THE ICEWEAVER

An ambitious fantasy on situations and themes from The English Patient, transplanted to 1809 New York, yields mixed results.

As the Napoleonic Wars cast their shadow over the young country in the form of an inconvenient trade embargo with nearby Canada and renewed Indian unrest provoked by white men’s quarrels, John Frayne returns to the town of New Forge to reclaim the property his father forfeited when he would not take a loyalty oath. Purchasing the right to feed and clothe a pair of indigents, an elderly family friend and a young mute woman first glimpsed pushing the body of her mother into a hole in the frozen lake, Frayne moves into Bay House and sets about making a family. But families are hard for Frayne, who left his first wife, Hester, when she took a lover, and survived a second wife, Tacha, whom he took while living among the Indians. And tensions mount when he finds Hester still involved with the same man, and their son Tim, ten, full of hate for the father who aches to reclaim him. Instead, Frayne devotes himself to Jennet, the mysterious outcast he has taken in, a woman as damaged as he is. As love blooms between them, Lawrence (The Burning Bride, 1998, etc.) cuts away repeatedly to focus on Frayne’s landlord and enemy, scheming shopkeeper Herod Aldrich, who dreams of unlimited wealth and power, and crippled furniture maker Marius Leclerc, who dreams only of shaking off the nightmarish miracle of his surviving Austerlitz. After a glacially slow beginning, Lawrence goes back to the well of memory to dredge up secret after damning secret about the characters. But she’s no Michael Ondaatje, and her melodramatic climax provides more relief than fulfillment.

Enough sumptuous prose poetry to sate the most demanding palate, though some readers will feel restless long before the seventh course arrives.