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Montana setting feels Kootenay familiar
Book Review
By Derryll White
Stroud, Carsten (1992). Lizardskin
One thing that strikes me immediately upon opening Carsten Stroud’s novel is that it is known country. Set in small town Montana, the geography and feeling is similar to small towns in the Kootenays. The air is clear here, the mountains are green and inviting. That first perception is followed immediately by another – this is a believable story.
Law enforcement drinks coffee in the novel just as they do here at Hot Shots in Cranbrook. The security guard in the novel fires a warning shot and blows his eardrum in and knocks himself down with the concussion, as one might expect in real life. Page four and I am finding strong traces of credibility.
Stroud is the kind of writer I like to read. He takes situations that have the feel of, the possibility of, reality and he amps them up. His characters push credibility to just shy of absurdity and make the reader laugh at how weird, how screwed up the world actually is. And he does pay attention to his characters, goes beyond superficial beauty to essence, past muscle to native intuition.
He does the same thing to place, using such detail that the image created in the reader’s mind mentally hurts because of the manufactured want, indeed need to be there to experience the place in person.
Stroud is very good here at bringing the American First Nations inhabitants into the Montana landscape. He is precise at delineating the groupings and gives a sympathetic view of the earlier history of Montana and their place in it.
There are some very contemporary issues dealt with.
The social and economic abuse of First Nations people, the corrupting power of privilege and the scary demands of science-at-all-costs are only some of the themes. I had never heard of Carsten Stroud and am very glad that someone chose to give me this book. I will search out and read more from this author in the future.
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Excerpts from the novel:-
MONTANA – The dead were dead, and the dead had gone looking for death. Montana had simply obliged them, something Montana had been doing for a million years. Montana was soaked to the grass roots with blood and bitter outcomes. It was a wonder the well water didn’t run red.
PRIVILEGE – Beyond the glass doors, the atmosphere had that indescribable scent created by a great deal of old money. A crystalline woman glided forward on oiled manners and intercepted them in the middle of a Navajo rug in pewter, ochre and sage purple, colors that were reflected and subtly echoed in every feature of the office suites.
BUSINESS – Their “set” was the merchant aristocracy of Montana, a collection of hard-eyed women and predatory men who had found a variety of ways to twist money out of the red earth and leathery hide of the country, and who along the way had cultivated the elements of coldness, the steely blindness required if the rich were to grow richer.
GOD – Risky talk that. Greer had to work hard to keep the rest of the guys on the Big Horn force from finding out he didn’t really believe in God. Not their brand anyway, a hard-handed man sitting in the clouds, dealing out thunderbolts and grief for technical infractions while terrible men did vicious things without any punishment at all.
DEATH – Although we all live surrounded by death and dying, every one of us believes he will live forever. The truth is always a surprise.
IMAGE – The Fire and Rain wagon rolled up in a cloud of dust and a hearty hi-ho-plasma, the way those guys like to do. They came running across the lot, and McAllister could almost hear them going hut-hut-hut to themselves, the way they saw it done on Rescue 911. Same as the young cops nowadays – Ray-Bans and black leather gloves and zombie cool. Television was taking all the fun out of being a cop.
PORNOGRAPHY – The usual full-colour hardcore entertainments, based largely on having low gag-reflexes and being double-jointed. This stuff always reminded Beau of autopsies, all that red flesh and slippery skin. Sexy as a federal audit.
LAW – “The guy just said he was trying to get away, that you provoked the exchange.”
“You actually believe that?”
“What I believe and what I can prove in an action are different things. The law isn’t about belief. It’s about advantage and disadvantage, about technical distinctions between separate realities.”
COPS – He popped the clamp on the shotgun rack and tugged it out, thinking what every cop thinks when he has to get out of the car in a bad place.
If it comes down to you or me, it’s gonna be you.
MODERN LIFE – “Wives work well into their late thirties, trying to put together the perfect life – the car, the beach house, the quintessential pale pink stucco Italianate in Sherman Oaks or Santa Barbara. It’s the same across the country. The trouble comes when older couples – people who, in a saner world, would have had their children in their teens or twenties, when nature intended them to have them – well, now they approach the great divide between youth and decline. And suddenly, perhaps as a final act of denial, they want to have children, they want to live the youth they traded away for some chimerical illusion of career and professional accomplishment. Selfishness, really. I fear for all the young children who are being raised by middle-aged work-obsessed parents who see the children in their lives as just another demonstration of their social skills, as additional trophies, or even – and this is worse – as small mirrors of themselves, to be dressed up like little mannequins in Oshkosh B’Gosh and Polo and paraded around as reflections of their own good taste and personal style. Rather vile, really!”
– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them. When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.
