My second of Vollmann's dreams. While the tome-like Fathers and Crows: Volume Two of Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes maintains relative succinctness across its 800+ pages, the Rifles meanders constantly throughout it's 300 or so pages. The introduction was so strong... Vollmann explored the idea of firearms as a means of suppression. You provide guns to a group of people, alter their way of life, make it so they can no longer function without the guns, and then you throttle the ammo supply to maintain hegemony. This was Canada's main method of enslavement with the Inuits shipped off to far-flung Resolute and Arctic Bay.

The rest of the novel consists of a history of John Franklin's lost expedition to discover the Northwest Passage interpolated with Vollmann's personal experiences in the arctic. Bill's tenuous relationship with an Inuit woman informs the blanks left in the history, which he fills in with yearning. Really, you can feel his loneliness splayed out, belly-up across the pages. If you are familiar with Vollmann, you know he has an affinity for prostitutes. Perhaps the lack of sex workers operating out of the arctic circle had a strain on him. I just never imagined an arctic expedition to be so . Some really incredible (in an ironic Vollmannesque way) illustrations, some very pretty parts, but this dream achieves only a fraction of what I expected from my previous foray into his recreation of the American landscape