num_pages: 384
description: Growing up in a prominent lumber family in the Miramichi brothers Will and Owen Jameson know little of the world beyond their town and the great men who work the forest including their father. But as young men the boys couldnt be more different  where seventeen-year-old Will is headstrong and rugged able to hold his own in the woods or in a fight Owen three years his junior is literary and sensitive. What worries their mother Mary however is the prophecy told to her by a local woman upon Wills birth: that her first-born would be a powerful man and have much respect  but his brother would be even greater yet destroy the legacy by rashness and the Jameson dynasty [would] not go beyond that second boy. She tries to laugh it off but the prophecy becomes a part of local legend and hangs over the heads of the boys like a dark cloud.When their father dies in a freak accident and the management of the Jameson tracts and company falters Will as the true inheritor of his fathers shrewd mind and fists to match quits school to take over. Hes a strong leader of men but perhaps too strong at times and dies while clearing a log jam during a run. Reggie Glidden Wills best friend and the Push of the Jameson team takes Owen under his wing searching for any small sign that the younger boy has his brothers qualities. But Owen knows his limitations and after his brothers death and then rejection by the girl of his dreams Lula Brower he joins the army and heads off to war hoping to get himself killed. Instead he returns a decorated war hero.Then he falls in love with the beautiful childlike Camellia  the wife of Reggie Glidden  and soon Owen and Camellia find themselves watched on all sides caught in the teeth of an entire towns gossip and hypocrisy despite the innocence of their relationship. But for the community its as if taking Owen Jameson  and therefore the whole Jameson family  down a peg or two will give them control over their changing world. Inexorably Owen and Camellia are pulled into a chain of events that will end with death disappearance and a sensational trial.At the same time realizing his destiny Owen takes over the family business and begins what will become the greatest cut in New Brunswick history his men setting up camp on the notoriously dangerous Good Friday Mountain. The teamsters spend months in fierce ice and snow daily pitting themselves against nature and risking their lives for scant reward in the last moments before the coming of mechanization that will make them obsolete. This heroic brutal life is all Meager Fortune the camp keeper knows. A good and innocent man he shows unexpected resolution in the face of the betrayals of the more worldly men around him.With The Friends of Meager Fortune award-winning author David Adams Richards continues his exploration of New Brunswicks Miramichi Valley both the hard lives and experiences that emerge from that particular soil and the universal human matters that concern us all: the work of the hands and the heart; the nature of true greatness and true weakness; the relentlessness of fate and the good and evil that men and women do. It is a devastating portrait of a society but it is also a brilliant commemoration of the passing of a world  one that cements David Adams Richards place as the finest novelist at work in Canada today.
language: English
title: The Friends of Meager Fortune
publisher: Doubleday Canada