2015 books: 25-29

[the_siobhan]

The Monkey Wrench Gang and Hayduke Lives by Edward Abbey

Apparently I got my copy of The Monkey Wrench Gang from the East York Public Library in 1984.

The story takes place in the mid- to late-70s. A group of people meet on a rafting trip through the Utah desert and discover that they have a mutual loathing of the development boom that is turning the American wilderness into a series of dams, strip-mines and clear-cuts. They get together and start blowing shit up. Apparently this book was in part the inspiration for Earth First! and also spawned the use of the term "monkey wrenching".

The writing is dated as hell, it's sexist and racist and at times Abbey is entirely too fond of the sound of his own voice. It is also a lot of fun and his love for the desert really shines through the text. I really like the fact that the characters aren't actually very good at what are they doing; it makes the book both more realistic and a lot more entertaining.

Heyduke Lives! is a sequel, published after his death. It takes place about five years after the first book when all but the Hayduke of the title are living quiet (mostly) legal lives. The book is silly and more disjointed than the first one and there are a lot of characters that don't really seem finished. (The down side of being published postumously, I guess.) It's also kind of obvious that outside of Earth First! Abbey didn't really have much use for other environmentalists.

There are more Mormons in these books that in any novel I have ever read before.

    

Gone To Soldiers by Marge Piercy I loved this book. It is so well written. It manages to be both bloody depressing and hopeful at the same time. The plot follows the lives of 10 Jewish people - six women and four men - through the events of WWII. It portrays the complete failure of every country in the world to give a shit about what was happening to the Jews, the crapness of the American government towards women when the GIs came home, the American refusal to put winning the war above their paranoia about communism and the general chaos, disorganization and ineptness of every army everywhere. Mostly it is about individuals living their lives and caring about their own petty human concerns while everything goes to shit around them.

Pearcy is a great writer. In the notes she says she intended to include Russia in the her locations which would have made the book a third again as long. I would have hoovered up every word.


    

The Wolf is My Brother by Chad Oliver A story about the white colonization of Texas and surrounding area through the perspective of two people on opposite sides of the conflict. The viewpoint switches back and forth between a Comanche warrior and an army Colonel. In a way it kind of works. The Colonel, in spite of the fact that he is involved in a horrendous genocide, is a single miserable cog in a big machine. However, the writer manages to completely fuck up in making the man a sympathetic character. He imagines himself to be in love with a sex worker because his wife doesn't understand him, I shit you not. And then he has PTSD over raping and murdering a Mexican woman during the Mexican-American war. Fucking what.

What I think is really handled well is how it talks about the hypocrisy of the people "back east" who idealize the Noble Savage and talk about how terrible it is that Indians have "had their land stolen" but still allow people to move into farmsteads on native land and push the army to protect those very homesteaders from the consequences. The ending is depressing but entirely inevitable.

    

The Snow Walker by Farley Mowat Another Canuk. Apparently we write books or something. The Snow Walker was apparently originally called Walk Well My Brother but the name was changed after a movie was made about one of the stories. It's basically a collection of short stories about the Inuit, focusing mainly on their interactions with white men. As you can imagine, most of them are not happy stories. Although there is a story about a bunch of Vikings ending up in an Inuit village that is pretty cool, and another one about an Inuit man who somehow ends up washed up in Scotland. They are all quite short and the book ends up being a quick read.