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Lightning

by Fred Stenson

Veteran Alberta writer Fred Stenson recently made a bigger name for himself in CanLit with The Trade, a myth-shattering look at the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Microsoft-like lock on the 19th-century Canadian fur trade. After chalking up a Giller nomination for his efforts, Stenson’s now turned his sights from fur trappers to cowpokes for the equally iconoclastic – is there any other kind of historical novel these days? – followup. A tricky blend of history-conscious critique and homage to the old west, Lightning is a bit rough around the edges, but its down-home charms make for a compelling read nonetheless.

This being a western, there’s a major character named “Doc”– he’s the book’s protagonist, a Texas cowboy. The tale unfolds in flashback style, with a weather-beaten elder Doc, now on an end-of-career cattle drive up to Canada, remembering his youth in the 1860s. Two key figures from those years dominate his recollections. The first, young Pearly, is a beautiful barmaid and professional pool shark, who Doc briefly hitched wagons with. The second is a larger-than-life prospector-cum-serial killer, one Overcross, who took a liking to Pearly during a billiards game, and whose head Doc subsequently tried to stave in. (Another mark of the authentic western: some good old fashioned head-staving).

Since those days, both characters have continued to loom large in Doc’s life – Pearly as the object of his heartsick, cross-continent searches, Overcross as the vengeful demon on his trail all the while. It’s an old formula, with Pearly representing the seductive allure of the Wild West and Overcross standing for the accompanying evil and violence. The latter, a sort of Hannibal Lecter in chaps, is the more memorable character, prone to rambling on about eating other prospectors or finding gold in cows’ stomachs, spicing his tales with a little German opera singing when the mood strikes.

Lightning is good when it’s a bit weird, and even better when it combines this weirdness with some playfully smart historicism. The character of Doc himself is a case in point: a macho cowboy, he’s also an expert in phrenology, the science of reading personalities from the shapes of people’s skulls; an admirer of Walt Whitman (though he struggles with the homoerotic passages); and a masterful bowler (the game was apparently all the rage in 1860s Montana).

Sometimes, though, the story’s narrator resembles a cowboy trying to drive more cattle at once than he can handle. A storyline involving vigilante freemasons, for instance, wanders off, never to return, as does the intriguing bowling material. This is no doubt partially intentional. Stenson wants to challenge the western’s too-neat conventions, to show us how the story of Doc’s life is like a cattle drive: messy, complicated, full of lost threads and confusion.

But Stenson doesn’t quite pull off his tricky mediation between satisfyingly coherent storytelling and realistic chaos. He comes pretty durn close, though, I reckon – close enough, at least, to have left this Ontario city boy dreaming for days of life out on the open range.

 

Reviewer: Nicholas Dinka

Publisher: Douglas & McIntyre

DETAILS

Price: $32.95

Page Count: 450 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 1-55365-101-7

Issue Date: 2003-8

Categories: Fiction: Novels

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