Code of the West

[Some may consider some of this content spoilers.]

Texan Jimmy Goodnight makes a name for himself by pulling an ax out of an anvil at the fair winning $1000 prize money. Roping a one-ton buffalo doesn’t sound very smart but having your buddy tie your feet to your stirrups after you get paralyzed when the beast knocks you off your horse doesn’t sound too intelligent either. Life in Early West Texas was rough and ready but certainly not boring. The bulk of the novel is set in a caňon along the Red River which forms the border between Texas and Oklahoma in the East. Palo Duro Texas State Park marks the location.

It is said that Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did on the dance floor but she did it backwards. Given the nature of dance that could hardly be avoided but making a woman ride side-saddle seems unnatural for both the horse and the lady, isn’t that why God made culottes for women? Taking an Eastern Lady and putting her in the middle of a gang of ranch hands 100 miles from the nearest settlement is quite something else.

The camaraderie of the bunk house among grown men one hundred miles from the nearest civilization may not have attained to the extremes of Brokeback Mountain but the relationship between the less than good looking Jimmy and the stunningly handsome Jack attained at least to brotherly love. That Jack is the better cowboy in every possible way makes his playing second fiddle a strain. Bringing a beautiful wife into a situation where isolated men lived in close quarters seems an act of cruelty. That Jimmy fails to see the attraction between his beautiful wife and the lady’s man Jack that drove the latter away seems hard to believe. [The book description refers to Arthur and Lancelot.]

The canker that has eaten away at Jimmy’s soul throughout his life is finally revealed in a flashback 2/3rds of the way through the book. We come to learn that’s Jimmy’s white family was largely killed in a Comanche raid on their stockade when he was ten and he was carted off as one of the spoils of war and eventually adopted by a Medicine Man. Seven Years later as a young brave he is spared when a white army and Texas Rangers wipe out another Comanche Raiding party. Years later his past comes back to haunt him. By this circumstance he was deprived of two families and eventually adopted by a surviving Uncle.

Five hundred pages is a long read and the first couple hundred are the most engaging. The book contains the rough language of cowpokes, graphic descriptions of their work, and of rape and cruelty. None of it is gratuitous.

If you don’t like the Arthur and Lancelot analogy Othello and Iago come to mind. Every great empire including cattle empires seem to have the seeds of their demise planted from the beginning.

Federico Garcia Lorca: Collected Poems

When writing in Spanish, a language where most nouns end in either an 'a' or an 'o' the greater challenge would be the attempt to avoid rhyme. In English his translators make no attempt to duplicate his rhyme scheme. I look forward to hearing this poetry read in its original Spanish. In English one gets only a sense of the poet's thought. The poems are deeply personal and reveal a rather depressive personality of one who is self-absorbed and obsessive. One begins to understand why he would not keep silent for his own good when he returned to Spain. Like so many dissidents before and after him he might have survived in exile but separation from his native soil would have been intolerable. Some men seem to be born to be martyrs.

There are notes supplied in an end appendix but since the poems are not numbered and there are only rough page references following them is not easy. I claim no expertize in Spanish but in rendering the title La balada del agua del mar rather than Seawater Ballad or Salt Water Ballad I’d have said Sea Chanty. These may be Lorca’s Collected Verse but what they most reveal is a rather undisciplined cluttered personality leaving many versions of the same poems with no definitive indications of his preference or even completed versions of most poems. An editor’s nightmare it would seem.

Lorca was born to wealth and privilege but was not ashamed to associate with the local peasants in the countryside surrounding Granada though beyond writing about it no mention is made of his efforts to improve their lot.

Everything about this book is monumental including the sixty-four page introduction. In paperback the binding cannot survive the reading of it.

Riders of the Purple Sage

Before last night Zane Grey was only a name known to me through TV’s Zane Grey Theatre. I now learn that Pearl Zane Grey was a dentist who wrote nearly 200 western-style novels and died 10 years before I was born. Until I started this novel I had not suspected a Mormon connection or the State of Utah as a setting. My knowledge of what constitutes the West in American mythology is limited but I’m learning that it was a moving target as civilization and manifest destiny moved westward. It has just been in the last days that I learned that Mexican Immigration was an issue in Arizona in 1914. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised as next to Texas it has the longest border and geography favours it as a crossing point. Driven out of Missouri at a time when the only good Mormon was considered a dead one the Brotherhood are here painted as being as intolerant of ‘Gentiles’ as the people who forced them to move west.

I’m finding this book a heavy read in spite of the fact that it’s under 150 pages. [Research shows the page count is out by 200 pages.] For one thing there are extended physical descriptions of the landscape and the people. As others have pointed out the dialogue is somewhat stilted and there seem to be long periods in which little seems to happen. Somehow a bit more economy of expression would have helped. Throwing the Mormons into the mix added nothing to the story which seems to be somewhat light on plot. The author really didn’t like Mormons!

Elsie

I recently reviewed Tony Danza’s memoir about spending a year teaching a single grade 10 English Class. Still in her teens my own mother set out to teach 11 grades in a one-room school in rural Nova Scotia. The present memoir tells of a twenty-something young lady who leaves the luxury of Long Beach California to teach in a homesteading community in Arizona in 1913, a year after the territory attained Statehood. She taught only five grades but the neighbourhood she lived in lacked running water, electricity, and central heat.

In her favour her neighbours welcomed she and her fellow teacher supplying them with accomodation, meals, and moral support. Her students were well-mannered and eager to learn. Letters home from their remote location took time and included a list of items they wanted sent on. The Sears and Roebuck Catalog gained well-worn pages. Travel in was by train, then stage coach, and even horseback. Roads?

The book contains editorial comment, excerpts from Elsie’s diary, letters home, and pictures from her Kodak Brownie Camera. The details are often repetitive and mundane. How often do we need to know she did her washing--albeit in the creek, or cooked. What begins as an interesting frontier adventure becomes somewhat mundane. Which may explain why I set it down for a couple months before resuming it.

In her second year of teaching she moves to a larger school in a more civilized setting. She taught through the years of WW#1 but lost friends to more prosaic things like disease and accident.

This book assembled by her granddaughter.

Last Resort

There really is a Green Acres Trailer Park in Bobcaygeon in the Kawartha Lakes Region of Ontario which today caters exclusively to seasonal campers. During his formative years Lindwood Barclay’s family owned and ran the place. I’ve been that camper attending to business only to discover there are no provisions in the stall I occupy. Linwood worked for a time for the Oakville Beaver before moving on to greener pastures at the Toronto Star. He still lives in Oakville. Despite the glowering appearance the photo on his website shows appropriate it would seem to his present occupation as a writer of crime fiction this memoir is written with loving humour.

Every eleven-year-old boy’s dream would be to have a John Deere Tractor lawnmower to ride around on, a power boat to tool around the lake in, a new set of playmates or potential girlfriends arriving weekly, and surrogate grandmothers to fawn over him and bake cookies. There were chores to perform in particular the bucket from the fish cleaning station but they weren’t all that onerous. The book reads like summers spent at the lake with friends. The troubles in his life are approached with the same sunny disposition.

Medicine River

My copy of Thomas King’s book was bought the year it came out in 1989, shameful that it has taken me 34 years to get around to reading it. To be fair the characters were much recycled on King’s Dead Dog Cafe Series aired on CBC and is still available for purchase on i-Tunes Canadian Site. For the record Medicine River runs out of Medicine Lake near Rocky Mountain House Alberta but no such community exists. The general neighbourhood is mid-way between Edmonton and Red Deer, Alberta and the other communities mentioned are real including Hobbema having the dubious distinction of being the most violent location in all Canada. Sad to say that the characters in this book speak of members of other tribes in the same racist terms used to describe First Nations Peoples by Whites.

Filled with colourful characters.

Monkey Beach

Eden Robinson’s first novel is a first-person narrative related by Lisa of her younger brother Jimmy lost at sea. Used as a pretext for describing her experience growing up in the Haisla First Nations community of Kitamaat. The author has a way of writing that makes one smell the foggy salt air and hear the waves slapping against the rocks on the shore. Can you hear the firehall siren wailing to warn of an approaching tsunami? Can you smell the cockles cooking on the stove or imagine one squirming live in your mouth as you eat it raw? It’s as if talking about the younger little brother who was forever following her around and for whose safety she was held responsible is her way of bringing him back to life. As the older sis she still feels responsible.

It’s the kind of book you read slowly because you want to savour every detail. Uncles are fun because they tell naughty stories about your parents. Like the time the brothers rolled out their sleeping bags on the beach one warm night and awoke surrounded by one ton basking seals. Trapped in his bag one brother says, thought it was my wife hogging the covers as usual. The speaker appears to be free-associating experiences from her past with present day events or places she goes. Although the book is ostensibly about the search for a lost brother he is rarely present in memories related and we get few descriptions of him or a sense of his presence. It’s as if he’s already absent. There is the usual talk of residential schools, pre-teen smoking, booze, drugs, sex and dreams unrealized.

Ultimately the book is about Haisla culture and traditions and the landscape they inhabit. And life on the Rez where a friends bad tires can end up cosing you a trip to the Olympics.

Joe

A book by one of my two favourite authors, Larry Brown; Larry Watson being the second. Larry Brown writes from working class experience, he served years as a fireman. There are no good guys or happy families in this book. Not Joe Ransom who buys stamps at the Post Office he doesn’t need just so he can see his ex-wife who works there. Certainly not Gary Jone’s family whose alcoholic father wastes money his family of five needs for food on Old Crow Whiskey. Joe at least has a roof over his head and a job. There are no likable characters in this hard-drinking, hard-scrabble world but the story has a harsh authenticity about it.

Fay, written some years later is the story of Gary’s older sister who deserts the family in disgust and peddles her booty to Biloxi. Neither book is intended for the faint of heart or those with delicate sensibilities. Fay and her father Wade are the kind of amoral characters who give gypsies and vagabonds a bad name. Well written and highly recommended both so long as you feel up to it.

Big Cherry Holler

Perhaps there’s something about an author’s first book but there was something magical about Big Stone Gap the first in author Adriana Trigiani’s Blue Ridge Trilogy. It contained zingers like ‘he made Levi’s sing’, unfortunately for the smitten lover the hunk proved to be gay. Four-Fifths of the way through book two I put it away because I just couldn’t stand it anymore. Her writing had descended into the lowest level of Harlequin Romance Dime Store chic. The Blue Ridge is hardly a hotbed for woman’s liberation but Italy would seem to be the least likely alternative.

If you’re going to have a summer affair for comfort while the wife’s away don’t leave love notes in your pockets. And Italian women have hot tempers. I’ve read and heard about married couples throwing the dinnerware at one another but I was raised too poor and practical-minded to ever think of doing such a thing.

What comes through most vividly when Ave returns to the Gap is how stultifying and claustrophobic life in a small community can be when anonymity is impossible.

**Spoiler Alert**

What could be more embarrassing:

Your husband invites his Italian rival to dinner
They immediately hit it off like long-lost buddies
Your nine-year-old daughter is smitten with the guy
The town’s most inveterate gossip walks in in the middle of dinner.

As he of the singing Levis who calls in the middle of all this says, sexual tension is not a disease. It’s that kind of book.

Now how long before I read Milk Glass Moon?

Lando

Lando is one of Louis L’Amour’s 17-book Sacketts Series. Orlando Sackett sets out from his Hillbilly Log Cabin in the Blue Ridge to head West in part to escape a blood feud and to escape the family who swindled him out of his Father’s Spanish Gold. We learn about life in the hills, the brigands who haunt the Post Civil War back-country, and the perils of travel along the Mississippi. Distinguishing friend from foes is not always an obvious choice and being an obvious mark is dangerous.

Code of the West:

If you wear a gun folks will expect you to use it and you better be ready to.

You won’t be keeping what you can’t defend.

Not one of his best.

Out of Control

Few can match Louis L’Amour in his evocation of the American West. If you’re expecting John Wayne to step from the pages of Mary Connealy’s books you’ll probably find these touchy-feely boys too in touch with their feminine sides for your taste but even the master sprinkled romance in his tales. Expect more detailed physical descriptions of the characters and their experience of the terrain than the physical experience itself. Don’t get me wrong, these books are well-written, just different. Real cowboys cry, admit to being afraid, and even have mental breakdowns. This is book one of a series but there’s a back-story here that slowly emerges as the story progresses leaving the reader feeling that they’ve walked into a family conflict they don’t understand.

Rafe and his brother Ethan are very believable but the women, particularly Julia less so. Her obsession with fossils as others have observed borders on manic. Somehow Rafe deserves better. As I read on this book became heavy going. Unfortunately it was a book I could and did frequently put down. I’ll accept that the author has written good books but this is not one of them.

Firefly Beach

An accountant moves to a small coastal community in Maine to become an artist. A diary she accidentally finds renews long repressed memories and sends the reader on a quest to find the writer. A story to satisfy the snoop and sleuth in all of us. Remarkable how much local gossips can miss. Filled with well-characterized small-town eccentrics. After reading several e-Books plagued by typos, missing words, spelling errors and grammatical mistakes it is pleasant to find one that is properly edited. The book is a pleasure to read.

The Sea and The Silence

Set on the coastline of the Irish Sea among Anglo-Irish Catholics at home neither in Ireland nor England. People who send their progeny to private English Boarding Schools ensuring their continued alienation in the land of their birth. Told from a woman’s point of view Iz marries a man who proves to be a ne’er do well who philanders on the side. Irish tempers, red hair and freckles, pubs, priests, fishing, and country estates figure large in the storyline.

Around the halfway point after a significant crisis point we jump back nearly 30 years to Iz in her post-teen years at the time when she met her future husband. Her Father, it transpires, was no better manager of his affairs than her future husband. The question gets asked, should one accept an arranged marriage that assures one financial security, or should one marry for love. The Irish troubles seen from this point of view look different. English landlords given Irish Estates by Cromwell held large tracks of land often lying fallow as was Iz’s family home. Landless Irish peasants clamoured for land reform.

Then as now the promise of youth is squandered in battles on foreign shores. Duty vies with dreams for dubious outcomes. This is an Irish story, not one with happy endings. But it is well-written and worth your time.

Jarvisfield

At the end of book 3 of the Macquarie Trilogy we learn that it is to be stretched to a fourth book. I will not be acquiring book 4. At the end of Book 2 Lachlan Macquarie dies and leaves George Jarvis in charge of Jarvisfield. A few chapters into book 3 George is killed off in a riding accident leaving the estate in the hands of George’s wife and Elizabeth Macquarie the Laird’s widow. Raised without a strong male presence Lachlan Jr falls into the company of a his Godfather’s son and joins him in the army in a life of dissolute gambling and debauchery. Whereas his friend can afford to lose at cards Lachlan cannot and he throws away his inheritance and his happiness in the process. This book is not the engaging read the first two provided. It has its moments and it may be true to life but it lacks the moral compass provided by the two strong leads whose friendship was the driving force in books one and two.

Beneath the Wall

Perky red-haired photo-journalists always seem to fall for tall, dark, handsome narrow-hipped, wide-shouldered Adonises who look like the covermen for Muscle and Fitness and have corded muscles that demand exploring. If you can get past that cliché and the 9 grammatical errors I marked in the first 150 pages this is a great read. Eryn LaPlant has that knack that some writers possess for drawing your interest from page one and holding it unbroken as you flip the pages. There are books one plows through to get past the tedious bits but this one carries you along non-stop and it does it without leading you through non-stop adventure though that’s there as well. Anyone who has read The Bridges of Madison County will recognize the central MacGuffin of adult children discovering after her death that their mother had a past they’d never dreamed of. Few though discover that their frumpy parent spent her salad days dodging bullets in Vietnam and fending off the attentions of Marines starved for female company.

Another cliché of the genre is the arresting cover shot of model Jason Aaron Baca calculated to grab the attention of casual browsers or book store window gazers. There’s even a forgettable book by him highlighting the fact that only 1 in 20,000 wannabes make it in his world. Fortunately the present tome rises above it all to provide book lovers with a very readable action-adventure romance.

Dirty Work

Two of my favourite authors, Larry Brown and Larry Watson. Brown, a smoker who died of a heart attack in 2004, wrote this book a quarter-century ago. Two injured Vietnam Vets end up in adjoining beds in a VA Hospital. One a black man missing both arms and legs has been there for 22 years, the other missing most of his face is a 250 pound white man who suffers from black-outs caused by a bullet logged in his brain. What these two men have in common is what we learn over a two-day period. Somehow I just can’t get away from war lately. This book illustrates the lasting costs of war especially to those forced to participate. This author can make almost anything interesting. The book draws you in and holds your interest throughout. Makes you feel that sixth-grade bully got what was coming to him. Alas for poor working class grunts there don’t seem to be any happy endings.

This Side of Brightness

Set in New York City at the turn of the last century among the sandhogs who hand-dug the tunnels under New York for subways and other traffic and the homeless people who occupy them today. I’ve read and enjoyed McCann’s style in the past. Believe I find the sandhogs more sympathetic than the street-people.

It was Henry David Thoreau who said, “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.” Colum McCann is able to find drama in the most mundane of lives and make us care for their joys and pains. They seem to come alive on the page and enter our field of vision.

As the story progresses we move from digging under the ground to high steel and the two story-lines meld into one. When a black man marries an Irish lass their chocolate coloured children arrive with crinkled flaming red hair. Practical minded rather than vindictive when hate messages wrapped around bricks crash through their apartment windows they rent an apartment too high for the bricks to reach.

The Shack

I found reading the book rather heavy going and not because of the heavy theological content. I’ve read Paul Tillich and Viktor Frankl. Guess I prefer my theological arguments straight up rather than in allegorical or fantasy formats. The chief protagonist in this piece is dealing with the abduction/murder of his youngest daughter and is invited to spend a weekend with God in three persons in a remote shack. A great deal of liberal theology gets covered here. If you don’t mind the format then this is a great book. To me a 300-page parable was rather too much of a good thing.

Hamfist Down

I want to thank Amazon for making the second part of this two-parter available as a free download. Read it in one afternoon. Part 2 follows Hamilton Hancock after he bails out over Laos and continues as he completes his deployment in Viet Nam. This is pure action/adventure and carries the reader along for the ride.

The Making of a Messiah

Little is known from the Biblical Record about the childhood of he who was born King of the Jews. In fact the cynical could reasonably claim that the mixed details available in the Synaptic Gospels were manufactured to fit Old Testament prophesy. It would appear that this child did not become self-aware and people start standing up and taking notice until after he began his itinerant preaching around Judea. We are told a great deal about his lineage, angel visitations, and the means of his birth. We hear much about his birth in Bethlehem, Angel Choirs, Shepherds and Wise Men and the events which place his birth around 4 BCE. He is named in the Temple at eight days. There is a flight into Egypt around the time he was two. And then nothing until his Visit to the Temple at age 12 and the trouble he caused his parents by staying behind.

The record is then a blank for the next 18 years until he joins his parents for the wedding to which his family were all invited at Cana. Before or after that he visits his cousin John the Baptizer in the River Jordan and wonders into the Wilderness to disappear again for a period of time. When he reappears for his 3-year peripatetic ministry of teaching, preaching and healing the sick at age 30 he is an old man at a time when life expectancies weren’t much higher than that. The teachings of a younger man would probably not have been given much credence.

In the Gospels details of time and place are often added in an attempt to give verisimilitude to the story. No attempt is made to fill in the blanks in his life story and it must be remembered that the first Gospel was probably written 3 centuries after his death. The present book is an attempt to fill those gaps by means of the anthropological record, other writings from that time period, and gospels that failed to make it into the canon. Since there are no written documents and the Bible in any case is a record of faith not history this needs-must be a work of fiction.

Items of interest:

This is not a childhood biography so aside from a few embellishments little is added to the list of known details I summarized in my opening paragraphs.

Jesus was a southpaw?

We are given a brief summary of Jewish History much as Jesus would have had it related which includes:
A revisionist version of the 10 plagues of Egypt
That Judea was emptied during the Babylonian Captivity rather than the more accepted assertion that it was her leaders and elite that were carried off into bondage, not the entire community.

We learn of Jesus’ moral upbringing and have cause to reflect that this was a very special couple chosen to raise God’s Son.

We learn of the scholarly influences he may have encountered and the philosophical and cultural systems in place during his growing years. Aramaic, Greek and Roman Latin.

The author takes it as a given that Jesus interacted with the Essene Community at Qumran along with his cousin John (the Baptist) taking particular delight in their library. It is also assumed that Jesus and his cousin John had a life-long friendship. John’s father Zechariah was of the priestly class and the knowledge he passed on to his son must have challenged the younger cousin though no mention is made of an interaction between Zechariah and Jesus.

The one issue the author does not confront is that of marriage. It would have been considered a given at the time that any good rabbi would have a wife.

This is not light reading. In a few short pages the author has summarized theological arguments and concepts that have occupied the best minds inside and outside Christendom for a millennium and filled entire libraries with their discourse.