The Land God Gave to Cain by Hammond Innes ~ 1958. This edition: Collins, 1958. Hardcover. 255 pages.
Oh, golly.
This earnest adventure novel, which I’d been looking forward to reading with some anticipation – raw and gritty Canadian setting, meticulously researched in person by the far-travelling Innes – turned out to be something of a dud, a rather “dull thud”, as my mother used to say when finishing off a disappointing novel.
Harsh, aren’t I?
Kind of like that brutal Labradorian setting, which is quite possibly the best thing about this logically unlikely effort by the otherwise careful Innes.
Herein we have a young Scottish engineer, Ian Ferguson, a charmingly fresh and enthusiastic twenty-something-year-old, son of an over-anxious mother and a crippled and brain-damaged army veteran, who stumbles upon a family secret while attempting to vindicate his father’s dying claim of having intercepted a crucial radio transmission on a shortwave radio, an improbable 2000 miles away from its alleged source in the wilds of northern Canada.
For much more detail and an ambitious analysis of the plot I will pass you over to the Books & Boots post of fellow blogger Simon, who has delved into the finer points of Hammond Innes’ many macho adventure tales, with intriguing conclusions.
I must say I am in total agreement with all that Simon says there, in particular his accurate assessment of Innes’ “formula”:
Innes’ novels are very strong on setting and atmosphere, but I’ve come to realise a central characteristic is that the reader spots what’s going on, or sees the danger signals, way before the central protagonist. There are two aspects of this: the protagonist is slow to the point of being dim; and a key figure who knows the secret of the riddle at the centre of the plot just obstinately refuses to reveal it, unnecessarily prolonging the agony (and the text).
Bingo. He’s got it.
Well researched though it may be, The Land God Gave to Cain is riddled with glaring inconsistencies of logic, not least in that Innes fails to take into consideration (or deliberately ignores) the real results of bodies left lying about in the Canadian wilderness.
For example, a perfectly preserved two-week-old (or thereabouts) corpse is found lying out in the open, sightless eyes staring at the sky (or something to that effect.) Well, sorry to be gruesome, but it begs the question: are there no crows/ravens/bears/other scavengers in the wilds of Labrador? It beggars this country dweller’s belief that a dead thing of any species would lie utterly undisturbed for any length of time, though Innes’ version is convenient of course to his narrative, and less harrowing to the squeamish reader.
The Land God Gave to Cain is very readable, as are all of Hammond Innes’ books, but it was also deeply frustrating in its eventual disintegration of already sketchy plot into pure melodrama, with a perfectly preserved scene of (possible) crime, and impossibly perfect clues such as handfuls of gold nuggets strewn about in telling locations, all ready for our amateur sleuth to find in his ultimate “aha!” moment.
Now for the rating. From what I’ve said above you’re doubtless expecting a dismal grade here, but I’m going to step back and be charitable, for I knew (to some degree) what I was getting into when I started this book, having a long experience with Hammond Innes and a fondness for his work possibly due more to nostalgia (his books were well represented in my teenage reading years) than to stellar literary merit.
Let’s see now…how about a generous 6.5/10, because I read it end to end without pause (if you don’t count my many muttered “Oh, really, Hammond!” asides), and the fact that despite my persistent annoyance with this writer his novel still very much a keeper, joining his many others on the re-read shelf.
Leaves & Pages 
What a shame. It’s often the case with the books you most look forward to reading.
I really thought there would be more substance to this one; it was really much ado about what turned out to be not much, and the coincidences were just too far-fetched for me to fully embrace. But it did roll along well enough for me to keep reading, and I’ll quite likely read it again some day, griping at the author all along. 😉
Being able to write a good and atmospheric setting is supposed to be a strongpoint with Scottish writers, so at least he’s being traditional, it’s a pity about the lack of authenticity. I think I read some of his books yonks ago.
Oh, yes, Hammond Innes is a fine enough writer in many ways, and he’s all about depicting things in nitty gritty reality – which is why his final scenes which were not especially believable on a number of points annoyed me so very much! Also his depiction of the token female character (aside from the hero’s mother, who makes a hand-wringing cameo in the early bits) leaves something to be desired. I didn’t mention her, but there’s a beautiful young French Canadian woman involved, love interest not of the hero but of the pilot the hero suspects of having been complicit in the death of the young woman’s father. (It’s complicated.) Anyway, the young woman is all French Canadian dialect and emotion mixed with incredible bush survival skills – she doesn’t read true and she was often more of a distraction to the advancement of the plot than an enhancement. It was almost like Innes had a memo posted up above his writing desk: “Put in a girl”, and this was the result – “Oh, yes, we need to have a girl…let’s see…raven hair, cute accent…who shall I make her in love with?” 😉