Elmore Leonard - Hombre & Three-Ten to Yuma

The 1967 Paul Newman film Hombre is a classic revisionist western. It was based, as many brilliant westerns are, on the 1961 short story by Elmore Leonard, which has been reissued recently by Penguin as part of their short Western Classic series. The book has an unusual protaganist in John Russell (played by Newman in the film). Russell is white, but grew up and lived with Apaches. Despite later being adopted by a white man, he retains his close relationship with the Apache, capturing and selling horses to the Whites for use hauling stagecoaches.

The story is told by Billy Lee, a young teenager who comes to idolise Russell. Russell inherits some land and needs to travel to sell it. An impromptu stage journey sees a disparate collection of travellers join them as the scheduled stage no longer runs. Lee is keen to demonstrate that he is now and adult and is leaving to seek adventure. On the coach are a former Indian Agent and his wife, Mr and Mrs Favor, the Mexican owner and the "McLaren girl", a young woman who has been rescued from capture by the Indians.

This is the set up for a scenario that sees the stage robbed because Mr and Mrs Favor are running away with money stolen from the government while he was Indian Agents. Getting this money meant starving the Apaches - essentially claiming more money than was spent on food. Russell's sympathies with the Apache mean hostility to Mr Favor, but a bigger threat comes from outlaws who know the cash is on the stage. But framing all this is the hostility toward Russell by the Favors who class him as an Indian despite his actual heritage. Russell is forced to travel on top of the stage, but when it is robbed and the horses killed, Russell is the only one with the tracking and shooting skills who can get them to safety.

Like all of Leonard's writing this is a very sprase narrative in terms of description. But it has a lot in it. Written in the 1960s it has anti-racist themes, and as a result it is a intelligent story. The film is relatively faithful to the novel, but I'd recommend the book before the film. The closeness of the movie to the original material undermines the power of the novel. The climax is, however, just as tense as the film.

This edition also contains the super short story Three-Ten to Yuma itself made a film twice (1957 and 2007). This time the films extrapolate a much larger story. The short story just covers the tense last part of the films. Nonetheless its a brilliant little read. A massive tale condensed to barely 15 pages, with the reader feeling he knows everyone's backstory even though its not written down. Again, a fantastic and exciting ending gunfight. You can see way Leonard's work was so often chosen for the big screen - its almost movie like in its sparsity.

Related Reviews

Leonard - Maximum Bob
Leonard - The Switch
Leonard - Glitz

Ivan Doig - Prairie Nocturne

Almost all of Ivan Doig's novels are, like Doig himself, rooted in Montana - even when they stray out of the state. Prairie Nocturne takes as its jumping off point the communities of Two Medicine County, the fictional area of Montana based upon the ranching and farming area were Doig grew up. Earlier novels set here followed the lives of two intertwined families and they feuded over land and ancient disagreements. Prairie Nocturne takes two character briefly mentioned in other works and sets them up as disparate lovers and friends.

Susan Duff was the singing schoolchild in Dancing at the Rascal Fair, taught by one of that books main characters. By the time that Prairie Nocturne is set, she has developed into a brilliant opera singer and performer, whose career in Europe and America made her a famous name. Now retired back in Two Medicine County, she's teaching singing to unskilled children. Wes Williamson was her lover, though he was married and the potential scandal derailed his political career. Wes met Susan in France when she was there as part of a delegation to commerate the deaths of thousands of US servicemen in the trenches of World War One. Susan's husband had served with Wes, and they are brought together passionately.

Back in Montana Wes is a major landowner, a fair and liberal man, who is constantly trying to expand his holdings. Readers of other novels by Doig, set before and after this one, will know the Williamson family as the opponent over the hill, whose ranching often frustrates smaller farmers. Their hope to get the McCaskill land forms much of the backdrop to other stories.

But in this between the wars novel, Wes' finds that one of his ranchhands, Monty Rathbun, a black worker and Wes' chauffeur. Monty has in Wes' ears a brilliant voice that deserves to get out into the world and Wes returns to his former lover to give Monty the training he needs.

While the training of Monty and the launch of his steller career form much of the base of the novel, Monty's backstory as the son of a Buffalo Soldier on the Plains during the war against the Native Americans and Wes and Susan's story are also central. Doig's traditional weaving of stories and times together give a characteristic epic feel to the book. But there are two other linked factors that make this book a cut above the average. The first is the question of racism. Montana had, and has, a very small black population, and thus black people do not feature frequently in Doig's novels. Nor do Native Americans, but that's a separate problem. Monty's presence, and particularly his (chaperoned) lessons with Susan are cause for comment and lead to the KKK making itself known. These scenes are traumatic but speak to a reality that is often forgotten among those who know Montana for its natural beauty.

The second, linked, factor is Monty's destination. While destined to become a famous singer across America, it is in Harlem, as part of the Harlem Renaissance where he comes into his own. This part of the book is well done and Doig gets across a real sense of Harlem as a place of refugee and cultural innovation, as well as poverty and crime. 

These stories link well. It's one of the stronger of Doig's novels and while some readers will enjoy the links to earlier stories and novels, this is a book that can be read independently.

Related Reviews

Doig - This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind
Doig - Bucking the Sun
Doig - Winter Brothers: A season at the edge of America
Doig - English Creek
Doig - Dancing at the Rascal Fair
Doig - Ride With Me, Mariah Montana

Sinclair Lewis - Elmer Gantry

Sinclair Lewis' Elmer Gantry is a delightfully cynical black comedy. It is also a book very much for our times. The eponymous Elmer Gantry is a happy go lucky young man, brought up in a stifling religious home, but now at college he's a partying, womanising and drinking law student. Realising that becoming a lawyer is hard work, and will likely keep him poor, he decides on a different course of action. Confounding his critics - the hardworking and deeply religious students around him - he heads to a Baptist College where he begins his planned ascent through religious bureacracy to make his fortune, strip the gullible masses from their wealth and sleep with as many attractive parishioners as possible.

When it was first published Elmer Gantry scandalised the good Christian folk of the United States. Small wonder really. Gantry is a lying, swindling, blackard. He is not afraid to dump his friends, betray his flock, and commit adultery. Indeed he happily changes churches, not out of actually religious fervour, but because he sees better chances of enriching himself. Gantry isn't lazy. He's perfectly happy to seep himself in religious works to better understand his place. He just doesn't believe any of it.

Perhaps his worst habit is the way his infatuation with young women leads eventually to boredeom and betrayal - and then abandonment. The only case where this bucks the trend is his encounter with the evangelist Sharon Falconer, to whom he seems genuinely committed - at least to the extent of only creaming off some of the cash, and only having one brief affair. 

Gantry's rise and fall, then rise and further rise, is the story of an obsessive and clever swindler. But it is also the story of hypocritical 1920s America when the church was happy to sell love, truth and future happiness for a decent enough donation in the collecting tray. The only difference Lewis says, is that Gantry is the most extroverted at it. He's also very good, and ambitious. The rest of the Church hate him but his gilded tongue, superb sermonising and his ability to cover his tracks usually gets him through.

HG Wells apparently wrote an article on America based in part on Lewis' descriptions in this book. While Wells probably ought to have done more first hand research, Elmer Gantry feels very much like its based on real people. Indeed Lewis lived with various preachers, went to multiple religious services on a daily basis for months, to research the background to the book. One of those whom he lived with was a preacher determined to show Lewis that his portrayal of priests and preachers in early books was deeply inaccurate. One can only imagine how he felt (and sermonised) about what Lewis did with his hospitality.

It is alleged that Lewis wrote much of the last chapters of the book in a deep alcoholic hole. If that's true than I didn't really find the book any worse for it. Indeed, the ending spoke very much to 21st century America. Lewis is a fine observer of the dirt beneath America's surface.

Conor Kerr - Prairie Edge

Grey Ginther and Ezzy Desjarlais are two Métis cousins living in an old trailer near Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Their days are a mix of drinking and endless card games; listless and dull. Grey is a disillusioned environmental and indigenous rights activist, fed up of the corporate NGO lobbyists, and the endless treadmill of well meaning white activists whose trajectory from college to NGO jobs or academia means they never actually engage in meaningful and lasting action. Ezzy is her friend, who survived a succession of foster homes, poverty and state failure - desperately looking for love and hope, yet failing at ever stage.

Grey comes up with a cunning plan. To ramp up activism needs something profoundly different. Rather than protest, they need direct action, and remembering how the bison were taken from indigenous and Métis people she vows to return them to their rightful home - the plains. Even if there are towns and cities in their way. Grey and Ezzy borrow a truck, steal a car and suddenly the news is full of video of bison roaming where they should not. "Let them stay" and "land back" become the chants and demands of citizens.

The bison plan is the back drop to this tale, but the story is really about how the crushing reality of the Canadian state oppresses and exploits people like Ezzy and Grey at every turn. There's little way out, and sooner or later something will (and does) go terribly wrong with the plan. 

The police turn up - all fat and aggressive. To them Métis and indigenous peoples are simply guilty. 

This is a deeply painful novel. It is not without hope - but that lies in the way that ordinary people stand up for each other and resist oppression. Community and family are the only defence again a brutal state, drugs and alcohol, poverty and addiction. But the novel really asks - is this enough? Or can we rewild Canada and other capitalist states to build something different.

Ken Follett - A Column of Fire

A Column of Fire is the third book in the Kingsbridge series - Ken Follett's incredible popular novels set around the mythical Cathedral town of Kingsbridge. One of the reasons for their popularity in my opinion is that they focus on the ordinary people of the town, artisans, traders, workers and servants, and their relationships and working life. The first novel, which centred on the building of the cathedral, is particular good in its portrayal of the people who created the building and those who supported them.

A Column of Fire still has Kingsbridge at its heart, and the cathedral is the centrepiece of one or two key events, but this time the book is very different. If the first two novels placed Kingsbridge's inhabitants at the centre of the story around which historical events took place, this one places one or two inhabitants of Kingsbridge, and their families, at the heart of historical events.

This means that the novels scope is much larger, to the detriment of the characters. The novel's principle focus is the life of Ned Willard, whose family are prosperous merchants. At the start of the novel he is returning to Kingsbridge from learning the family business in Antwerp, and is desperately in love with Margery, the daughter of the local Earl. Their romance is stopped by the dynasty building ambitions of her father, and Ned has to leave Kingsbridge to become a courtier working in the service of the new Queen, Elizabeth.

Further tensions arise as Margery is a devout Catholic and Ned is Protestant. Ken Follett here is able to construct the complicated religious conflicts of the era around the tensions between the two. Ned is present at many of the key events of this era, including the Saint Bartholemew massacre, the Armada and so on. While the reason for this is of course his service as a spy for Elizabeth, it's on occasion a little implausible.

The networks of Catholics trying to overthrow Elizabeth are only part of the story. Follett has included other aspects of the period - including the slave trade and international commerce with Spain and the New World. Some of Ned's family become incredibly wealthy, and peripheral characters, such as former slaves are shown to also become rich - after they are liberated. While Follett doesn't downplay the violence of slavery, its a little too much in the background. 

Ned's central role in key historical events allows him to become the modern reader's viewpoint. He's liberal and kind, bemoaning the violence of both sides, while desperately trying to avoid England collapsing into Civil War.

A Column of Fire is an enjoyable read - like the other books its packed with cliff-hangers, sex and violence. It's a decent holiday read and should be enjoyed on that basis.

Related Reviews

Follett - World Without End
Follett - The Pillars of the Earth

Alistair Macleod - No Great Mischief

Preparing for a trip to Nova Scotia and Cape Breton one is struck how the interconnected history of Indigenous people and immigrants remain central to the region, and indeed the formation of modern Canada as a whole. Alistair Macleod's No Great Mischief focuses on the immigrant experience, those who left Scotland to settle in Nova Scotia, to work its land and mines and build a better life. It is a sweeping history of shared identity and the challenges of building a new life.

The novel begins however, in the modern era, with Alexander MacDonald, a successful dentist, visiting his alcoholic, elder brother Calum. Through a series of flashbacks we begin to construct their shared history, the tragedies that have left the MacDonad children orphans, and the struggles they have fought in the Uranium mines and the fields of Canada. Tragedies outnumber the good times. These are lives, like most immigrants, of long days of hard work, of low pay and accidents. Their are good times, often fuelled by music, dance, poetry and drinking. But while the flashbacks return as far back as 1779 when the first MacDonalds fled Scotland to settle, it is perhaps only Alexander who has broken free of the endless cycle of poverty and death.

Immigrant identity looms everywhere over the novel. Strangers who share the characteristic red hair of the MacDonalds, and claim heritage to the original clann Chalum Ruaidh, stop each other in the street to bond over shared history and family. It's a fierce defensive mechanism that brings conflict with other immigrants groups in the mines and the fields. It creates a culture that pervades contemporary Nova Scotia in many different ways. 

The book is hard to characterise. It's focus on groups in the rugged landscape means that the place itself is part of the story. The rocky coasts and barren landscape. There is, for me, a frustrating lack of presence of Indigenous people whose culture would have been in conflict with the immigrant experience. Perhaps the story would have benefited from inclusion of some of the great working class struggles that Nova Scotia has seen - particularly in the mines. But this is a celebration of brotherhood and solidarity in other ways, the fight to preserve identity and to stand true to who you are. Its a lovely book that will linger as I explore Cape Breton.

Willa Cather - O Pioneers!

I stumbled upon Willa Cather's O Pioneers!' due to my interest in the people and history of the North American praire. First published in 1913, but in part based on the authors' own experiences as a youngster in the late 1800s, it feels like a very modern novel. 

Alexandra Bergson is the capable and highly intelligent daughter of her and her brothers' beloved widowed father. On his death she takes over the running of the land and through a series of carefully planned decisions manages to turn the farm into a highly successful concern. She carefully questions the other farmers, reads the news and keeps abreast of the market, planting crops that are considered marginal, until they become highly profitable. Quickly the farm expands, but Alexandra herself defies convention - she doesn't marry and prefers an austere lifestyle. Eventually she falls out with her brothers who are convinced that despite her leadership on the farm, most of the land is rightfully hers.

The book, like many others of its type, tells a number of shorter stories centred on the lives and loves of the people in the area. There are two great arcs though, the first centres on Alexandra and her relationship to the land. The land is a key character in the novel - the changing seasons as well as the industrialisation of the farms as they change from early, amateur efforts into a managed landscape. The other arc traces the love between Alexandra's younger brother Emil and her, married, friend Marie. 

These stories form the heart of the novel. The praire is a tough place to farm. As the novel opens many farms are failing and families are heading back to the cities to try for jobs in factories and industry to improve their lot. The reader knows, of course, that two decades after this novel is set the Dustbowl and the Great Depression will decimate the farms again. But Alexandra draws the farm into prosperity in a time when farming in North America could boom. 

But what struck me reading the book was the novel's treatment of three issues that feel very modern. The first of these is gender and sexuality. It is very likely that Willa Cather herself was LGBT+. It is hard not to see some of her life in Alexandra's decisions which seem to defy the traditional relationships of the community around her. 

Secondly is the question of Mental Distress. One of the people who work on Alexandra's farm is Ivar. A many who hate the killing of animals, who prefers to live alone and prefers a cave to a house. He is a wizard with horses and animal care, he advises Alexandra how to look after their pigs when others are dying of disease. But his unusual behaviour and frequent mood swings and depressions lead some to think that Ivar is dangerous and threatening. Once again, in defiance of the community around her, Alexandra refuses to accept this and promises to become Ivar's ward if the doctors come to take him away. This kindness brings its rewards towards the end of the novel. But the most interesting thing is how this kindness and rejection of the stigma of mental health feels so unusal for a novel of this time period.

Finally, the question of immigration is central to the story. Almost everyone in the book is a Swedish-American immigrant. The religion, politics and culture of the old world is transplanted to the New, and evolves. At the back of many of the older members of society are their hopes and dreams, and memories, of Europe.

There is one big ommission - Native Americans play no role in the book. I didn't see a single reference, which is disappointing given the great themes of land and labour.

While the nostalgia that is at the heart of the motive power of O Pioneers! can feel a little thick at times, this is still a powerful and moving book. I look forward to reading the follow up books in Cather's trilogy.

Related Reviews

Norris - The Octopus
Williams - Butcher's Crossing
Cronon - Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West
McDonald - The Red Corner: The Rise & Fall of Communism in Northeastern Montana

Stephen Graham Jones - My Heart is a Chainsaw

My Heart is a Chainsaw is the first in a trilogy of horror novels by Stephen Graham Jones. As I mentioned in my earlier review of his book The Only Good Indians there is a strong tradition of such works being used to discuss wider social and political themes. My Heart is a Chainsaw uses the genre in a very meta way to discuss big issues and more individual ones.

The book is set in a lakeside town of Proofrock, Idaho. It's a small town on Indian Lake. Jade Daniels is about to graduate, but her childhood has been hard. In her final semester she attempts suicide. Coming back to Proofrock she becomes convinced that the town is about to experience a slasher killing, as portrayed in a myriad of films that Jade is obsessed by. Jade's internal monologue, and increasingly frequently, her conversations with others, is peppered with references to events, plot devices and tropes of the slasher movie genre. She even identifies a "final girl" in Letha Mondragon a beautiful new girl in the school. Letha is popular, bright and the daughter of the fabulously wealthy Theo who is developing the far side of Indian Lake into a exclusive and expensive new housing area. The lake will be the playground of the rich and Proofrock will be the source of their labour and services.

As the victims begin to pile up there's alot of ambiguity about who is doing the killing. Jade is convinced it is a slasher and for a time people think the killer might be her. The reality is both more sinister and in keeping with the tropes of the genre. 

The book carefully ties up the horror with the wider social problems of poverty, boredom and abuse inherent to a poor, forgotten rural community. The rich, with their yachts and wealth, form a nice counter-point to the reality of Proofrock. Indeed their chosen name for their development Terra Nova, might echo the way that settlers viewed indigenous people and their lands when Europeans arrived. 

One of the most important themes of slasher movies for Jade is revenge. For her, the slashers are fighting injustice - literarily. The murders they commit are supposed to rectify some ancient evil or balance out some horror. But Jade divorces the events from her personal history. She doesn't get that she is the centre point of the story, believing that Letha in all her "final girl" glory of beauty and innocence, isn't the protagonist Jade thinks she is. As a result the finale takes everyone by surprise and allows Jones to keep misdirecting the reader while Jade stumbles through the chaos. A great read, but one that's really too gory for me.

Related Reviews

Jones - The Only Good Indians

Elizabeth Gonzalez James - The Bullet Swallower

In 1895 bandit Antonio Sonora lives on the border between Mexico and Texas. Sonora came from a very wealthy landowning family, but fallen on intensely hardtimes. He, and his own family, live in a shack made from the materials of his ancestor's mansion. But finding himself completely out of options, drought destroying the local farmland he embarks with his brother, on a final attempt to make it rich - a daring robbery of a train carrying plunder from Mexico to the US.

After the robbery fails, it's a bloodthirsty and desperate fight against the Texas Rangers whose renowned brutality strikes fear into the Mexicans (and Native Americans) and who are happy to murder Sonora's family to try and flush him out. Thus begins Sonora's quest for retribution - path of revenge that requires him to sacrifice himself, but also his past and his family's future.

In 1964 Antonio's grandson is one of Mexico's most famous movie stars. One day a mysterious woman gives him a book which is a history of the Sonora family, in all its gory and violent detail. Jamie Sonaro decides to make a film that tells the story, and rescue his family from obscurity. In doing so, he encouters a mysterious, shadowy stranger who seems to have magical powers. This stranger has the power of life and death, surviving a scorpion bite, and bringing the crushed creature back to life. Perhaps he is the devil, or Death.

The two different timelines gradually become closer, as Jamie learners the truth about his grandfather, and we follow Antonio's story of revenge, redemption. The latter forms the core of the novel. Antonio's story is told through a series of set piece encounters - a cross between a Western and a road trip. He meets a series of characters including very delightfully described Englishman whose inherited wealth includes slave plantations. This character embarks on a trip with Antonio as an adventure, until the bandit admonishes him. This is real life for him, not a game. The conditions of poverty, war and hunger all around are not scenery. They're real. 

Normally I find magical realism difficult to follow. But this unusual Western brings fantasy, magic and a realistic tale of a bandit trying to escape poverty through violent action to life. It's a lovely book. It's worth noting that it tells a very different story of the Texas Rangers to the heroic bravery of that depicted in Lonesome Dove. A useful antidote to that rewriting of history.

Lois Phillips Hudson - The Bones of Plenty

John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath is probably the novel that most people associate with the Dustbowl of the 1930s. Lois Phillips Hudson's The Bones of Plenty was published nearly 25 years after Steinbeck's classic and bares comparison. It is set in North Dakota, and centres on the Custer farming family whose patriarch, George Armstrong Custer (named for the General). The struggles of the family, and in particular George's struggles with drought, storms and disease, make up a novel that marks the gradual decline and fall of the Custers and their community.

George spends his time criticising the government, the banks and his fellow community. He recognises that something fundamental has gone wrong. Big business has stripped the little producer down, the hardworking farmer has been undermined by politicans whose support has gone straight to grain speculators and big capitalists. His rage at the banks, the government and the capitalists is only matched by his antisemitic anger at the Jews he imagines are running the banks. It's a powerful example of the contradictions that can sit in the brains of men oppressed and exploited by an anonymous system.

Hudson fleshes out her narrative with stories of what's happening elsewhere, so of which she tells narrator style, and on other occasions tells through George and his wife Rachel's reading of newspapers and listening to the radio news. Bankruptchies destroy families, farms and communities. George obsesses over prices for grain, and makes tough calculations about his possible yields and finances. Maybe next year will be the time he makes it.

His eldest daughter Lucy is just reaching adolescence and her naive, hopeful dreams carry the novel. She's the thread that links disparate stories, the eyes through which we see the frailty of the Custer's wider community. She, alongside Rachel, are also the victims of George's uncontrolled, abusive anger. He wishes that Luch had been born a boy. She desperately prays that she will change overnight so that her father will like her more and she can work on the farm. He blames the government, the banks and everyone else for the unstoppable calamity.

The community does resist. George helps collectively to fight against the selling off of a neighbour's farm, someone brought low by the banks, but helped to survive by collective resistance and refusal to allow his home and farm to be auctioned. But there's not enough of it, and as the system sinks further, the end is on the horizon for George and Rachel's farm.

This is then the story of tens of thousands of others who found in the dustbowl the inherent contradiction of a capitalist model of farming clashing with ecological realities. It was the smallest people who suffered and the richest who stood to gain the most. The crisis would only be resolved through World War and massive state investment from governments. That was in the future. It doesn't help the Custers.

There is plenty more to this remarkable novel - the story of the drifters, community spirit and solidarity and the anger of those crushed by the system, but not quite losing all hope. Tragically it's a bit of a forgotten book - perhaps because it is so bleak. But it ought to be read more widely. It's got a lot to say to the 21st century world.

Related Reviews

Holleman - Dust Bowls of Empire: Imperialism, Environmental Politics & the Injustice of 'Green' Capitalism
Erdrich - The Mighty Red
Vogel - The Farmer's Lawyer: The North Dakota 9 & the fight to save the family farm
Smith - The Good Hand: A Memoir of Work, Brotherhood and Transformation in an American Boomtown

Anthony Trollope - Doctor Wortle's School

Dr Wortle’s School is a later one of the prolific novelist Anthony Trollope's books. It is also one of the shorter. This era, and type, of novel is not one that I often read and I picked it up because I came across a discussion of its plotline which piqued my interest. The novel is a surprisingly interesting discussion of Victorian morals. Or rather the pious and pompous attitudes of a particular class to those morals.

Doctor Wortle is a clergyman and headmaster of a small, private, rural boarding school. His staff includes Mr Peacocke, a teacher and an occasional preacher in the church. His wife, Mrs Peacock, is American and while they are nice people, there is a reticience to engage in the social life of the village, or that of the wider (and wealthier) parents of the students they look after. Early on in the book Trollope tells the reader that he will explain the reason and the reader can continue if they like. 

It turns out that the Peacockes were married, but that Mrs Peacocke was already married in the United States, to an uncouth, abusive and alcoholic Colonel Lefroy. Mr Peacock feel in love with her while Lefroy and his brother, also a Colonel, are in the Confederate army. Nothing improper occurs, though it is clear the two fall for each other. On hearing that a Colonel Lefroy has been killed during the Civil War, Mr Peacocke travels to the South to learn which brother has died. On hearing from her brother that it is Mrs Lefory's husband he returns and marries her, making her Mrs Peacocke.

On discovering that her former husband was not actually killed, and finding themselves not actually married, the pair flee to England and Dr Wortle's school where they live as husband and wife. Guilt eats at the two of them. Living in sin like this is considered a major social, moral and personal failing, particularly for those who would teach children and preach in Church. But it is clear they love each other very much, and Mr Peacocke decides to tell Dr Wortle. Before this can happen, Lefroy arrives and breaks the news, scandalising the local population, shocking the gossips and leading to many students to be withdrawn from school.

The plot then follows Mr Peacocke as he returns to the US to find the truth. 

The novel is of greatest interest because of the moral questions. Dr Wortle is the lynch pin of the story, and the reader now (and then) explores the ambiguity of the Peacocke's position through him. Wortle understands that the Peacockes love each other greatly, and feels that they are effectively married. He looks after them, offering Mrs Peacocke somewhere to live while her husband goes to the US. This scandalises people still further but Wortle, a brave, principled, if inflexible, soul stands firm.

Readers today will find it singularly unshocking. Had Mrs Peacocke had the right to divorce, nothing would have mattered. I suspect that the scandal that is depicted is true to life. Trollope offers his readership a slice of gossip, a slice of amusement and a slice of morals. What is love? What is marriage? What should these things matter? 

But matter they did. Trollope has to offer his married, but not married, characters a way out - and of course the first husband is found to be dead so the Peacockes can marry again. There's not defying of Victorian morals, but there is a challenge to those who would dismiss people so easily. Trollope knows his readers and he knows he has to give the steam an escape valve.

As such this is a novel very much of its time. Nonetheless, Wortle does speak to a more modern audience. Do you stand by your friends and colleagues when the world is flinging mud? Do you make snap judgements? Do you care for society's morals? 

The book is shorter than the more well known Trollope novels. On the other hand, it does feel padded out in places. There is a somewhat unnecessary subplot involving the Wortle's daughter and her betrothed. Perhaps Trollope was being paid by the page.

Nonetheless there is a lot here, dated though the moral questions are, its an insight to how a certain class of people in the 1880s thought about each other.

Maja Lunde - The History of Bees

Climate fiction is in the vogue these days. It usually depicts a horrific, post-apocalytic world where extinction and global warming have decimated humanity and destroyed society. The few survivors grub about in the ruins and try to live their lives. When Maja Lunde's The History of Bees was first published in 2015 the genre was less advanced, and to be fair, Lunde's take on it errs on the side of hope, rather than inevitable disaster.

Bees are a key, though not the only, part of the ecological system due to their role in pollination. Without bees, we are told, the world come close to starvation very quickly. In the last few decades the decline of bees, and the collapse of bee colonies, through the little understood "Colony Collapse" has become an issue of mainstream concern. Lunde puts it at the heart of her story which uses three different, and obliquely connected stories to tell a wider tale about how bees have been transformed by humans.

The earliest story is set in the 1850s with a scientist whose efforts to advance understanding of bees and improve their domestication are constantly undermined by his failure to remain at the forefront of scientific knowledge. Wracked by depression and self-doubt, William designs a new beehive, but is distraught to learn it isn't unique or the first. His design however becomes a family heirloom and his descendents become bee keepers in the United States. Interestingly William's depression overcomes his ability to innovate, but Lunde's development of his daughter, Charlotte, as the person who takes things forward and breaks free of England's stiffling atmosphere is one of the high points of the book. William, characteristically dismisses Charlotte's insights. Rather like one of his descendents George.

George is a bee farmer (I use the words deliberately) in the 2000s. He's farming colonies that can make honey, but more importantly because they are part of a wider and utterly irrational part of capitalist agriculture. I've written on this elsewhere, but the monoculture of industrial farming makes it impossible for bees to survive. So capitalism has made it profitable for bee farmers to move thousands of hives across country to artifically pollinate crops. You couldn't make up a better metaphor for the limitations of farming for profit. Unfortunately George is too pigheaded to see this. He also is too pigheaded to understand that his son is the only person who can truly innovate things, but doesn't want anything to do with the bees (or his father). 

Finally we have Tao and her family. In China in a future where bees have disappeared she works in near slave conditions to artifically pollinate trees by hand. Its the most dystopian part of the story, and Tao dreams that her son will escape through education. His sudden illness and disappearance sets her on a journey that leads to the "hope" of the novel. 

While bees, farming, and colony collapse are the central themes of The History of Bees, the substance of the book comes from the family relationships. Lunde is adept at portrayal of parents who don't understand their children, and whose obsessions blind them to wider issues of family and society. That said, Lunde is also shownig how our attempts to domesticate the undomesticable (is that a word?) drive ecosystems into crisis. The desire to manipulate for profit is what is dooming us - and along the way fathers will fail to understand their children just as they have always done. But the politics and the conclusions aren't developed enough, and the ending is too much of a liberal cop out (with a leader who "also has kids"). Relying on family won't save us. What will save us is the rejection - exemplified by George's son Tom - of capitalist farming and its profit motive.

Nonetheless I enjoyed this novel a lot, despite the appalling insensitivity and blinkered nature of George and William.

Related Reads

Goulson - A Sting in the Tale
Lymbery - Dead Zone: Where the Wild Things Were
Ware - On Extinction: Beginning again at the end

Ivan Doig - Mountain Time

In my head I associate Ivan Doig closely with the old West, settlers and immigration. His autobiography This House of Sky is mostly set in his time as a boy and young man on a ranch near the Rockies in Montana. The period traverses the 20th century in many ways, finishing with Doig heading to a new life as a writer in Seattle, but is rooted in the characters and family of the late 19th and early 20th century and their experiences living, farming and loving in Montana's rural areas.

So it is strange to read a Doig novel that has laptops and email, and seems to focus more on the Seattle side of this life. While Mountain Time is part of the lose Two Medicine Country series, it shares only a few names with the early books in that series and a few characters with the later books. Indeed one of the realistic things about these books is how the past, while present for all the characters, matters less and less to them the further generations it is away. There is clearly a lot of Doig's life here. His main characters are centred on Seattle having made the break from Montana and rural life. Mitch, the main character is a talented environmental journalist, whose regular columns document the depletion of the natural world on the West and NW coast of the United States. Mitch's connection to Montana is his father, a grumpy old grifter back home, whose get rich projects never, well, get him rich.

Mitch's wife Lexa is the sister of Mariah McCaskill the central figure in Ride With Me, Mariah Montana. This allows Doig to tie up a few story lose ends from previous books in passing. But the main story centres on Mitch's return home to see a dying Dad and the weeks that follow his death. 

Life most of Doig's novels there is little plot. Montana itself, the countryside, the mountains and the people are the real story. Here however the real story is an individuals relationship with their parents, and how that is challenged and transformed by death. It is inevitably, poignant and sad. But also a celebration of life and labour.

Related Reviews

Doig - Ride With Me, Mariah Montana
Doig - This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind
Doig - Bucking the Sun
Doig - Winter Brothers: A season at the edge of America
Doig - English Creek
Doig - Dancing at the Rascal Fair

Len Deighton - Horse Under Water

*** Spoilers *** 

Len Deighton's follow up to The Ipcress File begins in the same seedy post-war Europe that the first novel did. The anonymous hero of Horse Under Water may, or may not, be the same "hero" of the first book. Deighton's 2009 afterword makes it clear he doesn't know himself. It does not really matter, because the point Deighton seems to be making is that spycraft in the 1950s and 1960s was in the context of a cold Cold War and the economic decline of Western Europe. 

Horse Under Water though has a difference, it's set in Portugal and Spain, by then they were holiday destinations - for a minority of people. Our spy hero meets his milkman on the flight Lisbon - but we aren't yet in an era of mass tourism. There's still an elements of exotic to the destinations, plane travel and general being abroad drinking coffee and eating local food. Deighton plays this well - not the fancy food of Ian Fleming, but the ordinary tasty working class fare that would appeal to his readers and to him as a cook.

The plot, as always, is convoluted. There's an old Nazi U-boat off the coast and the British want to get into it to grab forged cash that the Nazis had made to finance the resistance against Franco and for democracy. Other people also want the U-boat, but then it turns out that there might not be any cash, only drugs, and then it seems like the drugs are the tip of a rather nasty Nazi iceberg. In fact, it turns out that the Nazis who fled Germany on said U-boat, had in their possession a list of Nazi sympathisers from the Second World War who are now, leading figures in the British Tory Party. Who could have imagined it?

Either way our brave spy, naively hunts this list down in order to fight for democracy and against fascism, only to find out that his masters know already and don't really care. It's a bit grim. But realistic. British spies haven't exactly been known to be on the side of the angels.

Its a thrilling ride that leaves world-weary London with its fan heaters and damp behind, and gives the reader a glimpse of the sun and the exotic world of Southern Europe. There's a touch of the naive about it too. There's so exposition (bizarrely requiring a trip to the Welsh valleys) where the reader gets various types of drugs explained to them. Our hero still has to put in his expense claims at the end though, and there's little to show for it. A great little thriller and, it has to be said, it's a nifty pun title that you might only work out half way through.

Related Reviews

Deighton - The Ipcress File
Deighton - Winter: A Berlin Family 1899-1945
Ambler - Journey into Fear

Ivan Doig - Ride With Me, Mariah Montana

Ride With Me, Mariah Montana is the final volume in Ivan Doig's English Creek trilogy. It's a sweeping history of Monata set in Doig's remote, and fictional, Two Medicine Country, nestled up near the top end of the Rocky Mountains. After the Native American's were displaced and destroyed it was a part of the world built on sheep, cattle and tourism. The book is set in 1989 as Montana is about to celebrate its centenary, which it should be noted, reminds us just how young much of America is. 

One of Doig's strengths as a novelist is his books are not constrained by a format. He can write sweeping epics, and tight little stories focused on a handful of people. English Creek, the first but middle book of the trilogy is focused on Jick McCaskill, a teenager whose family is about to be torn apart as his elder brother falls in love and abandons the plans his family have made for him. The first volume, Dancing at the Rascal Fair also dealt with romance, but set against a breathtaking story of homesteading and the founding of a farming community. In Ride With Me, however Doig abandons both these styles and opts for a road trip featuring the now elderly Jick.

Jick, the bright teenager of English Creek, is now older and more cynical. He has just lost his wife and is bereft. As Montana's centenary approaches his daughter, Mariah approaches him. A photo-journalist, she has been commissioned to do a series of pieces about the centenary, and about Montana, with the star journalist Riley Wright from the local paper. Riley, unfortunately happens to be Mariah's former husband, whose spectacular falling out during the divorce appears to have been the talk of small town Montana. He also rejected Jick's offer to take over the ranch, threatening that the small farm would be subsumed into the big agricultural conglomerates that have been a disliked feature throughout the history of the state and the trilogy.

All this is a convoluted setup to explain why Jick is driving a Winnebago around the backroads of Montana with his daughter and ex-Son in Law in the back. It means that Doig is able to write about the places and people of Montana with his customary love and sensibility. There's plenty of history of course - including some sentimental stuff for Jick, and plenty of other stuff about the decline and fall of various Montana staples - the mining industry of Butte. I was also glad that Doig's characters acknowledged the Native American history, visiting Chief Joseph's final battle site (though oddly there's only a passing mention of the Little Big Horn). 

While all this is fun, and its particularly cute for anyone who has done a Montana road trip as you'll recognise places, roads and so on. It makes for a less engrossing story that the early books. It feels like a crude attempt to tie up loose ends from the earlier books. One scene has Jick going to a local library and finding letters from his grandparents back and forth to Scandinavia. These are all characters from Dancing at the Rascal Fair and it all felt contrived.

All in all this was a disappointed finale and not up to the standard of Doig's other works.

Related Reviews

Doig - This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind
Doig - Bucking the Sun
Doig - Winter Brothers: A season at the edge of America
Doig - English Creek
Doig - Dancing at the Rascal Fair

Ken Liu - All That We See or Seem

One night Elli, a famous artist and extremely popular weaver of dreams, gets out of bed, closes the bedroom door on her still sleeping husband Piers, and walks out of the house. She vanishes. There's seemingly no reason for it. The police are baffled and Piers has no idea. Then he gets a phone call. Someone called The Prince has Elli, and is demanding that Piers return what she stole. The Prince tells Piers that he will kill her if he doesn't find the missing thing. The problem is that Piers doesn't seem to know what is missing and the Price is light on clues.

Piers finds Julia Z, a young woman who lives in the fringes of society. Its a world of data, surveillance and control. Everything from information about what you do, where you go and how you live is stored, bought and sold. Data is everything. Julia, in rejecting that, has learnt to live in the cracks and use her skills to earn cash through semi-legal schemes and also to resist the system itself. Julia, Piers hopes, can rescue Elli by identifying what is missing. 

So begins a romp through a future world that feels not very different to our own. This is Ken Liu's first techno thriller and he embraces the concept fully. Few pages pass without some new technological idea, equipment or concept being thrown at the reader. There's a lot of action, thrills and spills and some nasty bad guys - not least the Prince himself whose corporation manipulates data and knowledge to shift governments, opinion and, well anything. 

The problem is that its all a bit one-dimensional. Julia, the centre of the story, has a good back story that shows how she rejected society and entered the underworld. But she's just unbelievable as a person. Her skills are almost superhuman. At various points in the story she's able to reach into her rucksack and pull out a self-built gadget that can hack, store, video, fly or analyse. AI here is a tool to be used and key to modern life. Yet it's also a deus ex machina that fills every plot hole and drives the story foreward. There's no real innovation - the bad guys are comically bad, and the contrived plot let's Julia jump from escapade to escapade leaving the reader bored and unconvinced.

There's a good story here, trying to get out. But Ken Liu's world building, character development and overreliance on increasingly unbelievable technology as a problem solver didn't do it for me. As a commentary on our world of data and surveillance it failed.

Related Reviews

Stephenson - Snow Crash

Ivan Doig - Dancing at the Rascal Fair

*** Warning Spoilers ***

The second volume of Ivan Doig's Montana Trilogy, is the first chronologically. It probably doesn't matter whether you read this, or English Creek first, because these are independent tales. But Dancing at the Rascal Fair sets up the origins of most of the people who live in Two Medicine Country, a fictional area of Montana just east of the Rockies towards the Canadian border. 

Rob Barclay and Angus McCaskill are leaving Scotland to head to Montana where Rob's uncle Lucas is working as a miner. Lucas sends money home every year - sizeable chunks - and Rob and Angus are attracted to the good pay and better quality of life than late 19th century Scotland can offer. Montana is a land of opportunity, riches, good land and an escape from grinding poverty.

The first chapters have a dreamlike quality as Angus narrates his and Rob's voyage and then their long search in Montana's new towns for Lucas. Eventually they end up in Two Medicine Country, where Lucas is not mining, but running a bar and the two of them join Lucas in sheep business. Right from the start the messy reality of small, close-knit, emigre communities is there. Rob falls for Lucas' partner - and getting him and Angus to homestead in the mountains is part of making sure this doesn't get even more messy.

But it is Angus whom we follow for the next generation, as he farms, clears, and also teaches in the local school. He meets, and falls hard for Anna, another teacher and hopes to marry her. When she choses someone else, in part for economic reasons, Angus is desroyed and marries Rob's sister who has been brought over for that purpose. Their's is a caring and loving marriage, but Angus' love for Anna hangs over it like a shroud. Eventually Rob is unable to cope with Angus' unrequited love and hope and their brotherly, almost lovelike, relationship comes apart.

For while this is a story of love and humanity, it's set against the harsh backdrop of Montana's climate and the economic and political reality of the early 20th century. Boys get sent to fight in the trenches, influenza hits and the farming economy goes through its ups and downs. In addition harsh winters, dry summers and the gradual changing of farming practices transform the area and drive some to poverty.

Doig is wonderfully skilful at placing the human emotions of his characters against the backdrop of economic crisis, winter storms, drought and war. We're rooting for his people, while anxious for their survival. Dancing at the Rascal Fair is no cowboy adventure. Its the story of what happens over time. The book takes place over thirty or forty years, yet some chapters deal at length with a handful of days. It gives the reader a feeling of an epic, while occasionally zooming in on great detail.

What happens to Angus, Rob and the others is, in many ways, shaped by forces beyond their control. There's little here about the US's own politics - other than setting up of the National Forests which plays a big part in English Creek. Instead characters play their parts against a backdrop of events out of their control. That, I think is a deliberate ploy to make the reader think about the people. 

It should be noted that one group of people who are not here in detail are the Native Americans. Its probably a criticism of Doig's fiction that he neglects their place in Montana's history (though this isn't true of all his books - see Winter Brothers). Here they are literarily unnamed, but ever present in a Reservation on the other side of the hill. Doig's focus on emigrant and immigrant lives reminds us that the modern US was built in part on the labour of economic migrants. But the other part - the genocide - is absent.

That criticism aside, this is a deeply moving look at the lives that people live, which forms the backdrop to modern Montana.

Related Reviews

Doig - English Creek
Doig - This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind
Doig - Bucking the Sun
Doig - Winter Brothers: A season at the edge of America

Ivan Doig - English Creek

English Creek is, confusingly, the first of Ivan Doig's Montana Trilogy, but the second book chronologically. The books tell the story of the farming community around the Two Medicine Country on the east of the Rocky Mountains. It's an area similar to that were Doig grew up, and if the places are invented there is a sense of these being real places, real people and real situations.

Jick McCaskill is 14. He's the younger son of hardworking parents. His father is a forester and fire-watcher for the National Parks, keeping an eye on the people using and farming in the Two Medicine National Forest. Jick's mother is a fiercely independent woman who runs the household and small holding and keeps the family organised. Jick's elder brother Alec is the brains of the family. His amazing ability with numbers has led to his parents saving their money to send him to college. They hope he might become more than a farmer or rancher. They want him to escape. But Alec falls in love and announces his desire to get married and stay on the farm. So begins English Creek and the story of Jick's transformative summer.

English Creek is one of those novels were little happens. We see Jick's world view transformed as he is on the cusp of adulthood. Still drinking pop and with time to spare around his chores he is just beginning to see how the grown up world works. His father hands him over for a few days to a transient worker, one of many older men who make their living doing various seasonal jobs. Jick gets drunk for the first time, but also encounters the wisdom of older people who show him the way the world of Two Medicine works.

In the few week's covered by the novel there are a few key events - a rodeo, a Fourth of July picnic and a horrific thunderstorm. The story, such as it is, culminates in a dramatic forest fire. But, to be honest, little else takes place. This is a novel about a time, place and people. Rural Americans whose life has been crushed by the depression, who are desperate for rain or higher prices for their cattle and sheep, and whose lives are closely intertwined, even if not obviously, to world events. The ending, is less of a plot conclusion, and more of a shock to the reader when we realise the context for Jick and Alec's lives.

Ivan Doig's books are not well known outside of the US (and probably Montana). This is a shame. His writing is sparse, but beautifully sharp. And their's plenty of vernacular - which flows both from the local accent and the immigrant communities - something explored further in the prequel. Jick's mother makes an unorthodox, and realtively radical speech at the July Fourth celebrations. In it she talks about her father and his friend Ben. Ben English, she says, "is gone from us. He died in the summer of 1927 of a strained heart. Died, to say it plainly, of the work he put into this country, as so many have."

English Creek is a celebration of that work, that hardiness and the despair that was the lot of so many Americans between the wars. Doig's book is a mighty fine celebration of those lives and struggles.

Related Reviews

Doig - This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind
Doig - Bucking the Sun
Doig - Winter Brothers: A season at the edge of America

John le Carré - The Russia House

The Russia House feels unusual for a le Carré novel, not because of the plot or the characters, but because it takes place as the Soviet Union is on its last legs. But much else about the novel will feel familiar. It is main characters are ordinary people drawn into complex, dangerous and unusual circumstances - two of them figure - workers in the publishing industry who both visit Moscow to take part in the annual gravy train of publishing conferences and drinking sessions, and try and sell their books (or import Russian ones). On one visit Niki Landau receives a package from a woman called Katya with instructions to get it to "Barley" Blair, a British publisher and heavy drinker. 

Landau realises that this is no ordinary manuscript but is a document containing details of Russia's nuclear weapons systems. It's important info, and British intelligence encourage and train Blair to return to Russia to verify the information and make contact with its source - the designer Yakov. Blair and Yakov have history - they'd discussed peace and the post-Soviet world. But British intelligence is skeptical that the source is genuine and worries they are being played. So do the Americans. 

While making several trips to Russia Blair grows fond of Katya. The endgame of it all won't be ruined here, but involves Blair making a series of complex decisions that require the reader to follow the text carefully.

But as with most of le Carré's novels the genius is in the interactions between people. In particular the way that the intelligence services treat Blair, and to a lesser extent Landau. How they manipulate, coerce and dig into people's brains is fanatastic, and Blair's interactions with the US intelligence services are particularly entertaining and well written. As with all of le Carré's books this is a book about people caught up in the twists of history. It's excellent, but you might need to read the ending a couple of times.

Related Reviews

le Carré - The Looking Glass War
le Carré - A Murder of Quality
le Carré - A Legacy of Spies
le Carré - The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
le Carré - Call for the Dead
le Carré - A Small Town in Germany

Lee Child - Tripwire

There is a certain satisfaction to one of Lee Child's Jack Reacher novels. As the reader you know, after the first two or so, that you are going to encounter some sort of unsavoury, unequal and violent scenario which impacts vulnerable ordinary people, and that Jack Reacher will come along and fix things by killing all the bad people and releasing the good people from whatever obligation they are trapped in. In Tripwire this pattern is barely altered, though Child has constructed a particularly odious bad guy in the form of the violent Victor "Hook" Hobie who enjoys violence, rape, torture and murder, but who has made himself very rich through loan sharking. Hobie entraps a businessman whose legitimate company is on the rocks as technological innovation has pushed his product to the margins. Hobie's greed destroys the company and allows him to physical trap the businessman and his far cleverer and able wife in a violent spiral. Having dispatched American Nazis in the previous book, this time its loan sharks. One can only hope Reacher continues to rip through the nasties of US capitalism for the rest of the series.

So that's the background. The plot hardly matters in some senses, because Jack Reacher gradually finds out what's going on as he investigates a seeminly unrelated issue passed on to him by his former military superior. Along the way, Reacher falls in love and appears to settle down with Jodie, his boss's adult daughter.

Before we dwell on the problematic aspects of that relationship. It's worth noting that Tripwire's main themes are surprisingly political. The basis to both Hobie's rise to power and Reacher's quest to fix a seemingly unrelated disappearance are rooted in the Vietnam War, or more specifically, the chaos engendered by the war, and the way that the US fought it. There's a deep cynicism within the novel, expressed through the military personal, about the way - Reacher thinks it was wrong. So do many of the military figures he encounters. More importantly, there's a sort of Ramboesque debate about whether or not the Vietnamese still have captured US troops imprisoned. The conclusion is that they don't, and there's no great conspiracy. But the very idea of this hangs over the novel and the characters. Is this representative of what America thinks today? Probably not, and probably not when the book was first published in the late 1990s. But it allows Child to portray Reacher not as a violent miltiary protagonist, but as the seeker of untruth, the helper and the supporter of the innocent that Child would prefer him to be. By making him a Military Policeman and not a combat veteran Child allows Reacher to be the hero the public wants, specifically knowing lots about guns, and not be tainted by US imperialisms failures.

But there's a problem with the central relationship in the book. Reacher knows Jodie as a child. She develops a crush on him. They are close, and when Reacher and Jodie finally get together as adults there is an implication that they have finally consumated something that was around in the past. The whole thing feels completely inappropriate, unnecessary and unpleasant to read. Oddly few people reviewing Tripwire seem to think this is inappropriate. I understand that Child drops the character in the next novel. It really undermined the book, the character and the series.

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