NORTH WOODS, by Daniel Mason. Read by a full cast.
It begins with a flat stone plucked from the earth and laid in a clearing at the base of a mountain — a kind of Genesis giving way to an Edenic apple farm, followed by several hundred years of corruption, sorrow, ambition, deception, isolation and love. Daniel Mason’s “North Woods,” read by a full cast, is an Odyssean epic in which the hero doesn’t leave home, it is a home: a New England house journeying through assorted inhabitants over the three-century-long history of America.
There’s the apple farmer, a Revolutionary War defector named Charles Osgood, rendered in all his gruff self-importance by the British narrator Simon Vance, and the escalating letters from the landscape painter William Henry Teale to his beloved “friend,” the writer Erasmus Nash, voiced by Mark Deakins in a placid and dignified reading that yields to a more tortured and desperate cadence. And then there is the third-person omniscient narration of Mark Bramhall, telling (among others) the heart-wrenching saga of Osgood’s twin daughters, Alice and Mary, whose inseparable custodianship after their father’s death is tested by one girl’s temptation to explore the world beyond their property lines.
Like the unforgettable audiobook production of George Saunders’s “Lincoln in the Bardo,” Mason’s historical fiction advertises a singular strength of the form: alchemizing an ensemble of distinct voices into a harmonious, deeply resonant whole.
