I have been looking forward to reading this new book by Richard Ford, because I have enjoyed many of his previous novels and because this one was set in Canada. It turned out, however, to be a book that took real resolution to stick with, as it limped through a long series of tedious chapters, before finally finishing with a strong flourish that reminded me how well Ford can write.

The focus of the first third of the novel is on the parents of Dell and his twin sister Berner; from unhappy mates, the parents somehow transform themselves into bound-together (but ineffectual) bank robbers, and demolish their lives in the process. How this happens is traced far too carefully, I thought, so far as the overall thrust of the novel is concerned -- and we learn far too much about how inhospitable Great Falls, Montana, has been to them and their children. Nor is it very credible to think that the two parents would be arrested and jailed -- and authorities would simply ignore for days their two 15-year old children.

But that gap does lead to both twins being able to flee -- Berner mostly out of the novel -- and Dell, with some help from a friend of his mother, north to the Cypress Hills area of Saskatchewan. The second third of the novel focuses there, and describes, again at considerable length, the very basic but humdrum existence into which Dell falls -- working with a Metis hunting guide, cleaning rooms in a small hotel and coming to know Arthur Remlinger, the evasive American who owns the hotel. Ford has obviously been in the area, and captures some of its character -- the dominance of wheat, the importance of hunting, the ethnic differentiation so marked in the province. But 1960, the year of which he writes, was also when a huge political battle was taking place in Saskatchewan over the introduction of the first system of government medicare in North America. And there is no echo of such turmoil in this book. Canada is painted as a quiet and calm contrast to the US, missing some of the currents flowing here.

If the first two-thirds of this novel left me impatient, though, the final third showed a momentum and depth that was powerful and thoughtful. The story of Arthur Remlinger is gradually revealed and shakes Dell's life even more than his parents' robbery did. "Think how close evil is," Ford writes, "to the normal goings-on that have nothing to do with evil." Perhaps that is the heart of this novel. The seemingly tedious stretches of daily life, first in Great Falls, and then in Saskatchewan, are essential backdrop for the portrayal of evil that this book conveys -- showing the banality of evil, the sad ease of evil, and the ways in which a life can be shaped to try to overcome its effects.

In the end, then, this is not really a book about Canada -- except, perhaps, insofar as the symbol for Canada that Ford sketches is seen as an antidote to the evil too evident in parts of his own country.