Jim Harrison - Legends of the Fall

Best known today from the Anthony Hopkins and Brad Pitt film, Legends of the Fall was Jim Harrison's breakthrough collection of three novellas. The first story, Revenge, is an intricate tale of a man whose affair with the beautiful wife of a Mexican gangster goes badly wrong. Cochran wakes up after being rescued by a Mexican worker who found him in the desert. He's been very badly beaten and would surely have died. Recovering anonymously, he plots revenge against the gangster who has submitted his wife, and Cochran's lover, to the most unspeakable of punishments. The story is well told, tense and unexpected - even if the revenge relies on Cochran having just enough unlikely contacts with wealth and power that seems likely.

Much better is the second story, The Man Who Gave Up His Name which follows Nordstrom from his lacklustre time in college through twenty years of marriage and divorce, while he makes his fortune in business. It is really the story of Nordstrom's growing awareness that there is more to life than money, and that defining himself by wealth is inadequate. But it is also the story of wealthy men and their mid-life crises, and overcoming your inhibitions. Nordstrom, despite, rather than because of his wealth gets a lot of sex. That too is his awakening. I was prepared to dismiss this story as the fantasies of upper middle class mid-life crises, but I really liked the ending and Nordstrom's character arc.

But most people will read this collection for Legends of the Fall. The length of the book and the film are incomparable. The film is much more sweeping and grandoise, even if the story is essentially identical. What is different about the book is the fleshing out of characters. The Montana ranchers are much more buffeted by world history than in the film. Brad Pitt's character is decidedly darker, and their mother is not dead, but living a bohemian life abroad. Global events, like the Russian Revolution are more prominent, as are less well known, but important ones. Pitt's character's capitalist brother is overjoyed when the IWW leader Frank Little is lynched in Butte (though Little isn't named). Russia hangs over the characters in the novella unlike in the film - their mother even has an affair with the socialist journalist John Reed.

The three stories all have some common themes, though they are not at all linked. Montana gets a couple of mentions in the first two stories, and is the setting for the third. But all the stories centre of the lives of strong willed, powerful and usually wealthy men who experience loss of lovers and friends. There's also a common theme of violence - the men all seem to be able to kill and bury bodies in the wilderness with impunity.

Jim Harrison's style needs to be experienced too. It's clipped and free of waffle. Legends of the Fall in particular reads like a film script already. The other two stories would have also made fine films, though perhaps less accessible.