North Woods, Daniel Mason

Daniel Mason’s North Woods is a captivating infusion of nature writing and gothic mythology. It spans generations, beginning with a pair of forbidden lovers who abscond their Puritan colony to seek refuge in the heart of the forest. The space they choose to settle becomes the novel’s centre point and the reader is presented with a series of vignettes, each depicting a different inhabitant of the same small square of Western Massachusetts woodland.

Whilst this multi-generational scope might bring to mind a sweeping epic, North Woods actually reads more like a dossier, complete with inserts featuring photographs, landscapes, and annotated sketches of local fauna. Each chapter is a successive snapshot of a different era, presented in a unique format each time, whether in epistolary form, as a journal entry, as medical case notes or as a lyrical ballad. In the hands of a less accomplished writer such an archival format may have been gimmicky, its fragmentation frustrating. Luckily, Mason’s versatility and inspired crafting of prose affords a rich array of narrative perspectives which serve to ensure that the woodland location never becomes claustrophobic or stultifying.

As the novel moves through time, it also moves through a chronology of American literary influences. It is inspired as much by Dickinson and Hawthorne as it is Thoreau. Mason entwines his detailed and dynamic descriptions of the forest’s wildlife with haunting episodes of murder, seclusion, and seances. His account of apple cultivator, Charles Osgood is fertile with biblical imagery, impregnating the apples with a sensual significance. A pair of ghostly twins inject an element of the uncanny. Later, the forest is enlivened with erotic potential as a homosexual painter projects his secret desires onto his impressions of the landscape. In every chapter, the forest pulses with an energy that excites some protagonists and threatens others but is always spell-binding.  

Mason is well established for bestowing gifts upon his readers. His 2002 novel, The Piano Tuner and his 2020 collection of short stories, A Registry of my Passage Upon the Earth both display his talent for capturing a multiplicity of engaging characters and far-reaching locations. North Woods manages to maintain the wide scope and diversity of Mason’s previous titles, but within a more constricted setting, proving that even the smallest locations are alive with passion and drama.