Reading distractedly these days, jumping from one book to another, I’ve been hearing echoes. One pair of books that talked to one another as I read them at the same time: Bush Runner by Mark Bourrie and The Mirror and the Light, the third volume in Hilary Mantel’s trilogy of novels about Thomas Cromwell. 

Both circle around the issue of betrayal.  

I started Mark Bourrie’s book at the end of February just before it won the RBC Taylor Prize for the best book of Canadian non-fiction published in 2019. Then I got sick and laid it aside, and when I picked it up again, the pandemic was well underway, and I found my concentration shot.

Many friends say the same thing. We can’t concentrate for as long as usual. Sometimes a book sits in our laps disregarded, or we pace, or get up and down restlessly, and we diagnose ourselves with nerves even though we don’t feel consciously anxious. It makes me wonder if we’re reading the content differently too, and whether books published as the pandemic got underway—and were finished a year before it—will feel stale when we read them.

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Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre-Esprit Radisson, by Mark Bourrie, published by Biblioasis, 2019.

The Mirror & the Light, by Hilary Mantel, Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd., 2020.

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Bourrie proves lucky in his timing. His Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre-Esprit Radisson isn’t just a biography, but a life-and-times re-examination of the relations between settlers and Indigenous people throughout northeastern North America during the 17^th century. Given the Black and Indigenous Lives Matter movements, Bourrie has written a book about the past that’s entirely relevant to the issues of today.

Old biographies and histories cast Pierre Radisson as a swashbuckling hero, a fur-trader who cut a swath around the Great Lakes and Hudson’s Bay. Meanwhile, the Indigenous people he traded with were characterized in racist terms. 

Bourrie makes a couple of simple points: that Indigenous nations were sophisticated democracies, culturally exuberant and notable for being meritocracies where accomplished people could assume positions of power. At the same time, the imperial nations of France, England, Holland and Spain were autocracies of great artistic richness—Shakespeare and Cervantes had died only twenty years before Radisson was born—but given the way they tortured and beheaded, they were pretty damn savage. 

Radisson was born about 1636 as a peasant boy in small-town France. Historians aren’t sure who his father was or what he did, but somehow Radisson learned to read and write, and that meant he could leave behind the memoirs that give Bourrie his material. 

In 1651, Radisson’s family shipped him over to the care of his sisters in what is now Quebec, where they lived in Trois-Rivières, then a tiny settlement on the St. Lawrence River between Quebec City and Montreal. 

About a year after he arrived, Radisson and two friends set out duck hunting in the marshes beyond the walls of the settlement. They were tracked by a party of Mohawk warriors from the Iroquois Confederacy. Eventually the Mohawk men attacked, beheading the two friends and taking Radisson prisoner. 

Bourrie speculates that the Mohawks were impressed by Radisson’s hunting skills and his obvious intelligence. He also thinks Radisson must have been physically attractive, although at sixteen, he was older than the Mohawks probably believed. Europeans at the time tended to be shorter than Indigenous people, who were generally better nourished. 

This meant the Mohawks seemed to think Radisson was young enough to be adoptable. Women, children and younger male prisoners of war were often adopted into Indigenous societies, whether they were European or, much more frequently, members of rival Indigenous nations. It was certainly the case that when the party returned to the Mohawks’ homeland, Radisson was adopted by a respected and prosperous family and treated as a son.

Here is where I put down the book and thought of Hilary Mantel’s trilogy of novels about Thomas Cromwell, the son of a blacksmith born in the London suburb of Stepney in 1585. Improbably, the blacksmith’s boy rose to become Lord Cromwell, the sumptuously-rich bureaucrat who ran the country under King Henry VIII. 

Mantel’s Booker Prize-winning trilogy paints a vigorous picture of life under Henry’s monarchy, when traditional feudal practices jostled against expansionist, proto-capitalist commerce. Near the start of his rise, when Cromwell was a prosperous lawyer, other families petitioned him to take their sons into his household. 

Cromwell would become the Master of talented young men. Among them was the future Lord Chancellor, Thomas Wriothesley, known throughout the trilogy as Call-Me-Risley, whom Cromwell trained in his interlaced trades of law, statecraft and profiteering. 

In effect, Cromwell would informally adopt the young men, just as the Mohawk family adopted Radisson, the practice as common in England as it was in the Iroquois Confederacy. By the third volume of Mantel’s trilogy, The Mirror and the Light, Cromwell’s earliest proteges have become powerful courtiers, if not always reliable allies. Running through the novel is the question of whether Call-Me-Risley is Cromwell’s man or a spy in his household, betraying his secrets to his enemies.

Radisson didn’t stay long enough to rise in Mohawk society, although he was well treated, later wrote that he was happy and showed no sign of missing his sisters. Instead, he betrayed his adoptive family, slipping away not once, but twice, eventually defecting to the Dutch in what is now Albany in upstate New York. Radisson made his way to Manhattan and talked his way onto a ship bound for Holland, where he scrounged passage back to New France. Before long, he returned to Trois-Rivières, where he started his career as a fur trader, still only eighteen years old.

The rest of Radisson’s long and astonishing life involves a series of adventures and betrayals. He traded around the Great Lakes, possibly making it as far as the Mississippi River, returned to France, defected to the English, sailed into Hudson’s Bay (where he arguably became one of the founders of the Hudson’s Bay Company), was captured by pirates and cast away on the Spanish Coast, and survived to make his way to England during the Great Plague. By this time, he was still only about thirty years old, with more than half his roguish life ahead, some of it spent in the Caribbean, some in the Arctic. 

After he arrived in England, Radisson started to write up his life story for King Charles I, who entertained him regularly at court, an almost unprecedented event for a commoner (Cromwell aside). 

Bourrie says that part of what interested him about Radisson was that he wrote respectfully about Indigenous people at a time when others were racist, fearful and scornful—scornful, perhaps, because they were fearful of the unsettling similarities, what Mantel refers to in her novel as the mirror and the chastening light it throws. 

That doesn’t make Radisson a good person. He often betrayed his Indigenous trading partners (and King Charles), making promises he couldn’t keep while repeatedly changing sides, switchbacking among rival Indigenous peoples and competing European powers.

Times were violent. Europeans brought guns to North America to use and to trade, expanding their settlements while scheming to turn one Indigenous nation against another. Just as Radisson arrived in Trois-Rivières in 1651, Thomas Hobbes published his Leviathan, famously writing that life was nasty, brutish and short. Wars raged around the Great Lakes and torture was commonplace. Yet Bourrie makes the point that even though Jesuit priests wrote up Indigenous violence in as if it were exceptional, contemporary European society was every bit as merciless.

Mantel’s novels make that clear. The Mirror and the Light opens shortly after the beheading of Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII’s second queen, and the execution of six men Cromwell claimed were her lovers, largely because they’d annoyed him years before. It moves forward through other beheadings, with dissenters burned at the stake, prisoners drawn and quartered, a French prince poisoned, peasants hanged after revolts brutally crushed. Throughout, there are constant betrayals, with Cromwell himself ultimately discarded by the king—“He’s bored with me,” Cromwell says lightly—and sacrificed by his proteges, who abandon him with no more compunction than Radisson showed in leaving his adoptive parents. 

Mantel’s book is set more than a hundred years before Radisson’s adventures. Yet by the time he was active, remarkably little had changed. 

“In 1650,” Bourrie notes, “no one treated any kind of prisoners well. Indigenous agricultural people killed many male prisoners taken in war. So did Oliver Cromwell, whose actions at Drogheda, in 1649, were as cruel as anything the Iroquois and Hurons did to their prisoners.”

That’s Oliver, great-nephew of Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell. Plus ça change.

Bourrie’s book is very well-written and his research is woven seamlessly into the story. I wish I could say the same for Hilary Mantel’s novel, since I loved the two earlier books in the Cromwell trilogy, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. But I’m afraid I didn’t love this one, and wondered at first if it was the wrong book to read in these times. At 882 pages, it might have been too much for my flickering concentration.

On balance, I think not. The book is repetitive and far too long. Mantel’s Cromwell is growing tired and his thoughts keep circling back into the past, playing over the same incidents, as people do as we age. Yet it’s possible to write about someone growing old without the story doing the same. Spareness helps.

Still, I’m glad I read both books, and read them together, thinking about threads running through history and woven into life today. Betrayal, for instance. Killings by police are a betrayal of the citizens they’re supposed to protect. Political leaders betray their electorate by failing to provide leadership during the pandemic. Meanwhile, prisoners are still being grievously mis-treated, especially in the U.S. Even where capital punishment is outlawed, they’re executing the weakest by keeping them locked in prisons rife with COVID. 

There’s another quote that covers this: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” 

—William Faulkner. 

Lesley Krueger’s most recent book is Mad Richard, a historical novel. You can order it here.