Reid tale blends personal, political

PETER LOON, by Van Reid, Viking, New York, 298 pages, hardcover, $24.95.

Edgecomb writer Van Reid takes a departure from chronicling the Victorian escapades of his Moosepath League to look at life in Maine shortly after the Revolutionary War. “Peter Loon” tells the story of a young man’s first sojourn from his family farm in Sheepscott Great Pond to Damariscotta and beyond.

“Peter Loon” is a sparser novel than “Cordelia Underwood,” “Mollie Peer,” or “Daniel Plainway,” Reid’s three previous novels. Those books are comic tales of Mister Tobias Walton and his young friends who solve mysteries and seek adventure as the state enters the 20th century.

In his novel, due out next month, Reid captures the isolation and determination of the “common folk” in Loon, the son of homesteaders. He contrasts that life, sheltered by the forest’s huge pines, with the life of a sea captain’s family, which to Loon appears frighteningly vast and inviting.

The 17-year-old’s adventure is set in motion when his father is crushed by a falling tree and his mother sends him in search of her former suitor, a man Loon has never heard of. As he sets off on foot, he meets Parson Leach, an itinerant parson and book dealer. Leach saves the young man’s life on more than one occasion and introduces him to the seafaring Clayden family, whose wealth and education astound Loon.

There are strong and opposing political forces at work in the novel as well. In his introduction, the author writes that by the end of the 18th century, many common folk believed that the American Revolution had not fulfilled its promise. The subsistence farmer and laborer, like Loon, asserted that a small number of wealthy and established families controlled the political arena, the courts and the official interpretation of history.

“In the District of Maine (then part of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts), men known as the ‘Great Proprietors’ claimed vast tracts of territory on the strength of old King’s Grants and often contradictory Indian deeds,” writes Reed in his brief introduction. “… the poorer folk, who were clearing the great forests of the northeast, believed that unsettled land was the right of any who could physically wrest it from the wilderness and they used sometimes brutal tactics to drive off and intimidate the proprietors’ land agents and surveyors. These bands of settlers who organized themselves against law and authority called themselves first the ‘White Indians’ and then the ‘Liberty Men.'”

It is through Leach that Reid explains the conflict from both perspectives and then defines the promise of the newly created nation called the United States of America. The parson

urges “moderation in all things” as a conflict between the two factions brews and young Loon struggles to understand the politics that hadn’t touched his life before his fateful encounter with Leach.

Throughout the novel, the author successfully blends the personal with the political as Loon encounters several young women who catch his eye, cause his heart to flutter and confound his logic. Reid also subtly conveys the deep divisions that existed between the educated and uneducated classes and the vast divide between the opportunities afforded men and women in the early years of the young country.

The author easily could have made Leach the superhero of post-Revolutionary New England, but as a writer, Reid offers his reader greater subtlety and depth than that. And, while the future of men such as Peter Loon may appear bleak, the philosophy that the parson ascribes to the new nation gives “Peter Loon” its hopeful, optimistic tone without resorting to rabid patriotism.

“‘If we only love those who agree with us, then our society has no future,'” the preacher tells his young friend. “‘The old world has kings and queens to fall back upon, to blame as well as praise, but we have only ourselves, and it is a measure of this civilization, this strange nation of ours and its particular refinements, how willingly we live beside each other in peace when our opinions, and even cherished beliefs are not in harmony. Reasonable men can disagree, Peter, and there will be every imaginable permutation of opinion and thought … no man’s lights reflecting any others completely …'”

Reid had no crystal ball and could not have foreseen the horrific events of the past nine months as he wrote “Peter Loon.” Within the context of these times, however, his book is a gentle and engaging reminder that America is more than a nation of individuals; it also is a nation of ideas and it would serve us well to look to those roots as our global encounters with new people engage and confound us as much as they did Peter Loon when he set off from Sheepscott Great Pond and found himself in Damariscotta.