Caleb’s Crossing is inspired by the life of Caleb Cheeshahteaumauk, the first Native American to graduate from Harvard. When Brooks first heard local talk of Caleb, and that he had graduated in ’65, she assumed that meant 1965. In fact, the date of his commencement was 1665, a period during which, as this novel explores, attempts were being made to build constructive relations between the Native Americans and the English who were settling in America’s north-east in ever increasing numbers. This rapprochement ended in 1675 with the onset of Metacomet’s War, a conflict led by Chief Metacomet on behalf of his tribe against the people of Massachusetts. It is testimony, of a sort, to the work of the settlers of Martha’s Vineyard that the Wampanoag people did not take up arms against them. Indeed, relations were such that the Wampanoag studied English at a school started by a Calvinist minister, one of the island’s first settlers. As a consequence, Martha’s Vineyard produced the first two American Indians to attend Harvard. But friendly collaboration can have calamitous consequences, as is evident from the shocking fact that Cheeshahteaumauck was the only Native American student until the 1970s who lived long enough to receive his degree.

This ambiguity lies at the heart of Caleb’s Crossing. Misplaced care can have consequences as distressing as warfare, and the complexity of these cross-cultural relations are played out in the novel through the friendship between (the entirely fictional) Bethia Mayfield and Nahnoso Cheeshahteaumauk. The two first meet as children, when they fall into a friendship that leads them to a much deeper understanding of each other’s cultures than they may otherwise have had. They share a love of the island’s windswept landscape, its forests and cliffs, its beaches and marshes. They give each other new names – he calls her Storm Eyes, she calls him Caleb. He teaches her Wampanaontoaonk, she teaches him English. Bethia gives Caleb his first Bible. Caleb, in turn, introduces Bethia to a life lived outside the strictures of puritan living. It is a broader, wilder, more nuanced world, one that neither of them is able to enjoy once they enter the straits of adulthood and find themselves walking the grey and damp streets of a fledgling Boston.

Bethia’s relationship with Caleb leads her to an encounter with his uncle, Tequamuck, the pawaaw of the Wampanoag tribe. It is he who speaks of the future that the new settlers will lead his people to: ‘Tequamuck spoke to me of what he had foreseen – his people reduced, no longer hunters but hunted. He saw the dead stacked up like cordwood, and long lines of people, all on foot, driven off from their familiar places.’ Bethia’s increasing comprehension of the price Caleb and all his people come to pay for knowing New Englanders weighs heavily on her.

Almost nothing is known of the real Caleb, other than that he was born into the Wampanoag tribe of Noepe (Martha’s Vineyard), attended Harvard, and died in Boston. Only a single document written in his hand survives. Brooks writes herself into these yawning gaps, creating an evocation of the times that is fully imagined, extraordinarily (but not showily) researched, and engrossing. Harder still, she uses language that is rich and of its time without being excessive.

The novel is narrated by Bethia. She is a wonderful heroine, but her strength of character creates a problem for the novel. At times, Bethia’s Jane Eyre-esque qualities feel overworked, and her tortured journey – for example, her decision to work in a buttery alongside the Indian College’s lecture hall – seems arbitrary, as if intended to allow her to continue to act as a narrator who has access to her subject. More dangerously, her perspective, through which all our knowledge of Caleb is filtered, speaks so powerfully of the ways in which women’s opportunities for education and broader engagement with life were limited that these issues come close to dominating the novel. There are, of course, parallels between the repression of women and the repression of Native American culture, but the quandaries that have led to feminism are familiar to me; the injustices that led to the ongoing Indian Wars, and the diminution of that proud culture less so.

Bethia’s centrality creates a further conundrum: as adulthood and propriety insist, inevitably, on a distance between Bethia and Caleb, the reader too loses her connection with Caleb. I wanted the novel to give me more of an understanding of Caleb; I wanted to get closer to him. This distance also affects the characterisation of Joel Iacoomis (based on an historical figure), who attended Harvard at the same time as Caleb. The relationship between these two men is crucial to the emotional arc of Caleb’s Crossing, yet Joel is so peripheral that we never come to know him.

There is no doubt that Brooks’s decision to write from a young woman’s point of view was made respectfully: this is not a novel that pretends it can take us where we cannot go – into the mind of an Indian boy born almost four hundred years ago. And while Brooks does not pretend to understand, or explain, what motivates Caleb, she deftly uses historical events, such as the smallpox epidemic that wiped out much of the Wampanoag tribe, to provide the dramatic context in which he makes decisions.

Indeed, there is so much fascinating history to enliven the novel: the fact that a woman of Bethia’s standing could be indentured as a servant to pay her brother’s debts; her receiving the lash for uttering the phrase ‘God damn you’. The politics of the Indian College speak to the kind of corruption that, no doubt, continues today – funds intended for the provision of a Christian education for natives are siphoned off to subsidise the education of more privileged white men.

One of the greatest difficulties that Caleb’s Crossing must grapple with is that of hindsight. The reader knows that Tequamuck’s prophecies will come true. It is a novel to be read without hope, and Bethia and Caleb’s intimacy is barely able to be acknowledged; it is a friendship that endures, in silence, through the bleakest of times. Despite all this, Caleb’s Crossing – written with passion and depth – is infused with moments of joy. It is, in the end, a deeply moving novel.