flower, where was rides ahead? This one was running again鈥︹��.
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Single words and verbless sentences are rife. There are passages of straight narration, short factual paragraphs, jerks from the past tense to the present and jottings from notebooks, along with thoughts going on in the heads of various members of the company. It鈥檚 skilful, certainly.
The blurb that appears on the back of I Should be Extremely Happy in Your Company: A novel of Lewis and Clark calls this 鈥渓ayering subjective accounts鈥� and says the book presents the story of Lewis and Clark in an entirely new light.