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Why read a historical novel about a privileged Harvard dropout who wants to find himself by going on a buffalo hunt?

1. It's by John Williams, who wrote one of my three favourite novels, Stoner, which I reviewed HERE, as well as his masterpiece, Augustus, which I reviewed HERE.

2. Hunting is not what it's really about (probably like Moby Dick?).

3. It was a good follow-on from Cold Mountain, which I reviewed HERE: two totally different US landscape-based stories, set only a few years apart.

What This Is - and Is Not

� This is a road movie - without the road, the car, or the film cameras.

� It's a Western - without cows, cowboys or indians native Americans.

� It's a character-based story - but the main characters don't speak or move (because they’re the landscape and weather).

� It's about big beasts, big wilderness, big ambitions, some big characters - but it often focuses on the minutest details of how things looks, sound, and feel (see quotes near the end).

� It’s about quests and dreams (of meaning for one; of wealth for another); aspects have a mythical air � but harsh reality dominates, and it's not the standard "American Dream" of wealth (success, fame, power).

� It's a coming-of-age story or bildungsroman - except that the end of the journey seems more like the beginning of Will's growing up.

� It's about life (finding purpose in it, as well as basic survival) - but there's bloody death and butchery.

If it seems a slightly surprising subject for a quiet professor of literature to write about, his wife explains that he lived in the West, loved the landscape, and liked camping. (He didn't hunt buffalo.) See this interview with Nancy Gardner Williams: .

Landscape

“He believed there was a subtle magnetism in nature, which if he unconsciously yielded to it, would direct him aright.�

I often seek quiet landscapes for solace, thinking, escape (preferably woodland). I like to listen and touch. I’m not brave or reckless enough to go anywhere really wild, and although I eat meat, I’m no hunter. Nevertheless, I can relate to underlying theme of this story more than I expected.

Will Andrews heads west, not to make his fortune, but to find meaning in his life. The landscape quickly has a profound effect, though it doesn’t really clarify things for him. He longs for the distant mountains but “did not know precisely what hunger or thirst they would assuage�. How many of us long vaguely for something, without being sure how or if it will fix things?

After only a month away from Boston, he barely remembers home, which seems “in a very distant time� The image would not stay with him. Unreal, it thinned like brown fog.� He quickly feels at home in the tiny settlement of Butcher’s Crossing, but yearns to go further, into the wilderness: in “a hint of the distant horizon� he sees “his own undiscovered nature�.

As he travels, he comes to identify with his surroundings, “He felt himself to be like the land, without identity or shape�. He has “the feeling that he was being absorbed� and “promised� a richness and a fulfilment for which he had no name�. After only a few weeks, “He had been here in the high valley for all of that part of his life that mattered� He could not think of himself outside of where he was�. Is this peace or an unhealthy form of disassociation?

But what’s it all for? When they eventually leave the valley, after much hardship, Will “felt vaguely that he would be leaving something behind, something that might have been precious to him, had he been able to know what it was.�

This thwarting of uncertain ambitions, this lack of resolution, reminded me of Stoner.

Faith, Religion, Ritual

Does everyone need faith in something? I’m not sure (I don’t think I have faith in anything much), but that’s the suggestion here.

Charley Hoge, the waggon driver, has a simple but profound faith in the words of his dog-eared Bible, and a fair amount of faith in Miller, the experienced buffalo hunter. Miller’s faith is also in Miller: his vast experience of the beasts and their environment. Schneider, the skinner, has faith in his own experience, so it’s no surprise that he and Miller don’t always agree. McDonald, the hide trader, has hope of future prosperity when the railroad comes through town.

Will is the faithless one: the son of a preacher who pressed Emerson more than God on his son. That is surely why Will now seeks answers in the wilderness, and why “the reality of their journey lay in the routine detail� a ritual, more and more meaningless as it was repeated, but a ritual which nevertheless gave his life the only shape it now had�.

There is also a ritualistic aspect to the hunting, killing, and skinning: “a rhythm in Miller’s slaughter� Like a dance, a thunderous minuet created by the wildness that surrounded it�. Does that make it somehow sacred, or profane and greedy?

If my Biblical knowledge were closer to Charley’s than Will’s, I’d probably spot more, but wilderness is significant in the Christian story, and just as Genesis has a six-day creation, Miller’s preparation for the journey is six days, as it the first leg of it (after which, they are literally off the beaten track).

I’m not sure if it’s the author’s intention, but you could easily sermonise along the lines of the perils of chasing material gain, versus the importance of searching for deeper truth.

Transformation

From the most ancient myths and stories, physical journeys have paralleled personal journeys of transformation. That is true here � not just of Will, but even the characters who are used to venturing out for weeks on end.

There are the obvious physical transformations from weeks in the saddle, then the hard labour of hunting and skinning etc, but the psychological changes are greatest, and most profound. As things get tougher, each man has to wrestle his own demons, as well as the other men, and the conditions in which they’re living, travelling and, hopefully, surviving - physically and mentally.

“He thought at times that he as moving into a new body, or into a real body that had lain hidden beneath unreal layers of softness and whiteness and smoothness.� Later, these feelings are echoed when he loses his virginity.

Survival

If you like survival stories, there’s plenty here. They travel in uncharted territory, where only one of them has been before, and that was ten years earlier. They have supplies, but need to make them last, and can’t ever go too far from water. The terrain and weather are always a risk, as is the greed of trying to get just a few more hides.

Seeing this Through Other Eyes

Some books are so deep or strange, they inspire hugely varied and very creative reviews. This is, in some ways, a very simple story, but I was struck by the variety of my friends' reviews: they are almost all 4* or 5*, but the themes and ideas the pick out are remarkably diverse. I think that indicates how much depth there is beneath the surface.

I think this could make a wonderful film - but only in the rights hands. It needs to focus on careful shots of the landscape, rather than wild west clichés: enormous vistas, as well as careful light, highlighting details close-up. would be perfect, though in 2010, Sam Mendes was reported to be adapting it. He's made some excellent films, but I'm not sure I'd want to see his version of this.

Descriptions of Minute Details

This is also a notable feature of his first (disowned) novel, Nothing But The Night, HERE.

� “He became aware that his hands were tightly clenched; the tips of his fingers slipped in the moisture of his palms.

� “Flat lines of sweat ran through the glinting beads of moisture that stood out on his forehead, and ran into his tangled eyebrows.�

� “He noticed the minute beads of sweat that stood out distinctly above her full lip and caught the sunlight like tiny crystals.�

� “The rich buffalo grass� changed its color throughout the day; in the morning, in the pinkish rays of the early sun, it was nearly gray; in the yellow light of the midmorning sun, it was a brilliant green; at noon it took on a bluish cast; in the afternoon, in the intensity of the sun, at a distance, the blades lost their individual character and through the green showed a distinct cast of yellow, so that when a light breeze whipped across, a living color seemed to run through the grass, to disappear and reappear from moment to moment. In the evening after the sun had gone down, the grass took on a purplish hue as if it absorbed all the light from the sky and would not give it back.�

� “When he inserted the rod into the breech of the barrel the hot metal hissed, and the drops of water that got on the outside of the barrel danced for a moment on the blued metal and disappeared.�

� “He heard nothing save the soft whistling of the wind around his ears, which were beginning to tingle from the coolness. The southern reaches of the valley were softening in a faint mist that was coming down from the mountains� the sunlit white vapor twisted and coiled upon itself before a thrusting wind that was not felt on the ground here in the valley.�

� “The mountainside was a riot of varied shade and hue� He thought that if he listened he could hear the sound of growth� the fragrant air, spiced with the odor of crushed pine needles and musty from the slow decay that worked upward from the earth.�

Other Quotes

� “It was a freedom and a goodness, a hope and a vigor that he perceived to underlie all the familiar things of his life, which were not free or good or hopeful or vigorous. What he sought was the source and preserver of his world, a world which seemed to turn ever in fear away from its source.�

� “She was a presence which assuaged a need in him that he barely knew he had, until the need was met.�

� “Caught in the ugliness of sleep� defenceless� in the innocence of sleep� he “had never seen a part of her that he was seeing now.�

� “It wasn’t you, it was me.� (Published in 1960!)

Williams' Four Novels, Compared

See the end of my review of his first (disowned) novel, Nothing But The Night, HERE.