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Excelsior Editions/SUNY Press
Albany, NY
2010
www.sunypress.edu
392 pp; $23.95
trade paperback
ISBN: 978-1-4384-3160-4
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FIRE ALONG THE SKY
Being the Adventures of Captain Shane
Hardacre in the New World
Revised and
Expanded Edition containing the love letters of Valerie D’Arcy,
complete and unexpurgated
A wildly entertaining historical adventure, deep inside the crucible
in which America was forged.
“Splendidly researched and wildly amusing historical adventure … Tom
Jones as The Deerslayer.” — Kirkus Reviews
Dearest Shane, I dream you as the leopard. Last night you came
to me in his skin.
So, in the voice of one of his lovers, we first encounter Shane
Hardacre, the narrator and protagonist of Fire Along the Sky.
An eloquent Anglo-Irish rake and fictional kinsman of Sir
William Johnson, the King’s Superintendent of Indians, Shane comes
to the New World from London because of a doubtful wager. “I laid
money on whether a man would take his own life,” as Shane informs
us. That man was Robert Davers, a Norfolk baronet who sought to
escape melancholia and learn the nature of the soul among the
dream-catchers of North America. He ignored Johnson’s caution that
“if you go looking for the spirit world of Indians, you will find
you are already inside it” and found savage death during the Pontiac
revolt.
We enter the extraordinary world created by William Johnson in the
Mohawk Valley in the aftermath of the French and Indian War, in the
time when America was forged. We meet extraordinary historical
figures: the warrior chief Pontiac and the Delaware Prophet who
inspired his revolt; Angelique, the “Pompadour of Detroit”; Molly
Brant and her brother Joseph; and Patience Wright, the “wax sybil,”
an American spy in London who rivaled Madame Tussaud. The action
races from the notorious Hell-Fire Club in England to the murder of
Pontiac near St. Louis, from Mesmer’s performance for Ben Franklin
in a Paris salon to bigamy and intrigue in New Orleans when an Irish
captain-general held the city in the name of the Spanish king.
Fire Along the Sky is grand entertainment that carries
lightly a wealth of original research summarized in the copious
notes “from the editor.” Through the narrator’s worldly skepticism,
we are given a window into the shamanic dream practices of early
Native Americans. The voice of Valerie D’Arcy, in the correspondence
interwoven with Shane’s narrative, provides a knowing woman’s
counterpoint to Shane’s phallocratic assumptions.
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